Chapter 16

Luc hadn’t meant to force her. Maybe he’d forgotten she wasn’t the bold adventuress she was pretending to be. But when she put on the fitted tunic and boots, when she cleverly figured out the next riddle of the poem—and when she touched him—how could he not want to make her his?

It was the drakling spirit within him, restless from the waxing mating moons of his far-away home—

No it wasn’t. It was her, just her. Amy made him dream of things he’d given up wanting.

But how could he make her believe when almost everything around them was unreal?

Now as they approached Altaria, a planet altered by beings who had no care what sort of trouble and damage they left behind, in search of the final gemstone, he feared that Farewell would become far too literal.

She silently joined him in the cockpit as they approached the planet and she cued up the data core info.

“Altaria is a tropical paradise of balmy weather and white-sand beaches bordered by lush foliage, stunning flowers, and sweet fruits,” the ship informed them. “However, it is not considered suitable for honeymooners due to the large number and unpredictable nature of its death traps.”

“Greeeeat.” Amy spun the holo-vid of the planet to show where the mapped cadences of the poem overlapped the latitudes and longitudes. “On the plus side, seems like we won’t even get to see these booby-trapped beaches. The third stanza lines up with the northern pole.”

Both poles were small, the northern one even more so. Luc grimaced. “Draklings do not like ice.”

“Hopefully we won’t be there long.” She zoomed closer on the screen. “Not much ground to cover, and your calculations look perfect this time. We can grab the last gem and get out before Rickster, Idrin, raiders, Octiron, whoever, come after us again. When we have the prism, they’ll have to negotiate with us. Or else.”

Her final words were spoken in a forbidding tone, her brow creased in a line as sharp as a ceremonial dagger. She’d bound back her shining black hair in myriad tight twists, a silkier echo of his own austere style, and it suited her. Admiration swelled in him. When she said “or else”, she wasn’t just playing a part for cameras that didn’t exist in a race they weren’t running; she meant it. Why couldn’t she see how strong and determined she was?

Briefly, the thought had crossed his mind as he’d set course for Altaria that he should ask her to stay on the Blissed while he found the third gem. After their previous near-disasters, he didn’t want her in more danger. He could’ve even phrased his protective instinct as a need for someone to stay with the ship in case Idrin had another way to track them. But really, he wasn’t sure he could pull this off alone. She was a good teammate and he needed to honor that.

Not to mention he just wanted her with him for however much longer they had together.

He guided the Blissed into a tight polar orbit, and Amy continued the ship’s scans the whole while.

“Readings indicate we can land here.” She pointed at a hashmark on the screen. “It says it’s solid ice, but…” She pursed her lips. “We have to walk a little ways to the gemstone.”

“Too much to hope for that the last one would be easy, I suppose.” He tried for a smile.

Which she didn’t return. “Yeah. The last one.” She averted her gaze, focusing on the screen.

Was she relieved this was their last adventure? His chest tightened, as if the heavy muscles that should’ve supported wings he didn’t have were compressing around his heart, with ragged, broken ribs jabbing into him from the inside. He’d never had to win a treasure before. He’d amassed his wealth through carefully counting credits and sensible investments. This was something else entirely.

This was his last chance.

Without another word, he landed the Blissed where she had indicated.

“Recommend against this shore excursion,” the ship announced fussily. “Such careless choices are sure to lead to divorce. Or death.”

Amy snickered under her breath. “Where was all this useful advice when I was looking for a boyfriend on Earth?”

“Its recommendations were never calibrated for Team Prism.” He led the way to the airlock where they rifled through the locker for a set of heavier ships fatigues to compensate for the lower temperatures and the threat of storms. He was half inclined to wear the EVA suit as well. As they stood in front of the hatch, he muttered, “Have I mentioned how much draklings hate the cold?”

She sidelonged a glance at him past the ruffled edge of her white hood, the corners of her dark eyes crinkling in amusement. “You look like a panda.”

“What’s a panda?”

“A furry, black and white creature from my home.”

“I am not furry,” he said with great dignity. “I am scaled.” He lifted his chin. “With purple highlights.”

She finally smiled. “Pandas are good luck, but dragons are better.”

“I would like to see your world someday,” he said as he unlocked the hatch.

“That would be an adventure,” she muttered.

The airlock cracked, letting in a harsh swirl of icy air. They both gasped and instinctively moved closer together, as if to share their last little bit of heat.

She raised the dat-pad strapped to the forearm of her fatigues. “Ready?”

