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But instead I see—my mother, still, blood on the side of her face, looking at me, looking and not looking, empty.
My father, head going back with a jerk, blood a mist in the air.
Wolf’s teeth, wolf’s jaws clamping shut over my arm, cold water sluicing up the ice.
And I can’t move. My hollow self has filled up. All that emptiness just left room for fear, and now I’m choking on it.
I can’t hear anything except the roar, but I feel the ice crack under me. Feel it heave.
There has to be something more than fear, and I find it. I find it in the frozen image of a photograph, my mother’s arm around mine, wind whipping our hair across our faces.
I find it in the look my father gave me, the one that said maybe if we’d had more time, I would have realized how much we could be to each other.
I find it in Will’s voice, his idiot grin as I inch my way across the floor and don’t give up.
And in Griff, and Scott, and Lily who told me she wanted to be brave like me.
It isn’t the food and work that make me strong in that moment. I’m still injured. Still weak.
But I’m not alone. I’ve never been alone. They are, every one of them, reaching out to me with the words they spoke and the things they did for me.
They made me strong.
Move.
That’s enough. Enough. ENOUGH.
MOVE.
I get my hands under me. Push upright. I brace one foot against the ice, then two—and pain stabs through my calf.
It’s my bad leg. Worse, now. I crane my neck back to look. Blood soaks through my pants. But that isn’t what my eye tracks to. Black water. The blast broke up the ice. There’s a hole where the explosion was centered. Shattered, cracked ice reaches out from it with still-stretching claws.
Raph is on his side on the ice. His face is pointed away from me, and I can’t tell if he’s alive, but he isn’t moving.
The cracks reach out under the plane.
I have to get to it.
The rifle is between me and Raph. I crawl over the ice to it, weaving as the world tilts and spins around me. I use the rifle to push myself upright.
I lock my leg and grit my teeth and get upright, barely, leaning heavily on the rifle, and limp toward the plane. The ice lurches alarmingly under me. Water sluices up here and there, sloshing over the fractured sheets.
I hear Raph grunt behind me as he pushes himself up. I hurry forward. I step over a crack that’s gushing water like blood from an artery and reach the plane. I pull myself up into the seat and reach for the controls.
The engine is still going. It’s only been, what, thirty seconds, a minute? It seems like an hour. A day.
I fumble at the controls.
The plane heaves. Nononono—the ice is breaking up under me. I have to move, but the plane only tips with a shudder, the front wheel sinking forward.
For more heartbeats than I can spare, I somehow believe that I can do something. Get away, take off. Enough heartbeats for the ice to give still more, the weight unbalancing and the plane nodding forward into the black.
And then there isn’t even time to grab the radio, to get a message out that will tell someone—if they’re even listening—how to find me.
A scream of fear and frustration rips out of my throat, felt but not heard.
I throw myself out the other door, the far side of the plane, onto the still-solid ice beyond. The plane is beginning to sink. The water clutches at it greedily, pulling it down into the dark, and I can only drag myself away and farther away as the ice shifts and cracks and settles.
