Saad is now scanning the horizon wildly, like we’re playing a game he’s desperate to win. “What is it? What do you see?”
“The ship. The ship, it’s right there. And the captain!” I fling a hand toward the black sandbar, but when I look again, it’s empty. I scan the horizon frantically, but there’s nothing. The charcoal ship is gone. “It was there!” I cry. Was it? “It was right there, I saw it! I know I saw it!” Do you? “It has to still be there, we just have to find it. We have to get to the beach!”
I kick the back of my boot, struggling to dislodge the spikes from the ice—my muscles are shaking. Saad tries to steady me, but I toss him off. He must think I’m falling—I’m not falling. I’m climbing. I’m climbing down. I have to get to the beach.
“Adrian, stop!” he calls. “There’s nothing there.”
“There is! There was! I saw it.” I swear I catch a glimpse of something on the horizon—clouds or sails or one and the same. I turn so wildly that this time, I do slip. Saad grabs the hood of my coat, so when my feet go out from under me, we both crash to the ice. We’re sliding down the embankment, out of control, both of us scrambling for a handhold, but the ice is slick as glass. We hit the lip of the ledge we were standing on and fly off, airborne for a moment before we crash onto the next ledge below us. I land on my back, my thick coat cushioning me though the impact still knocks all the breath from my lungs. Beside me, Saad groans.
I can’t breathe. I can’t get my breath back. Saad is going to stop me from climbing down any farther. He’s going to hold me back, or take the spyglass or tell me I’m insane. He’s going to realize he put his faith in a lunatic, and take me away to a madhouse to rave about ghost ships where no one can hear me.
But I have seen the Dutchman. I have steered too close to the dark rocks.
I have not come this far to only come this far.
I scoot along the shelf until I can see over the side and down the next patch of the glacier. The slope is gentler, and instead of a fall, I slide on my back like a seal. I can feel pieces of ice slip down the back of my coat and into my boots. The terrain turns jagged as the glacier slopes into the bay, and I hit several more of the hard ledges of ice like the one Saad and I fell from. I feel bounced around like a coin in a pocket, but I’m ready to slide all the way to the sea if that’s what it takes. I’ll put my boots on that black sand and the captain will be there. I’m so sure of it.
I reach another shelf, this one the widest yet and with the steepest drop-off, and I’m forced to stop my descent. The ice here has flattened into a glassy blue sheet before the sharp slope into the bay, and I’m stuck, unsure what to do. The ice face below me is too slick to climb. I’d need spikes and ropes—or maybe I don’t. Maybe I can do it alone. I’m not cold—I could take off my shoes and my coat and the pads of my fingers and toes would stick to the ice. I could scale it like a monkey.
“Adrian!” I hear Saad shout, and I glance backward. He’s followed me in a controlled slide, the edge of his ice hook dug into the glacier. That’s what I need—that pickax. I could climb down the cliff if I had it. I look down to the lagoon again and realize the figure on the beach is back. I watch as they stand, brushing their hands off on their trousers, then retrieve their hat from the sand and cover their long, red hair. It feels like someone put a lid over the sun. The sky darkens for the first time in days.
“Wait!” I try to shout it, but I can’t get enough breath in my lungs for the sound to carry down to them.
“Adrian, stop!” Saad is above me, his shoes dug into the slope. He’s jammed his ice hook deep into the hard-packed snow to hold him in place. A shower of ice and pebbles breaks off beneath his heel and spatters the ledge I’m on like rain. “What are you doing?”
“It’s there!” I point wildly to the horizon. “The Flying Dutchman is right there.”
Saad adjusts his grip on the ice hook. “Give me your hand. I’ll pull you up.”
He throws out a hand to me, but I lurch away from him, almost stepping off the edge of the shelf.
Saad gasps. “Stop, you’re going to fall.”
“I’m going to die!” I shout back at him. “Unless I get to that ship.”
“No one’s dying—come on, Adrian, give me your hand.”
Before I can move, there’s a low crack somewhere deep in the ice, like the warning before an avalanche. Saad and I both freeze.
There’s a moment of cold silence. Then a chattering sound, as white veins appear beneath me in the clear ice.
“Adrian, grab my hand!” Saad shouts, and I look up at him. My spiked heel bites the ground. There’s another low crack, then the ice beneath me collapses.
30
I have no sense of how far I fall—it seems both an instant, and long enough for my brain to realize this is too far to survive.
Then I hit the water.
It’s shockingly cold, though not deep. I’m disoriented for a moment until I feel my feet against the bottom. I push upward, my muscles already starting to stagnate from the cold. My clothes are weighing me down—I fish the spyglass from the pocket of my coat, then manage to wiggle out of it and let it sink. The lift I feel toward the surface without the added weight is immediate, and I kick off my boots too. By the time I’m free, there’s no breath left in me, and even if there were, I couldn’t make my lungs work; they’re too shriveled from the cold.
My head breaks the surface and I gasp, half blind from the water and the sudden light, coughing and not shivering so much as shuddering. I cannot stop shaking enough to swim or even float. I drop under the water twice more without meaning to, simply because my limbs are too clenched by the cold to do anything helpful. I’m wheezing but getting no air, my body convulsing from the cold. My vision is beginning to spot.
You have to stay calm, I tell myself. You have to focus. You will not die here.
I close my eyes, thinking only of my breath, and for once, try to thank my lungs for what a goddamn fantastic job they’re doing, like that will encourage them to keep it up.
I open my eyes. A stream of light tumbles down from the hole I fell through. I can hear Saad shouting above me, though he’s too far to help. I can’t even make out what he’s saying. I want to call back so he knows I’m alive, but I don’t have enough breath. Ice is all around me, glassy and crystal blue like the center of a flame. I’ve fallen through the top of some sort of cave in the glacier, carved out by the warmer water from the sea flooding the bay, and now I’m trapped here, floating in cobalt water, surrounded by glassy sapphire ice.
It would be so goddamn beautiful if it weren’t trying to kill me.
In the refracted light filtering in through the ice, I can make out a small bar of black sand ahead of me and I force my body to swim toward it, pushing myself through the freezing water until I’m close enough to drag myself up onto it. It’s less relief than I had hoped it would be. I may be out of the water, but I’m still soaking wet, my muscles convulsing with cold. I lie on my back, clutching the spyglass in both hands against my stomach, trying to stop my shivering and think about anything other than how cold I am.