He gestured for her to step down and followed her out to Farewell.

It was cold, exactly as he hated, but as his fatigues adjusted around him, he found it tolerable. Maybe that was just because Amy was at his side and their focus on the task ahead of them made their discord irrelevant.

She pointed, he nodded, and they headed off.

The sun glared down at them—and up at them, bouncing off the jagged ice. The planet’s two moons were both pale crescents in the crystalline vault of the sky marred only by a few high streaks of cloud in the shape of feathering ice crystals. He pulled his goggles into place and she did the same. The lenses compensated for the glare and made him realize how much the frozen waste looked like one of the deserts at home. Draklings had beautiful, soaring cities and garden spaces, but the vast stretches of untamed land still called to their wild souls.

They didn’t go far before her dat-pad beeped a warning.

She halted and he came to a stop beside her. “The ice is thinning,” she said as she swept the dat-pad scanner across the way ahead of them. “It should still hold us, but…I think we should spread out a little.”

The urge to object, to keep her close, welled up in him, but he swallowed it back. She was right. Reluctantly, he took a few steps to one side while she did the same, and they continued on.

They climbed a flat sheet of ice that had been pushed higher by forces underneath, and he tensed at the almost imperceptible creak beneath his boots. It was more menacing than the click of mite mandibles or the proximity alarm of the Blissed for incoming plasma bursts. Despite the buffer of his heavy fatigues, a shudder iced his spine.

Amy reached the top of the rise first and recoiled. A second later, he did the same, wincing at the blinding light glaring through his darkened goggles.

He sighed. “Let me guess. The Soul’s Dream is down there.”

She peered at the dat-pad. “At the very, very bottom.”

It was a whirlpool of ice, and the churning funnel went straight down, deep enough that the bottom—wherever it was—was obscured by the spikes of ice that clashed against each other with a cacophony louder than brittle swords, breaking and refreezing like immortal fangs trying to swallow the world. The sword-fangs of ice reflected the polar sun in blinding shards of light that nearly overwhelmed his goggles.

He sighed. “The very, very bottom?”

She nodded. Then giggled, a slightly hysterical sound. “Can you believe it?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” However the queen’s prism had come to be shattered and scattered, the forces in effect had a perilous whimsy even more perverse than Octiron’s. But whether the impossible icy whirlpool was a natural phenomenon or a deathtrap left by Farewell’s cruel creators didn’t even matter. If they wanted to get out of Paragon alive and force Octiron to honor at least some of the lies the assistant producer had told, Luc needed to retrieve this last gem.

He shuddered at the thought of descending through the not-quite frozen maelstrom, but he took the first step down from their viewpoint.

“Wait.” Amy was typing at the dat-pad, so fast he barely noticed the place where her finger was missing. “The whirlpool is actually a supersaturated, supercooled salt solution. That’s how it stays in motion even as it’s freezing.”

“Colder than freezing,” he muttered. “I can’t wait to jump in.”

She gripped his elbow hard enough that he felt her fingers through the thick layer of fatigues. “That’s what I’m telling you. You can’t jump in at all. The air itself is barely above freezing, and those shards would bore right through you like a drakling popsicle-kabob.”

“We need that last gemstone.” Frustration sharpened his voice almost as much as the frozen spikes.

“Not that badly.” She set her jaw. “Luc, it’s over. We failed.”

“No. Two out of three is not enough.”

Her brow furrowed over the dark goggles. “I’m sorry the math isn’t working out for you this time—”

“It’s not the math,” he said. “It’s us. We’ve been told so often that we aren’t enough that now we believe it.”

She clamped her hands on either side of her hood as if she wanted to block out his words. “What does me being stuck in Sunset Falls, Montana, and you wanting to show off at your brothers’ weddings have to do with deadly ice harpoons? This is reality.”

He shook his head hard enough to make his own hood fall back. “I won’t be stopped this time. I’m not even going to quote the odds against it. Because I know we got this.” The practical accountant side of him was aghast, baffled at the boldness welling up inside him. “We found all three gems. It’s like the Firestorm Queen and her blacksmith want us to reunite the prism.”

“Only if they want us to die too!” Amy twisted away from the whirlpool. “Maybe we just have to face the facts: We weren’t meant to win.”

“Is that what your ye-ye would’ve said? Or would he have told you to be brave?”

