by eden Hudson
CRACK
I went into freefall. Carina slammed into me, our skulls smacking together, then I was face down with a mouthful of snow and ice. Something sliced across my cheek and tried to rip my nose off. All around me, whiteness. White snow, then a flash of gray-white sky, then snow. Sky. Snow. Sky. Snow.
My brain raced to catch up. The ice ledge had broken off. We were falling back down the slope.
There was a yawning crevasse at the foot of this hill. We’d spent half an hour trekking around it just to get to this side.
I hacked wildly with the hand clutching my ice ax. It didn’t help. I kept wheeling, ass over stovetop percolator. Something hard banged off my cheekbone. Bright lights flared inside my skull. The only thing that kept me chopping my ax was the thought of being wedged between two walls of deep blue ice until I froze to death or the crevasse shifted and crushed me into a fine meat-paste.
The spike caught. The ax handle ripped out of my grasp, but the braided nanofilament loop around my wrist pulled tight. My skid jerked to a stop.
A second later, the rope around my waist yanked tight, dragging me another couple feet. My vertebrae popped with the power of the jolt. The braided loop on my ax held, but my wrist didn’t. The bones inside snapped. I screamed.
Some faraway, disconnected part of my brain flashed to Carina setting down her ice ax to grab my hand. She hadn’t had anything to slow her fall. She’d gone over the edge into the crevasse. If she was still alive—which was a big if, considering she’d probably hit the end of that line at close to terminal velocity—her back was probably broken.
I needed to pull myself up.
The waves of pain cascading down my wrist thought that was hilarious. Me, not so much.
I dug my good hand and my feet into the snow, fighting to take the weight off my left arm. Not that easy to do with another human dangling from the other end of the line.
There was a hookblade in my pocket. Slip it around the rope, give it a little tug, and I’d be free to go.
Except I couldn’t. Not if she was alive. Not when we were so close to how it was supposed to be between me and her.
Maybe it was delirium from the pain that made the sound of two little kids laughing and screeching at each other ring in my head. Whatever caused it, that made up my mind. If she was alive, I wouldn’t cut the line. If she was dead, I wouldn’t have any choice but to cut the line.
“Carina?” I yelled. For some reason that made my wrist throb even worse. “Son of a chum-guzzling— Hey, Carina, are you still alive? Better tell me now!”
“Van Zandt? I can’t hear what you’re saying! Are you all right?”
Her shout echoed strangely close. I tried to guess how far I was from the crevasse, but between my wrist and the rope connecting me to Carina, I was stretched too tight to turn around and look.
“This would’ve been a lot simpler if you had just died,” I yelled.
“What?”
Instead of answering, I went back to digging and scratching in the snow, trying to get the weight of two healthy adults off my broken wrist. I couldn’t just slip my hand out of the loop. If I did that, Carina and I would lose our only anchor and go flying into the abyss.
I kicked the toes of my boots into the snow as hard as I could. My feet were too numb to tell whether it was working, but when my brain sent the signal to push, my legs pushed. I slid forward a few inches. Lightning bolts of pain jagged down my wrist.
“Van Zandt?” Carina yelled.
Thinking she was asking about my progress, I ignored her and started kicking my toes into new footholds that I hoped were slightly higher than those last two.
“I think I found something,” she yelled. “A time anomaly.”
My knees tried to buckle, but I ordered them to push straight. This scooted me forward a little more.
“If you’re saying that as some kind of pathetic incentive for me not to cut your line, I really will kill you,” I yelled.
“Anchor the line somewhere,” Carina yelled. “You need to get down here.”
“Oh, sure, just let me tie the rope around this tree here! No, wait, here’s some tackle and a pulley! And a team of horses waiting to pull you up! And the rescuers just landed with blankets and mugs of hot coffee! We’re saved!”
“You know, just because I can’t hear what you’re saying doesn’t mean I can’t hear your tone.”
“Yeah, but can you hear this?” I asked, blowing the loudest, longest fart sound I could manage.
She didn’t have a smart response for that.
