Maureen clicked the timer and held it up so Ivo could see the count start falling.
“Fourteen minutes. After that, the intake pressure drops below threshold and we can’t seal it at all.”
Ivo followed her look down into the flooded compartment what used to be a hydroponics bay, black water waist-deep, the crash having turned it into a freezing metal coffin.
The coupling lay somewhere in that dark a twenty-kilo titanium piece that had sheared off the recycler intake when they’d hit atmosphere.
Without it seated and sealed, the whole bay stayed flooded and the recycler stayed offline.
Without the recycler, the camp’s water margins tightened by the day.
John surfaced near the far wall, breath steaming.
He’d been down twice already.
His lips had gone pale.
“Can’t find purchase. Current’s washing me off every time I get hands on it.”
“Then we send two,” Maureen said.
“Ma’am.” One of the other divers, a man named Kovač, shook his head.
“Water that cold, that long we’re looking at hypothermia in five minutes. Two men won’t solve it faster if neither can hold position.”
Ivo watched the water.
The coupling was down there, ferrous, maybe sixty percent pure, offset from the mount by half a meter if the tilt was what he thought it was.
The Assay laid the numbers over the black like a diagram he could read in the dark.
He could move it.
From here.
Without touching the water at all.
Lodestone had a four-meter range when he wasn’t spent.
The doorway to the coupling-mount was three.
“I can set it,” he said.
Maureen turned.
“You’re not going in that water.”
“I don’t have to.”
Judy, crouched by the medical kit she’d hauled down for the divers, looked up sharply.
John pulled himself onto the edge, dripping.
“Ivo. If you’ve got a trick, now’s the time.”
A trick.
Close enough.
“The current’s the problem, right?” Ivo kept his voice flat.
Factual.
“If someone can get the coupling into the general area, I can talk you through setting it. I’m good with alignment.”
“Talk me through,” John repeated.
“From up here. I read metal. Angles, load, where it’s binding.” He met Maureen’s eyes.
Didn’t blink.
“I’ve done this kind of thing before.”
It wasn’t a lie.
He had.
Just not from three meters away through black water he never entered.
Maureen studied him.
The timer in her hand clicked down.
Thirteen minutes.
“If you can do this,” she said slowly, “we need it done. But if you’re guessing”
“I’m not.”
Judy stood.
Ivo felt her attention lock onto him like a targeting beam.
Maureen nodded once.
“John. Get the coupling into the zone. Ivo directs from topside.”
John slid back into the water without a word.
Ivo knelt at the doorway.
Let his fingers rest on the threshold where the decking met the flood.
Cold bit through the metal into his palm.
Down below, John dove.
The Assay flared.
The coupling lit up in Ivo’s vision, orange-gold, dense and off-true.
John’s hands found it, lost it, found it again. Find the original chapter at g.com.
The current shoved.
“Half meter left of the mount,” Ivo said.
His voice came out calm.
Procedural.
The opposite of what his pulse was doing.
“Nose it forward. Not up forward. The mount’s canted.”
John surfaced, gasped, went down again.
The coupling scraped.
Shifted.
Not enough.
Ivo reached.
Not with his hand.
With the pull.
The Lodestone sank into the coupling the way a hook sinks into flesh caught, held, undeniable.
He drew it left.
Slow.
The current fought him.
The metal was heavy, sluggish in the water, but it was his the way iron filings are his when he calls them.
He pulled.
The coupling slid.
John’s hand slipped off it entirely.
Below the waterline the coupling drifted into alignment, nose-first, and seated onto the mount with a muffled clang Ivo felt in his teeth.
“Seated,” John called, breaking the surface.
“I didn’t it just”
“Lock it down,” Maureen said, eyes on the timer.
Eleven minutes.
John dove again.
Got the first bolt threaded.
Then the second.
Surfaced, shaking hard now, face blank with cold.
Kovač went in for the last two bolts.
Ivo held the coupling steady a light pull, just enough to keep it seated against the current while Kovač’s numb fingers worked the wrench.
The final bolt clicked home.
“Sealed,” Kovač rasped.
Maureen hit the pressure release.
Somewhere deep in the bulkhead a valve cycled.
The intake coughed, caught, and the recycler’s hum climbed back into the steady operational range.
The bay was live.
Ivo let go.
The pull slid out of the metal like a long breath he’d been holding, and the ache came with it not in his teeth this time but in his wrists, cold and specific, the way a bruise announces itself when you stop ignoring it.
He sat back.
Let the ache settle.
John hauled himself out, dripping, shaking.
Maureen wrapped a thermal blanket around his shoulders and pressed a heat pack into his hands.
“That,” John said, looking straight at Ivo, “was the best calling I’ve ever heard.” He gripped Ivo’s shoulder wet hand, solid weight, no hesitation.
“Thank you.”
The warmth of it hit harder than Ivo expected.
He nodded.
Managed, “It’ll hold.”
“Damn right it will.” John’s smile was real.
Uncomplicated.
The kind of smile you gave someone you trusted at your back.
Ivo’s chest did something complicated he didn’t have a name for.
Maureen stowed the tools without a word wasted.
Kovač peeled out of his wetsuit, hands still shaking, while the recycler pulled the flood down in steady, grudging increments.
Judy handed John a mug of something hot, then crossed to Ivo.
She held out a second mug.
He took it.
The heat of it bit into his palms colder palms than they had any right to be, for a man who’d never gone near the water.
Close enough that he could feel the warmth off her shoulder.
“You called every movement before it happened,” she said quietly.
“Angles. Load. Where it was binding.”
He sipped.
Swallowed.
Said nothing.
“I’ve been keeping a list.” Her voice stayed low.
Just between them.
“The cable that bent the wrong way in your hands. The beam you told them to pull when you were half-conscious and shouldn’t have known which beam it was. The times your fever spikes and then something breaks our way.”
Ivo’s pulse kicked.
“I thought you were hiding an illness,” Judy continued.
“And you are. But the illness and the edge are the same thing, aren’t they?”
He looked at her.
She looked back.
Steady.
Clear.
Not angry.
Just certain.
“I’m not going to ask you what it is,” she said.
“Because you’re a worse liar than you think, and I don’t want to watch you try.” She took a sip from her own mug.
“So I’m going to stop asking and start watching. And when you’re ready to tell me, you’ll tell me.”
The kindness of it landed like a blow.
“Judy”
“You just saved the recycler from three meters away through freezing black water you never touched.” Her mouth curved.
Not quite a smile.
Something gentler.
“I don’t need you to explain it. I need you to know that I see it. And I’m still here.”
The ache in his wrists spread up into his forearms.
He was colder than he’d been since the purge.
Shaking, just a little, the way he did when the cost came due.
Judy saw.
She always saw.
She shifted closer.
Let her shoulder press against his.
“Drink,” she said.
“You’re freezing.”
He drank.
The compartment drained.
The recycler hummed.
John laughed at something Kovač said, warm and alive and human in a way that made the camp feel less like a disaster and more like a place people could survive together.
Ivo sat beside Judy, holding the mug she’d given him, carrying the warmth of John’s hand on his shoulder and the weight of her certainty together.
Nobody could fake what he’d earned today.
Not the standing, not John’s grip on his shoulder, not the mug going cold in his own hands.
Judy had watched him do it and stayed anyway.
That was the part that should have scared him.
It didn’t.
That was the dangerous part the part he’d pay for later.
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