She twisted to face him, her lip lifted in a silent snarl. “I got burned up in the fire once. Now I gotta freeze to prove myself to you? No. Just no.” She stomped away from the edge of the incline, her infamous interstellar explorer boots raising puffs of brilliant snow in her wake.

“Amy.” He strode after her, even as the call of the Soul’s Dream seemed to reach for him. “You don’t have to—”

He oofed as she crashed to a halt in front of him and he slammed into her back. She whirled so fast she was facing him within the circle of his arms before he could catch his breath.

“It’s a salt solution,” she said slowly. “Ye-ye used different salts in his fireworks—strontium salt for red, calcium salt for orange, sodiums for yellow, bariums for green, copper chloride for blue.”

Luc looked down at her, confused. “That’s…interesting. How did he make purple?”

“Purple is really hard,” she said distractedly. Nestled in his arms, she typed at the dat-pad. “But he used to do tricks for me with salts. He had one called hot ice that sort of pretend froze salt solutions at room temperature.” She looked up at him, and though he couldn’t see her eyes behind the darkened lenses of her goggles, the warmth of her breath as she exhaled touched his lips. “Luc, I think I have an idea.”

***

The Blissed bucked fractiously under his hand as he muscled the ship into place above the whirlpool.

“I can’t hold this long,” he said into the comm. The brutally cold winds spiraling up from the center of the vortex played havoc with the atmospheric engines.

“We only have one shot anyway.” Amy’s voice was close and determined in his ear. “We exhausted all the ship’s supply of materials to synthesize more kyapa-sho. If this doesn’t freeze the whirlpool, do you promise not to—I don’t know—fly the Blissed right down the hole?”

“Honeymoon cruisers are not designed for submerged travel.” The ship’s comm sounded almost alarmed. “If more excitement is required, please consult the approved list of stimulating beverages—”

“I used up all those compounds,” Amy murmured in his ear. “This is as exciting as it’s going to get.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Since this is going to work.”

It had to.

But the almost mystical surety that had gripped him outside on the ice had melted away. He was an accountant, not a Great Space Racer and not a chemist or even a cook playing with this fake kyapa-sho. The spice might be ‘the ice that becomes fire in the heart’, but would it work the same as her grandfather’s hot ice trick?

“Can you get us any lower?” The tension in Amy’s voice crackled in his ear. “I need to get the seed pellets as evenly distributed as possible.”

In her theory—and tentatively confirmed by the simulations they’d run—the fake kyapa-sho would bind with the salts in the whirlpool water and let the polar temperatures finish the task of freezing the whirlpool into place. At least long enough to drop through the center of the vortex to grab the Soul’s Dream.

This was not a dream; it was his nightmare.

Gritting his teeth—but keeping his touch perfectly light—he dropped the Blissed deeper into the glacial maw of the whirlpool. “A tropical paradise, and this is where we end up,” he muttered, never letting his attention waver.

“Not the end yet,” Amy replied. “Dispersing the kyapa-sho now.”

Through the ship’s airlock viewport, he watched her fling the small golden beads into the maelstrom. Despite the safety harness strapping her to the Blissed, a furious part of him wanted to drag her back inside. Larf it, he’d drag her back to the bedroom, never to emerge again… She pushed back the white hood, her black hair whipping in the wind, and raised her thumb to the viewport with a wide grin. He assumed that was a good sign.

In the white glare from the ice, even the ship’s sensors couldn’t track the beads, and for a moment, it seemed as if the “delicious calamity” was only a calamity.

Then the stabbing brilliance dimmed as the churn of the ice spikes slowed.

And stopped.

The whirlpool was frozen. As the icy teeth stopped gnashing, the silence of the polar plain poured down the gullet, and the upwelling wind from the vortex died, letting the Blissed hover smoothly.

But for how long?

“Amy,” he snapped into the comm. “Get up here and hold us steady while I drop down.”

“No. I’m going in.” The viewport showed her leaning out precariously over the white maw. “This is my dumb idea. And I’m going to need you to pull me out if…” She yanked her hood back into place without finishing.

The last of his good intentions to let her claim her inner adventuress evaporated at the sight of her tugging nervously at the tether attached to the airlock.

“Amy, no—”

She looked up straight into the viewport camera. Though her eyes were hidden behind the goggles, he imagined those wide, dark pupils swallowing his pounding heart. For a suspended instant, he saw her as the Great Space Race audience might have seen her: innocent, vulnerable, and so fucking brave.

Then she stepped backward out of the airlock and into the petrified whirlpool.