Chapter 17

She’d had dumber ideas, no doubt. She was just so fucking terrified, she couldn’t remember what they were.

And thank the Blissed for its automated tether. When they’d done their spacewalk, Luc had explained how it could be controlled from the dat-pad, and Amy unclenched her death grip from the line long enough to check the rate of descent. As the tether lowered her, the dat-pad was scanning the inverted cone of the frozen whirlpool and sending that info back to the ship and Luc to keep her centered in the ever-narrowing funnel. She wanted to stay far away from the sides where the icy spikes still looked unnervingly spiky even though they weren’t moving.

For now. A hint of gold from the synthesized kyapa-sho shimmered in the depths of the ice, but she swore the whirlpool was groaning deep inside, a low complaint at the enforced stillness.

“Luc, are you seeing this?” She tilted her head back to gaze upward at the underbelly of the Blissed.

From the dat-pad strapped to her arm, his voice was a comforting rumble. “The ship’s viewport has you,” he confirmed. “Keep the dat-pad sensor running and I’ll see you there too.” His tone lowered toward a grumble. “And when you’re back on board, we’ll discuss your penchant for spacing yourself.”

She forced out a chuckle that, to her surprise, wasn’t hard to maintain. Maybe that whole ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ thing was finally coming true. “You could just yell at me now about how disappointed you are so you don’t have to do it later.”

“On the contrary. I am proud to be your teammate.”

If she hadn’t been descending at a high rate of speed into a frozen whirlpool, her heart might’ve soared at his praise. “Go, Team Prism.”

She sucked in a harsh breath as one of the icy spikes, longer than the others, struck her shoulder. The impact sent her into a tight spin.

“Amy, what happened? The visuals just went sideways.”

Although her stomach tightened with nausea, she couldn’t close her eyes for fear of hitting another spike. “I’m fine,” she said through gritted teeth. “I hit the side, but the tether is compensating for the spin.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Just bruised, I think. I’m almost at the bottom.” She peered down between her boots, and the nausea seemed to trickle weakly through her limbs. “Oh no. Not the bottom.”

“I see it. The icicles are frozen almost all the way across. Amy—”

She knew what he was going to say, and she couldn’t listen. It would be too easy to give up. “I’m small enough. I can fit through.”

In the eerie silence of the whirlpool, she could almost hear him shouting no.

So when his voice echoed softly off the icy walls, she would’ve fallen if not for the tether: “Go for it.”

With a signal through the dat-pad to the Blissed, she dropped another few tentative feet until her boots brushed the crisscrossed ice spikes. The daylight from the mouth of the whirlpool didn’t reach past the spikes, so she turned on the glow from the pad and aimed it into the darkness below.

Carefully, she squirmed past the icicles as if she were a mouse clambering past the blades of a garbage disposal. A brutally cold breath of air whispered over her exposed lips, like the kiss of death. Damn, if only the Great Space Race viewers could hear her voiceover…

Below the spikes, the funnel narrowed to coffin sized—okay, she had to stop thinking about death. “There’s a glow,” she whispered. Why was she whispering? But the echo of her voice seemed too loud in the tight confines. “It’s blue…no, purple.”

“The Soul’s Dream,” he said. “The final facet of the prism.”

Wriggling past the narrowing spikes, she twisted, exhaled hard to squeeze through another drop…and stopped, one boot wedged between two icicles, her other dangling above an impossibly tight fall.

As small as she was, no matter how deeply she exhaled, no way would she fit. The violet glow under her feet mocked her.

Her heart froze inside. “No. No, it can’t stop here. Luc…”

“Zoom in.”

Swallowing back the sour bite of defeat, she aimed the dat-pad toward the glow. On the screen, the glow intensified but didn’t quite come into focus.

“The gem is frozen in the ice,” Luc murmured.

“My fault.” She squeezed her eyes closed. “My dumb idea.”

“We wouldn’t have gotten this far if not for your idea.” He was silent a moment. “Now it’s my turn. Just…stay there.”

Like she was going anywhere. Hanging in the violet-touched darkness, she refused to let tears fill up her goggles. She’d be damned lucky to be able to squeeze back out again. And once she did, she’d forever remember how close she’d been to finally—

A touch on her shoulder made her flinch. An icicle falling…

The first two gemstones spun hypnotically in front of her eyes, spattering flecks of color—red-orange and yellow-green—across the ice. She grabbed for the gems, only to realize they were suspended on the second tether, the one that had attached Luc to the Blissed during their spacewalk. “Luc. What—?”

