Skye
“Chin up.”
I tilt my chin, my vision taken up by the serious but strangely devoted look painting shadows across the planes of Alex’s face as he zips me into a bright yellow parka, all the way to the neck. He’s careful, far more gentle when touching me than he was only half an hour ago, when I was breathless on his lap, and he sucked a bruise so deep I can still feel it throbbing. He’ll barely meet my eyes as it stands. In all honesty, I can barely meet his. Whatever that was felt… less like I was offering him the sustenance he desperately needed and more like something totally, completely, out of control and overtly sexual.
I flush with heat just thinking about it, a small, involuntary squeak leaving my lips when he grips my fingers and reaches above my head to dig through a bin of gloves. We’re chest to chest, and he smells… amazing. Like everything male, dangerous, and delicious. Like things I can’t possibly place because this is the first time I’ve ever wanted–
“These should fit.”
I stuff my hands into the gloves and stand there, rigid, worried if I so much as open my mouth to breathe, I’ll say something I’ll deeply regret.
Beneath the parka, I’m wearing the same yellow thermals I’m intimately familiar with but have never tried on. They’re soft but thick and don’t have much stretch–specially made to store heat and wick sweat away–according to Alex’s thorough explanation only moments ago. He stuffs a beanie over my hair, mumbles a curse when he accidentally covers my eyes, and adjusts the hat just a bit.
“Is it really that cold down there?” I ask when he steps away, and his proximity is no longer turning my mind to molten mush. I blink into the sharply bright fluorescent lights of the dressing room, where neon yellow parkas hang along the wall, and lockers are mostly ajar, stuffed with thick, heavily-treaded boots and other winter gear.
“It can be, especially in the tunnels. Here, put your foot on my knee.” He kneels and I obey, watching with interest as he secures cleats to my boot. “The other.” I use his shoulder to maintain my balance while he secures the other cleat. Then, he rises, inspecting me from head to toe with a wry smirk.
“What?” I murmur, shuffling in what feels like an extra 30 pounds of clothing.
“Nothing,” he replies, but that smirk doesn’t fade. His gaze drops to my neck for just a moment, long enough I can see the gears turning behind his eyes. I think he might feel guilty about what happened. He shouldn’t. I wish he’d believe me when I tell him so, but Alex doesn’t seem like the kind of man who easily changes his mind.
The thermals and parka expertly cover the dark bruise on my neck, and I’m not in pain. In fact, I feel good. Great. Awake and alive in a way I haven’t felt in years–maybe ever.
He takes my gloved hand and opens a metal door leading into a second room. This room is empty save for the doors to the elevator and a few racks for gear and coats, I presume, but it’s 4:00 A.M., and based on how quiet it was when we left my condo and traveled down to the surface level of campus, we might be the only people in his lab this morning.
“Ready?”
I nod, and he slams his fist against a large red button on the wall. I startle as cold, dry air bursts from the ceiling, settling like mist around my feet. The mist snakes around us while the button blinks red. Alex is unperturbed. He moves the fabric of his coat away from his wrist to read his watch and then meets my eyes again. “It’s okay to breathe it in. It’s not going to hurt you or your lungs.”
“What does it do?” I ask, lifting my arm to watch the mist curl and hang from the fabric of my sleeve before fading.
“Disinfects everything. It’s a safety measure to keep not only the lab safe and clean, but to also prevent germs from traveling from one place to another. We’ll go through the process again when we leave.” The button turns green, and he pulls a lever on the door of the elevator to open it. It’s a snug fit in all of our gear, but the walls are transparent, and when it starts to move, the walls turn from a thick, concrete gray to varying shades of blue.
It’s like being underwater. The pressure changes. My ears pop. I press a gloved hand to the glass as the ice shifts color again and again, fading from the brightest to the deepest shades of blue that remind me of Alex’s eyes. Thirty seconds later, the elevator comes to a rough, shuttering stop, and the doors crank out, revealing a wide, round room made entirely of ice.
The smell is hard to describe. It’s clean in a cold kind of way, with hints of soap and the same disinfectant clinging to my clothes. I shuffle out of the elevator behind Alex, unsteady in the cleats. It takes me several steps for my body to catch up with the cling and drag of the metal picks, but it feels wholly unnatural, even when I get used to it. Alex, however, moves like this weighted feeling is normal.
Like he doesn’t know anything else.
“This is the main part of the lab, or central, as we call it. Uh, over here–” He motions toward a row of metal tables lined with vinyl arranged against an icy wall. “Are the microscopes and a few chem stations. My lab assistants have their own workspaces and can experiment down here to their hearts’ content as long as I’ve signed off on it.”
“So they don’t accidentally blow up the lab?”
Alex chuckles. Low and deep. I whip my head up to look into his face, having never heard that easy laugh before. He doesn’t notice and instead walks toward the other side of the lab, where several thick plastic drapes house containment stations. “I’m not worried about them blowing things up down here. Something getting loose? Ancient infectious material? Yes. That’s a concern.” He pulls a drape back and motions for me to follow him into what I quickly realize is another room carved out of the ice. Several large glass structures funnel from the floor to the ceiling, and within, a variety of flora rest on little shelves.
“What are these?” I ask, perplexed. I press my fingertips to the glass to peer at the scraps of what look like fossilized plants.
“Ancient seaweed,” he sighs. “Very exciting.” I frown up at him, and he chuckles again. “Normally, the ice cores we drill are just that–ice. Occasionally, those cores contain fragments of sediment, and in cases like these, plant material. If we’re lucky, we’ll find a frozen specimen containing mammalian proteins, but that happens so rarely I honestly can’t remember the last time it happened.”
