Vessel, Book I: The Advent

by Tominda Adkins

Stella Rosin barked two syllables.

  With his face scraping the sidewalk, and his arm twisted in the air behind him, pinned in an iron grip, Ghi struggled to assess the situation. A boot was crunched into his spine, that was significant. Most significant, though, was the barrel of what he feared to be a pistol digging into the back of his neck. That fear was confirmed when he heard the unmistakable sound of it being cocked.

  Stella repeated herself, then unleashed a string of other demands. The sound of her voice was drilling and forceful, but with a trained volume—no moseying tourists above would hear her. More arm twisted. More spine crunched. It took Ghi that long to realize that he didn’t understand this woman, not a single word she was saying.

  "I don’t know!" he coughed into the ground. "I don’t know what you’re saying!"

  Stella paused. "English," she murmured.

  With a deft, harsh motion, she flipped Ghi onto his back and pressed the pistol to his throat. She hardly needed to. This woman scared the shit out of him. He wasn’t about to move. As Stella examined his face with quick intensity, he got a good look at hers: angular, older, light hair, blue eyes, getting angrier and angrier ...

  "Explain yourself," she commanded.

  "What?!"

  "What are you doing here?" Stella nearly inverted his adam’s apple with the gun. "Where are they?"

  "Lady, please!" he squeaked. "I don’t know!"

  Corin, Jackson, and myself, meanwhile, were already rushing to his aid. Well, they were running. If given the chance, I would have sprang for the next departing ferry without so much as a good luck sentiment. But Jackson―a hefty guy, I'll remind you―had taken hold of my elbow and was yanking me along. He let me go as we rounded the corner and onto the scene. I guess he didn't see the gun, because he then did the stupidest thing imaginable.

  He grabbed Stella Rosin.

  The gun went off with a muffled, wet pop. Ghi’s limbs spasmed out and then fell limp. I screamed. Jackson jumped back and knocked Corin forward in the process.

  Stella Rosin whipped around, now with two guns outstretched and trained on the closest thing that moved, which was Corin. He ducked his head and threw his arms out as if this would save him.

  It did.

  There was another pop, but a different kind―a crackling, hardening sort of sound. Stella stopped abruptly. Her eyes still stared forward, focused on Corin. Her weapons were still trained on him. Her body remained in a poised lunge. But she didn’t move. She couldn’t move. And for a moment, as we grappled to comprehend what had just happened, neither could we. We were petrified.

  Stella was covered in ice.

  Solid ice.

  From the tips of the gun barrels, ice followed the lines of her arms to the rest of her body, curving out behind her in the captured shape of a watery blast. Smooth as glass, it encased her front half from the top of her head to her knees.

  She fell backwards to the ground.

  Corin screamed. It was the kind of immasculine scream that friends make fun of you for. We weren’t friends yet. And now wasn’t the time.

  It wasn’t the time for anything but running. No time to wonder why Ghi, instead of lying dead with his throat blasted apart, was suddenly coughing and fumbling to his feet. No time to marvel at this frozen phenomenon, or to stop for the extremely excited Indian guy who had appeared from nowhere to chase after us.

  We just ran. Jackson dragged Ghi along, Corin looked over his shoulder to make sure that I was keeping up, and we ran as fast as we could for the loading ferry.