His face appeared on the screen of the dat-pad strapped to her arm. He was standing in the airlock, the bright arctic light turning the edges of his scales to brilliant amethyst. “Remember how the Heart’s Flame and the Body’s Hunger joined together as soon as they were close enough? Lower them to the Soul’s Dream.”

“That’s crazy.” Since when had her rational, pragmatic accountant become a mystic?

Well, she wanted to believe too.

Grabbing the second tether, she unspooled a length and hovered the two-thirds prism over the fall. “If we lose this, we lose everything.”

“Not everything,” he said cryptically.

Though every nerve in her body resisted the thought of letting go, she dropped the gems into the hole.

The tether zinged through her gloved fingers with more than the force of gravity, as if something was pulling the line downward. She gasped and tightened her grip, but the tether almost smoked in her hands, it was going so fast.

“I’m going to run out of line,” she warned.

“Aim the dat-pad at the glow,” he said. “I think we’re almost—”

The line went taut and yanked her hard enough that she stumbled. Her boot broke one of the icicles with a crystalline pang, opening a wider hole to see down.

The Heart’s Flame and the Body’s Hunger were burning through the ice toward the purple glow. With every penetrating inch, the light of the Soul’s Dream brightened until the entire glassy funnel was awash in blues and violets. A faint hum echoed, amplifying with every pulse of light, and in a heartbeat, the whirlpool was singing with each pure tone on the scale.

Suddenly, the line slackened.

“Oh no,” she moaned. “The tether burned through.”

And still the Flame and the Hunger reached for their long-lost Dream.

The sound and the light were almost paralyzing now. Like being trapped in the heart of a cascading firework that never finished exploding

Her heart, though, was about to rupture from freezing fear. Her lips were numb with cold, and she could barely form the words when she told Luc, “I’m going down there.”

If he told her no this time, she couldn’t hear it over the crescendoing passion of the reuniting gemstones. This wasn’t the age-old science of fireworks that Ye-ye had kept alive, and it wasn’t the high-tech, faster-than-light universe she’d come to discover. This was mythology and magic, pure and simple and utterly terrifying.

She clawed her way past the spike she’d broken with her boot. The trio of gems weren’t as far down as she’d feared; the hazy glow of the Soul’s Dream frozen into the ice had made it seem deeper. All she had to do was—

The harness jerked tight. “Shit.” She glared over her shoulder to see her tether tangled in the crisscrossed spears.

“Amy,” Luc shouted through the comm. “Don’t you dare…”

Where had she heard that before? But it was just another yard or so. She could climb down the icicles as easy as a ladder. A slippery, frozen ladder. Made of deadly spikes. She unlatched the line from her harness.

As if echoing Luc, her dat-pad beeped an alarm, more felt though her jacket than heard over the gemstones’ jubilant song of union. She ignored it and crouched down into the hole. The very bottom of the funnel was right there, the Flame and the Hunger melting a rainbow puddle above the Dream. If she just turned upside down, she could reach into the hole…

Wedging her hips between two icicles—yay for that lingering freshman fifteen!—she stuck her head and shoulder down into the fissure. If only she had the arm length of the glamorous real explorer back in Mr. Evens’ shop…

But that woman would never have fit this far. And maybe she wouldn’t have even thought to use the synthesized kyapa-sho to freeze the whirlpool.

Amy grabbed the dangling end of the second tether. The end that had bound the gemstones was seared clean. Not even a puff of ash remained to spoil the rainbow puddle or the golden haze freezing the ice. With cold-numbed hands, she quickly looped a good-luck knot that would serve as a basket for the prism. In another second it would be melted free. And not a moment too soon—she was going to be blind and deaf from the cacophony.

As if the gems heard her, the tones cut out abruptly and the exuberant glow dimmed, leaving her blinking behind her darkened lenses.

Just as the goggles automatically adjusted to let her see, the faintest ping—like a fingernail lightly flicking a crystal goblet—chimed up through the frozen whirlpool. The Flame and the Hunger settled into the melted pool as the Soul’s Dream emerged from the ice.

A soft sigh—like a breath held for a thousand years—whispered up from the gemstones as the prism fused. All the colors played across the surface in a wild rainbow.

“Oh…” Forgetting the tether for a moment, she reached down to touch the nearest facet.

And a silent explosion of pure white light burst from the prism.

Her goggles didn’t have a chance. The light seared across her eyes—she felt the burn, hotter than any peppercorn, across her lips—and she might have screamed. But in a split second after the light, the resounding tones that had nearly deafened her before resumed, merging into major triad chords that would’ve made her long-suffering music teacher cry. But she didn’t have time to fear dying inside this icy firecracker.