A metallic crack echoes from the main part of the lab before a whoosh of air, and soft, sleepy voices travel in our direction. Alex catches my gaze before turning to the voices, edging out of the containment room to part the drapes, and I turn to the trio of young lab assistants funneling in wearing their yellow gear. He turns back to me, tilting his head in a motion to follow, and I do, but I notice the lingering gaze of his students when he bends a knee to check on my cleats before turning me into another set of heavy plastic drapes.
At first, the shift from the bright light of the lab to a claustrophobic kind of darkness riles my powers. Then, just as Alex cranks a lever, and the tunnel fills with crackling, flickering blue light, the drastic change in temperature makes my bracelet heat in warning.
I hang back when he takes two steps into the tunnel and stops to look back at me.
“How deep are we underground?” I ask, reaching out to smooth my hand over the tunnel wall. It’s high and wide enough to fit three grown men side-by-side with room to spare, and it’s smooth to the touch–the deepest, clearest blue I’ve ever seen.
“Only about a hundred yards below the surface in the main lab, but our deepest tunnel is a mile under the ice.”
“A mile?!”
“Unfortunately, yes. That tunnel isn’t often in use, and for good reason. It’s highly unstable that deep under the ice. The pressure, as you can imagine, is insane. We have special equipment we use to travel down that far on foot, but our main drills are stationed closer to the surface. Half a mile down, at the most.”
I have no idea where we’re going, but I’m at his mercy as we traverse into the depths. Alex talks for the entire walk, telling me about the drills they use to pull ice samples from miles below the surface, the discoveries they’ve found recently, and the work they do in the main lab. It strikes me how similar our fields of study are when we reach a fork, and he angles us toward the left, where the tunnel widens to reveal a room of sorts. The entire room vibrates gently, and sensors fixed to the wall blink in rhythm while Alex walks ahead to check a screen attached to a strange kind of mechanical box. Numbers flash on the screen, followed by a grainy image as he taps away, the electric green hue reflected in his eyes.
He searches back in time for the answers to his questions, traveling further than anyone has been willing to go, further than anyone has thought to have gone, and I… look up. I look far, far away for answers to those very same questions.
“This is an ice core, right?”
“Well, technically it’s a drill arm, but yes.” He straightens to look at me, frost beginning to coat his lashes and wisps of dark curls escaping from his beanie. “It’s cutting away a sample from the ice–a core, we call them. That’s why the room feels like it’s vibrating. In a few days, we’ll bring it to the surface for further study. This one is special.”
“Why?”
He licks his lips, his eyes still holding mine intently. “Abby is going to be the one to tell us, actually. But we may have stumbled upon something big. An animal, likely. But based on the footage we have from when the drill hit, we think it might be more than that.”
I step toward him, noting the hesitancy in his voice.
“Tell me about it.”
“I don’t know what we’re looking at yet.”
“A sea monster? An ancient whale?”
He sucks his teeth and smiles down at his boots. He’s doing his best to hide an excited smile. “I don’t think so.”
“What do you think it is?”
“A village.”
“What?”
He leans against the wall, and I do the same, facing him, watching and listening to the steadily beeping sensors and the soft hum of the drills turning in slow rotations yards and yards below us. “I think this is likely the biggest find of my career, if we’re right,” he admits. “I’m trying not to think about it, and the Beta of Aurorium’s task definitely came at the right time to keep my mind off it, but yeah. A village. A settlement of some kind. We know the ocean here is roughly two miles deep, and we’re as close to the bottom as we’ve ever been able to drill. We’re scraping the bottom at this point, I believe, and our last few cores pulled from this tunnel in particular have produced sediment samples… iron-rich. Samples of coal. Foreign fibers and the like. Fur.”
“Fur?”
“A few minuscule hairs, but yeah. It could be a fluke. It could be core contamination despite our best efforts.” He crosses his arms over his chest, his coat crinkling with the movement. “Abby is the best at this. I’d hoped, when I met her during her graduate program, she’d start to lean into paleomicrobiology. It’s rare form for biologists, though. We’re the ones who find these things, who know where to look, what these samples could be, and then other scientists take over. She wanted the action of the process of discovery once that sample was already in her hand, not the thrill of the chase.”
I smooth my hand over the ice again, noticing hairline cracks throughout the wall.
“Anyway, she’ll run her tests, and we’ll know for sure what we’re looking at in a few weeks' time.”
I form a fist against the ice before my hand falls to my side. “Alex?”
“Yeah?”
“What exactly did you find in my blood?”
Silence hangs between us for at least a minute. We watch each other, eyes holding fast, like we’re both looking inward, reaching for something we can’t ask or say.
I’ve questioned the hows and whys of my powers my entire life. My father has, too; I know that for a fact. But it’s never seemed to matter. Many people in my family favor the idea that our powers are simply a gift, something divined from the Goddess, something passed down from Isla when she emerged from those falls in Maatua with the magical ability to heal and the gift of light.
Others have been questioning the origins for decades and why powers on my side of the family are waning while Ella and Ryatt’s family line has only grown in power.
Alex purses his lips and sighs, giving me a slightly defeated look. His lips part in what I hope is an answer to literally any of the million questions I have when a sharp, echoing alarm sounds from deep within the tunnel system.
He grits his teeth and kicks off the wall, grabbing my arm, but I barely feel it through the thick layers of fabric. “Another time. I promise.”