Questions that had to wait for another time. Bodies were piling up fast, so many that they began blocking the way to us like a gruesome wall. The fight went on. My face was covered in warm cetus blood, the ice stained a deep red color around my boots. Aim, pull, slice, kick.
“Fortuna.”
Oliver hadn’t spoken in so long that it took my mind an extra moment to realize he’d said my name. I twisted toward him, drawing my knife in an arc that cut across a cetus’s fleshy, wiggling throat. While it staggered backward, choking, I frowned at Oliver. His expression set warning bells off inside me. “What is it? What’s happening?” I demanded.
But Oliver wasn’t paying attention to me anymore; his gaze was on the ice, scanning the area around us as if he saw something I couldn’t. “Back up,” he said suddenly.
I searched the ground even as my feet moved to obey. I’d never seen such urgency in my best friend’s eyes. We had another one of our silent communications, and in the next breath, Oliver and I broke into a run. Strangely enough, the line of ceti had hastily retreated—they were going back into the water. If our luck held, we could just leap over the gap and get to that path on the icy cliffside.
“What’s going on?” I asked again, panting.
Oliver opened his mouth to answer just as the place we’d just been standing shattered into the sky.
The ice lurched violently under our feet. We went flying, the force of the explosion causing us to land on our spines. My backpack did nothing to break the fall, and the air left my lungs in a violent rip. Gagging, I rolled another moment before coming to a stop.
For several seconds, I was paralyzed in a state of no oxygen and no ability to draw it back inside me. Then my body started working again, like a machine that had worked out a clog in its gears. I gasped in the air I so desperately needed, ignoring the pinpricks of pain as it entered my lungs. Ollie, I thought. Is Ollie okay?
Slowly, I pushed myself upright. I’d squeezed my eyes shut when I hit the ground, and now I pried them open again, terrified of what I’d see.
I breathed easier when I saw that Oliver was already recovering next to me. Following his lead, I struggled to my feet, taking stock of everything else as I did.
One good thing had come from the two of us getting thrown like ragdolls—we were now on the other side of the line the creatures had formed when they first came out of the water. But a bad thing had come of it, too. My mouth was dry as I watched another cetus rise into the open, its head a long silhouette against a wide moon.
In that instant, realization hit me. The creatures we’d been fighting all this time… they’d been the young ones. The hatchlings.
Because the immense animal lumbering out of the water, its torso so big that the ice was crumbling beneath the weight like an ancient piece of bread, could only be their mother.
She had dozens of nipples along her underside and her leathery hide was run through with cracks. Her flippers were muscled. Meaty. One blow from those and we wouldn’t have intact skulls anymore.
“There’s no fucking way,” I breathed, unable to comprehend the sheer size of her. We were dead.
Oliver grabbed my hand and dragged me into a run. I didn’t fight him—it was the right call. The only call. We’d been thrown clear of the bodies and there was a straight shot to the path we needed.
More ceti were already coming out of the water, and they were slightly more versatile than their hideous mother. I faced forward again, pumping my arms harder. Oliver did the same. I could hear his breath in my ear, and the short, even bursts became something I focused on, as if I were counting reps during one of Dad’s exercises. We ran faster than we ever had before, even during one of our childhood races.
Within a minute, we were at the base of the icy wall, rushing along the narrow ledges that led upward. Oliver didn’t look back, and neither did I. I put one foot in front of the other, controlling my breathing as best I could. Thoughts hovered at the edge of my calm, more questions. Later, later, I chanted at them, timing the word with each inhale and exhale.
The fury of the ceti faded; we were out of their reach now. Though Oliver and I didn’t slow, I relented the strange chant I’d been doing in my head the entire time we’d been rushing up this wall.
It seemed unlikely the creatures would follow us—those bulbous bodies hadn’t looked built for land, much less climbing—but after we reached the top, we didn’t pause to catch our breath. We kept going, and going, and going. Even when it became clear our boots were hitting snow and not solid ice, and there was no longer a threat of something coming at us from beneath our feet, Oliver and I didn’t falter.
Once the sense of danger had passed, though, the adrenaline began to abandon me. It was only then I remembered that I’d been in the water.
Oh, God. They hurt. My fingers hurt. It was so cold, too cold, and it felt like I’d die if I didn’t feel heat soon.
Stop that, Fortuna. You’re not going to die, I told myself sternly. I glanced at Oliver, wondering if he was struggling, too. There was still moonlight shining down on the ice, and real alarm surged through me when I saw how starkly my friend’s freckles stood out against his skin. His lips were the palest of blues. Was that what I looked like? Could I contract hypothermia in the dreamscape, then carry that into my world? And Oliver, what would happen to him now that he couldn’t heal himself at the wave of a hand?
Worry gnawed at my mind along with the cold. After a minute or so, however, the wind picked up again and provided a terrible distraction. My freezing skin felt overly sensitive, as if it was faintly throbbing. Every gust of air was like teeth and claws raking past me. That was when the shivering returned, but this time, I couldn’t stop. The miserable shaking made my teeth ache, and eventually I figured out that they were chattering.
Instead of setting up camp and waiting it out, Oliver and I bent our heads down and pressed onward. I wasn’t sure why, now that the ceti were well and truly behind us. Maybe Oliver was as shaken as I was by the encounter with those creatures—this had always been his safe place, too. His home. Everything was changing too much, too fast.
We hadn’t been walking more than a few minutes when my legs wouldn’t support me anymore. I started to slow, my knees threatening to give way. Without a word, Oliver put his arm around my lower back, underneath my frozen backpack. I looked at him through frost-tinted eyelashes, but he kept his gaze on the darkness ahead as he took most of my weight and propelled us onward. Farther away from the coast. Deeper into the wilderness. I didn’t know where he was finding his strength, especially since he’d been in that water next to me. “Th-thank you,” I said past tingling lips.
He didn’t answer.
I decided to let Oliver determine when we should stop—it was taking all my concentration to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward. At some point, I put my head down. But even then, I didn’t stop or fall. If Oliver could do it, so could I. He was me, and I was him.
You’re not making sense anymore, Fortuna. Probably a bad sign, I thought dimly. The tingling that was in my lips had traveled to my fingertips.
Not much longer after that, Oliver set me down carefully. He made sure I didn’t topple over before he took off his backpack and put that down, too. I didn’t remember closing my eyes. I must have, though, because the next thing I knew Oliver was touching my arm, his voice a low murmur. I tried to raise my head. Tried and failed. I felt Oliver take hold of me again, and we made our way into the softly-glowing tent he’d erected.