Scraping her shoulders through the icicles, she lunged down and grabbed the prism, still brilliant in her dazzled gaze, like the afterimage of a blazing sun. Her fingers—minus one—closed around it, cutting down the glare, although one beam still shone through the gap of her ring finger. Her hand spasmed around the prism, and agony shafted up her arm. She arched back, smacking her head on the ice.

She was burning again…

In her mind’s eye, white dragon wings spread wide across the rainbowed sky, and thunder bellowed. The Firestorm Queen.

The dragon would burn her alive.

And she would die ecstatic.

From a million miles away, Luc’s voice was a syncopated call underlying the pure tones—“aye-em-ee”—and there was another noise too: a deep rumbling crackle followed by a melodic tinkling. An icy gust blew back her hood, and the chill extinguished her burning.

The whirlpool was melting.

Amy snapped back into herself as a droplet of near-freezing water traced across her cheek like one of those tears she hadn’t shed. Since she was still upside down, the salty, kyapa-sho-laced tear was trickling in reverse toward her eye. Aw hell, that was going to sting.

Tucking the prism into the good-luck knot at the end of the second tether, she lifted the dat-pad to her mouth and screamed an order at the Blissed. The tether—with the prism attached—recoiled upward toward the waiting ship.

It took the sound and bright fury with it, leaving her behind in the melting whirlpool.

Ice creaked and groaned all around her as the removal of the Soul’s Dream collapsed whatever strange equilibrium had existed here for a thousand years. She squirmed backward out of the hole, accidentally peeling out of her heavy jacket and knocking off her goggles as she wriggled past the dripping fangs of ice. The cold stabbed into her: a preview of what would happen if any of the breaking icicles rained down on her.

Grappling for the remaining tether, she yanked herself upright and clambered through the crisscrossed spears of ice at the bottom of the hole. She stared up at the belly of the Blissed high above her, maybe fifty feet above the surface of the polar plain. The prism flashed like a smaller but infinitely more powerful disco pyramid, casting shards of rainbow in every direction. Luc, his heavy white fatigues bright against the ship’s dark underbelly, snagged the line and drew it into the airlock. He waved to her, and his voice from the dat-pad was tensed but calm. “Now get your Earther ass back up here.”

With her teeth clenched hard to stop their chattering, she answered him with a wave. It took her three tries to reattach the line to her harness, her hands were shaking so badly from cold. And fear. But whatever, she’d done it. She’d helped find and reunite the Firestorm Queen’s Prism. Even if no one on Earth, no one else in the whole universe, knew it, she’d always remember this moment.

She slapped the auto return-to-ship command of her dat-pad and the slack in the line lifted toward the ship. In just a moment, she’d be lifted too, back to the Blissed, back to Luc. To whatever the future would hold for a fake, infamous interstellar explorer.

As the tether grew taut, the freezing meltwater swirled up to her knees. Luckily, she still had on the heavyweight pants for protection; even though the space-age material, the chill was aching.

Wrapping her hands in the harness, she braced herself as the line hauled her off her feet. Suspended in midair, she had nothing to do but turn helplessly, staring up at Luc, blinking her dazzled, stinging eyes. He was leaning out through the open hatch—who was flying the ship?—his gaze fixed on her as if he might levitate her right into his arms.

She might not know exactly what that future held, but for the first time in her life there was a light at the top of the whirlpool.

She was smiling up at him when a screel from the ice—like a hundred Mongol sabers rattling—surrounded her. Spikes of ice began to crack away from the sloping walls of the funnel as the whirlpool broke free of the kyapa-sho’s thrall and spun slowly to life.

Rocking frantically, she managed to avoid one crashing column of ice, but another and then another fell past her, plummeting into the deepening pool below with a brutal splash. One chunk barely nicked her boot, but she cried out as the blow seemed to crack her ankle and spun her sideways toward the churning wall. The tether sang with high tension as Luc must’ve increased the speed.

So close…

A white saber of ice sheared off the rim and plunged downward. Silhouetted against the bright sky, the huge saber turned black as it aimed right at her.

Pumping her legs, she crashed into the opposite wall and clung to the rotting ice, hugging tight though the freezing water drenched through her tunic. The ice would miss her, but she’d never be warm again—

The saber caught the tether instead.

With a scream, she was plucked from the wall by the force of its descent. Her harness snapped, but too late. She was already falling.

The line whizzed upward without her.

She caught a second-to-last glimpse of Luc reaching out in horror to the empty space where she should have been, if she hadn’t been so hellbent on proving herself.

Her last glimpse of him—just as the icy water at the bottom of the whirlpool closed over her head—was him diving out of the Blissed after her.