I pushed up another few inches. Finally, the loop around my wrist went slack. This made my wrist go disturbingly numb. When I looked up, my hand was dangling in the ax’s loop, two inches of bare skin sticking out from between the bottom of my mitten and the top of my coat sleeve. The loop had embedded itself in my wrist. The skin around it was bloody, swelling, and turning a nasty shade of purple.
“Gross.”
I double-checked that the toes of my boots were planted securely in the snow, then hooked the index finger of my good hand through the loop and unstuck it from my bloody wrist. With that mess out of the way, I switched the ice ax to my good wrist. Transfer complete.
Then began the long process of crawling forward. With the ax in my good hand, I hacked at the snow above my head, then used that as an anchor to pull myself forward a little farther, repeating the toe-kicking and Carina-pulling.
Carina seemed to have caught onto the fact that I was too busy to engage in witty repartee, and stayed silent while I worked. My legs tingled and fell asleep from a combination of the cold, the deadweight Carina’s body was putting on them, and the way the rope was trying to cut off my circulation from the waist down, but they didn’t give out.
My broken wrist stayed numb, but my hand kept getting hung up between me and the snow. I paused to pick that arm up with my good hand and throw it off to my side, where it would stay out of the way, then went back to hacking, kicking, and crawling.
What felt like hours later, I heard Carina grunting and scrabbling around, and the sound of snow falling by the heap into an endless chasm. Without warning, the cinch cutting into my waist went slack. I rested my face in the cold white powder and breathed a sigh of relief. She was out of the crevasse.
“Van Zandt.” Carina’s voice was hoarse with gratitude.
“I snatched you right out of the jaws of death,” I said. I rolled onto my back and held up my broken wrist, the hand hanging at a disgusting angle. “I heroically sacrificed my own well-being and overcame insurmountable odds to save your life.”
“Thank you,” she said, dropping backward in the snow as if she’d been the one doing all the work. “Give me a second, and I’ll splint your wrist.”
“It’s the least you can do,” I said. “Am I the most beautiful genius you’ve ever met or am I the most beautiful genius you’ve ever met?”
“You’re the prettiest,” she said, white puffs of steam rising from her mouth with every word. “I’ve never said otherwise.”
“To my face,” I qualified.
“Anywhere,” she said. “Now, how are we going to get you down there with a broken wrist?”
I sat up. “Down there? Back into the jaws of death I just pulled you out of?”
“Yep,” Carina said. “I found our concentrated time anomaly. The bad news is it’s at the bottom. The good news is we’re not going to have to dig for it. Not if we can climb down.”
EIGHTEEN:
Nick
Nick expected the Helicab pilots to ask questions or stare when a Guild knight, a Tect, a kid, and a jungle witch climbed into the bay, but all they did was stare at the Tect as if she were some kind of angel sent from God.
“Where we goin’ today, Miss Re?” the pilot drawled as if they did this every day.
“Back to the factory, jiggity-jig,” she said. “Yer brother’s gonna be back in town later on this week. Y’oughta stop by and see him.”
“I might, a
t that.”
As they flew, the copilot kept glancing over his shoulder nervously. Finally, he caught the Tect’s eye.
“S-selha,” he stuttered. “I don’t mean no presumption, but I know what ya done for Jo’s brother, and I-I heard talk about some other folks you healed…”
“Don’t be scared, darlin’,” Re Suli broke in. “Sol’s here to help us all.”
“It’s just…my daughter got the muscle death.” His voice cracked. “She was born with it. Cain’t move ’er legs at all. Healer says soon her arms’ll go, too. Then it’s only a matter a time ’fore her lungs…’fore they…”
The order that kept Nick’s mouth shut unless the witch or the Tect asked him a question kept him from suggesting the man take his daughter to a Guild aid team for transport to Emden. The Hospitalers there could surely do something for her.
The copilot turned around and looked the Tect full in the face. “Please, Selha. We ain’t got anybody else to turn to. Won’t you please let her become one a yer faithful?”
