The Jupiter hit.
Ivo’s spine compressed against the frame behind him, his teeth clacked together, and the cargo netting tried to cut him in half.
The world turned into a sustained crunch of metal on ice, then a shriek of tearing hull, then silence so sudden his ears rang.
He lay still.
Counted his breaths.
Waited for the deck to decide whether it was done moving.
It wasn’t.
The whole ship canted five degrees to port, slow, groaning, and stopped.
The deck hummed under his cheek a frequency that felt wrong.
Not the drive.
Deeper.
Colder.
Ivo opened his eyes.
The cargo hold was dark except for one amber emergency strip that had survived the landing.
The netting had slackened.
He made out the hull plate nearest his head, a structural rib, and the figures overlaid on them.
They were still there.
Rust-orange, faint, laid over the metal like frost only he could parse.
The rib was titanium-aluminide, sixty-eight percent digestible, four point two kilograms.
The deck plating beneath him was a composite he still didn’t have a name for, thirty-one percent, mass indeterminate because it ran the length of the hold and the readout didn’t stop.
His molars ached.
Ivo closed his eyes, opened them again.
The overlay didn’t fade.
He turned his head and the figures slid across his vision, tracking to whatever metal caught his gaze.
A tie-down.
A conduit housing.
The hatch frame.
The hatch frame was steel, ninety-two percent, eleven kilos, and it would taste clean.
The ship was a larder.
The thought sat wrong in him, worse than the cold.
He swallowed.
His mouth was dry and his throat hurt and the iron taste sat at the back of his tongue like a meal he’d already started and his stomach was still working on.
Voices.
Muffled, forward, past the sealed hatch that separated the cargo hold from the living quarters.
A woman’s voice, fast and precise.
“Will, I need you on life support. Penny, find me a battery count. John”
“Still outside.” A girl’s voice, younger.
“He went to check the”
“I know where he went. Judy?”
A third voice, calm under strain.
Tired.
“Two cracked ribs, maybe three. Bruising. Nothing I can’t tape. Mom, the lake”
“I know. We’re on it.”
The deck shuddered.
A long low creak ran the hull’s length, metal flexing under a load it hadn’t been designed for, and Ivo felt it in his back teeth.
Not sound.
The overlay spiked, flared brighter for half a second, and he saw the stress map light up along the nearest rib hot orange veins branching where the welds gave.
Failing.
Not now.
Soon.
He pulled himself upright, slow, and took stock.
Cargo containers had broken loose and piled against the port wall, netting and tie-downs snarled through the wreck of them.
Coolant and scorched insulation soured the air.
His shoulder throbbed where he’d hit the deck during the drop; his hand still cramped around nothing.
The hatch was six meters forward.
Sealed.
No wheel on this side, just a panel he didn’t have access to, and the temperature was dropping fast enough that his knuckles caught it before anything else did.
His breath plumed faint in the amber light.
The deck pulled warmth from his palms when he braced against it, and the wall behind him radiated a chill that meant the hull had already bled its heat into whatever they’d landed on.
Ice.
He’d felt the impact, heard the crunch.
They were on ice, and the ice was under a ship still hot enough to melt it.
Ivo pressed his palm flat against the nearest rib.
Cold climbed his wrist like it had somewhere to be.
The Assay told him the rest.
The frame was sound, but the lower hull plating had buckled on impact.
Hairline fractures spiderwebbed across two panels near the keel, stress points glowing faint orange in his vision, and the largest crack ran fifteen centimeters and was widening.
Microns per minute.
Not fast.
But the lake beneath them was pulling heat via the gap, and heat plus ice equaled water, and water equaled weight the ice couldn’t hold.
They were sinking.
Not now.
Not in the next hour.
But soon enough that staying in the hold alone would mean freezing before the family even knew he was here.
He let his hand fall.
Looked at the hatch.
Thought about knocking.
Thought about what he’d say when someone opened it.
I’m cargo.
I’m not supposed to be here.
I can fix things.
Please don’t throw me out.
The voices filtered closer now.
Clearer.
“batteries are in the hold, which is currently on the wrong side of a sealed hatch, so unless you want me to cut”
“No cutting. We don’t know what we puncture.” The first woman again.
Maureen.
The engineer.
He caught it in the cadence, the way she stacked problems into a sequence and worked the sequence.
“Will, you’re smallest. The dorsal maintenance shaft connects to the hold. Can you fit?”
“I think so.”
“Then go. Inventory everything. Batteries first, then oxygen, then tell me what we lost.”
Footsteps.
A hatch cycling somewhere above and aft.
Ivo went very still.
The boy was coming.
His gaze swept the cargo pile, the netting, the dark corners the emergency light didn’t reach.
Swept the hatch and the frame he could parse like a blueprint now, mass and composition and exactly how much force it would take to pop the seal if he had the charge to spend.
He had nothing to spend.
Heat zero.
The Line was in him but inert, a dead weight behind his sternum that only watched and ached.
Hide, then.
Slip behind the containers, stay low, stay quiet, let the boy do his count and leave.
Wait.
Stowaway patience.
Ivo had been running on it for four days.
But his fingers were white at the tips now, and patience was curdling into something colder the first real fear.
Not of people.
Of freezing.
Somewhere under the deck, the ice cracked with a sound like a word he couldn’t make out, and the overlay along the keel flared brighter.
Failing faster now.
He pulled the cargo net over his shoulders and wedged himself into the gap between two containers, low and still, and watched the maintenance hatch in the overhead.
It opened three minutes later.
A boy dropped through, twelve or thirteen, careful hands on the ladder rungs.
He hit the deck light, sneakers on metal, eyes flicking to every shadow the emergency strip didn’t reach before he let himself breathe out.
“Okay,” the boy said to no one.
“Batteries. You can do this.”
He moved across the hold like he was trying not to touch anything broken.
Stepped over a split container, ducked under a loose tie-down, and stopped in front of the battery rack bolted to the starboard frame.
Ivo watched him count.
Watched him pull a tablet from his pocket, tap the screen, frown.
The boy glanced up.
His eyes found the hatch Ivo had been staring at for the last twenty minutes.
His hand moved toward the panel.
Ivo stopped breathing.
The tablet buzzed.
The boy pulled it back up, read the screen, and his face did a complicated thing.
A voice crackled from the tablet, tinny and distant.
Maureen.
“Will, forget the hold count. I need you topside now. Your sister just went out onto the ice and I am not having this argument with her over the radio.”
The boy’s hand fell away from the hatch panel.
“Copy,” he said.
“On my way.”
He turned, climbed back up the ladder, and the hatch sealed behind him.
Ivo let his breath out, slow, and listened to the ice crack again beneath the hull.
The hold was colder now.
Cold enough that his fingers had gone stiff.
Cold enough that waiting wasn’t patience anymore just a slower way to die.
The exposure-clock was running and he couldn’t beat it alone.
He pressed his palm flat against the hull plate.
Let the Assay wash over him.
Read the ship’s failing seams, the microfractures spreading along the keel plating, the stress points glowing hotter where the frame strained to hold a load it couldn’t distribute.
The whole shape of it was clear now.
What would fail first.
How long they had before the ice gave up and the Jupiter went through.
Every hand aboard would be counted when that happened including a stowaway’s.
Not long enough to hide.
Ivo pulled the netting off, stood, and flexed his cramped hand until the feeling came back.
Control had shifted.
Not to the family.
To the cold.
The next time that door opened, he’d be the one opening it.
On a moment he chose.