Drop

He gasped; icy Antarctic seawater became molten iron in his lungs. There wasn't room for anything else. Arms and legs numb, might as well have been gone. Lips and nose, painful, hard, frozen. He closed his eyes, let his mind swim up, past the ice and blowing snow, through the tent, across a tundra he'd once thought naked, but that had become a living thing all its own: blue shadows, moving specks of arctic fox between the drifts, glittering sun dashed into billions of pieces on ancient glaciers. Leopard seals blinking frosted eyelashes.

All the way back to Cairo, to the heat and dusty air, to the room above the card parlor. Into sheets shuffled across sweating torsos and down muscular limbs.

Jack, far above, holding the broken line. Screaming. Noise lost to the underwater kingdom.

Both sides of the icewall shifted. The ravine, almost imperceptibly, closed.

Water like fire: Thad opened his mouth, knives piercing his everywhere.

And gone. The cold, the fire, the numbness, all replaced by a hundred small mouths, clipping onto his body, piercing through coat and pants and layers of insulation. Digging in, wriggling.

Biting.

And he could breathe again.

One, small and flat as Jack's palm, floated in front of him.

A ray, its white underside blinding. Vibrations ringing through the sea, settling in his mind.

Legs together, fusing--a whiplash tail! He spread his arms, and white flesh shivered to fill the gap. Chin tipping up, throat smoothing. His eyes opened wide and tilted up, taking in the expanse of ice over his head. The surface was somethere up there. Jack was somewhere up there. Above.

Jack. His captain, his lover, the holder of broken things.

The thing that had been Thad, that had been Fairchild, that had been lieutenant, that had asked why in Cairo--flexed long, flat muscles and rippled away, down deep. Following the hundred mouths that had released him. Swimming into an abyss cold and deep, while far above, two massive slabs of ice came together and closed until there wasn't a sign, not even the faintest crack, where the explorers had found the Antarctic ravine.