“You know what you’re askin’?” the Tect said. “Committin’ her to my service? You won’t get her back ’til after my appointed time comes.”
The man’s lips trembled. He nodded.
“By your faith, she’ll be saved,” the Tect said. “After you’ve dropped us off, get your daughter. Bring her to the factory.”
The copilot broke down in tears, thanking the Tect for her kindness, praising her, and calling her Selha.
Nick glared out the window, thinking that even if he could talk, he wouldn’t know what to say. This whole situation was so surreal. Did this guy even understand what he was signing his daughter up for? He wasn’t going to get his child back at the end of the Tect’s ‘appointed time,’ he was going to get a rotted corpse fitted with cyborgcromatic pieces. Did Soami hatred of the Guild really run so deep that he’d rather have his kid dead but still walking around, a decaying robot soldier serving a false god, than bring her to one of the aid teams? Nick wished he could shake the guy and force him to see reason.
Then a sick thought made Nick’s stomach lurch: Cyborgcromancy didn’t work on living tissue. Who was going to kill this guy’s daughter? Would the Tect do it herself or would the witch have her new errand boy do the job? He didn’t want to follow that inquiry through to its logical conclusion, but his mind wasn’t built to work any other way. If Re Suli ordered him to do it, and the brain had to remain undamaged for the cybrogcromancy to work, how could he murder a child while putting it through the least amount of pain? Carbon monoxide, murder-machines, direct cardiac injections, and the snapping of tiny necks swirled through Nick’s brain for the rest of the flight, dragging him deeper and deeper into a pit of loathing and disgust. Both of his parents had been in Soam during the Crusades—what the Soamis called the Massacres. Though it was something the family never talked about, he knew they’d both been forced to kill child soldiers. He prayed to God that he wouldn’t have to find out what it was like to have a kid’s death on his conscience.
Hours of flying and brooding later, a hole opened up in the rainforest canopy, revealing the remains of an ancient First Earth factory.
Grateful for the distraction, Nick inspected the ruins. Thousands of square feet. Four chimneys. An overgrown parking lot and loading bay. A fallen tree had caved in one of the far loading doors, but otherwise, the place looked like it had held up to the last nine centuries pretty well.
In the seat beside him, Re Suli stretched and moaned sweetly.
“Hope you got some rest, sugar,” she said, patting his knee as the pilots set them down on a cracked landing pad. “’Cause it’s time to get to work. Nicolai Éloy Beausoleil, you look over this here factory and figure out, to the best a yer ability, what needs to be done to the machinery so’s it can melt down a whole lotta First Earth steel and turn it into brand-shiny-new poly-alloy.”
NINETEEN:
Jubal
If my wrist hadn’t broken saving both of our lives, getting to the bottom of the crevasse would’ve been a thirty-second rappel. With the valiant but annoying injury complicating things, I had to back into the crevasse slowly, splinted wrist resting uselessly against my gut, holding onto the rope with my good hand while Carina fed out my line.
As I descended, walls of snowpack rose up around me, blocking me from the wind. When my face finally dipped below the surface, my stomach dropped out. If either ice sheet making up the walls of this crevasse suddenly shifted, it would smear my precious brain into chunky gray jelly with real skull shards. There was no way Carina could pull me up in time.
I considered shouting up to her to throw out the line and let me rappel anyway, but I stuffed the urge back down and kept my mouth shut. Recklessness is the trademark of a common housebreaker, not the best thief in history.
At about ten feet down, the snowpack began a slow fade into wet blue-green ice. Now and then my crampons snapped off straw-like icicles and sent them skittering down into the abyss below.
The temperature shifted, too. At first, I thought it was just being blocked from the wind that made the difference, but the deeper I went, the warmer it got. The testicle-shriveling nitrogen-cold of the surface dissipated, and a climate closer to a meat locker took its place. By the time I’d hit the twenty-foot mark, I was sweating inside my biothermal layers, and my wrist was throbbing.
As I passed fifty feet, I got comfortable enough to look down for Carina’s anomaly. I expected to see the meager sunlight fading into yawning blackness. Instead, the farther down it got, the more the light shifted from the surface’s dirty gray shine to an ambient blue-green glow, as if the ice were illuminating the crevasse.
There was a forest of trees down there. Between their leaves, I could see a dark, rough-looking patch that could’ve been First Earth asphalt. I wondered whether this little biome had been exposed by glacial runoff or a pulling apart of the ice sheets.
As I descended, the ice walls in front and behind me grew apart like the haunches of an arch. With the angle of my descent, I couldn’t keep my feet on the walls anymore. They moved farther out of my reach with every foot I dropped. I hung in my harness, unable to stop myself from spinning slightly as Carina lowered me down.
The crevasse wasn’t just some thin slice cut into the terrain, I realized as I descended, but an enormous ice cavern. At least as wide as an eight-lane highway, and longer than I could see, even from my vantage point.
The first leaves and naked branches at the top of the canopy brushed against my boots at a hundred and twenty feet down. From there, I had to constantly kick out of snags and break off the smaller branches in the way. Carina could thank me for all my hard work once she rappelled safely through the hole I’d made for her. I’m no dendrologist, but the trees I was passing didn’t look like thousand-year growth. They looked middle-aged, ranging from late fifties to early hundreds, and at their bases verdant, primeval-looking underbrush thrived.
In spite of the booming business the foliage appeared to be doing down there, the creaking of the rope, the snapping of the branches I had to break, and the occasional drip of water were the only sounds. No bugs, no birds, no wind in the leaves, nothing. I could see a bright blue stream running parallel to the asphalt, but its waters weren’t giving off the traditional babbling of a woodland brook. The silence set my teeth on edge.
Finally, my feet touched down on muddy ground beside the asphalt. I unclipped my harness, then gave the rope a few tugs to let Carina know I was off. I backpedaled out of the way, watching as she tossed down the end of the rope.
A few seconds later, our bags zzzzzzinged down. The smack of the first bag hitting the ground seemed to offend the eerie silence, which comforted me greatly. The second bag caught on a tree, but after some jerking on the line—which rustled the branches and made an all-around pleasant ruckus—it came loose and joined the first. I dragged them out of the way, then waited at a safe distance for Carina.
Unlike in Soam’s jungle, the tree canopy in the
cavern was much more dispersed. As soon as Carina made it past the point where the walls started to retreat from one another, I could see her without any trouble. Either her hood had fallen back or she’d thrown it back, and she’d taken off her goggles, probably so she could feel the rush of the descent on her face. Her long hair whipped around her head as she sped down.
When she made it through the trees, and her crampons bit into the ground beside the asphalt, she was grinning.
“It’s never bad, is it?” I said, fondly recalling the last time I’d rappelled into dangerous territory with her.
She smiled back, almost glowing with the adrenaline. “It hasn’t been yet.”
Although we’d done much less hiking on this day than the other three, we were both tired, and I was battered. We shucked a few of our outermost layers in silence.
While Carina set up the tent, I went a little ways away to study-slash-water the vegetation.
“Can’t even hear the blizzard,” she said. “Should be in full swing by now.”
“This place is definitely an anomaly,” I said, shaking off and stowing myself with some difficulty. Zipping your fly one-handed ain’t easy. “Feels like springtime. And look at those deadfalls. These trees are either exactly the same as they were on the day the First Earth was destroyed, or they’ve been growing and dying down here for almost a thousand years without being affected by that mess up there.”
Carina made an acknowledging sound in her throat. When I came back to camp, she had pulled the tabs on two new ThinSul8t mattresses and was checking her wristpiece while they inflated.
“Are you getting any reception?” she asked. “I haven’t been receiving messages. Not even ones coming in late.”
I glanced over to see whether she was dropping hints or watching me for suspicious behavior, but she was busy dragging our bags into the tent as if she’d already forgotten the question.
Of course, Carina would know that the best way to avoid letting on that you were suspicious of someone would be to act as if you were only half listening to their answer.
