Ivo turned the bolt over in his fingers for the twentieth time, not sure why his hands wanted the motion, while the cold worked its way through the hull plating and the cargo netting wrapped tight around his shoulders.
The ship groaned.
Ice cracked beneath the keel with sounds like gunshots muffled under snow.
Voices topside.
Maureen’s, sharp with command.
John’s, deeper, moving fast.
“batteries are down there and we need them now”
“I know where they are.” Judy’s voice.
Calm.
The medic voice.
“I can get them.”
Ivo shifted enough to peer past the netting.
The Assay washed over the hull without asking permission, rust-orange readout overlaying every surface.
Titanium-aluminide ribs.
Steel bracing.
Mass and composition and the ship’s slow failing, all of it laid bare like a schematic pinned behind his eyes.
And something else.
A cold mass, overlaid past the hull.
Colder.
Denser.
The lake itself, three meters of it under the keel, and past that the batteries they’d lost in the drop.
Sunk.
Sealed under ice.
The overlay pulsed.
His molars ached.
He pressed his palm to the deck and the readout sharpened.
Not just the batteries.
Judy.
A heat signature descending through a cut in the frozen surface, human-warm against the killing cold of the water, her respirator giving her minutes and her body heat giving her less.
She was going under the ice to get them.
Ivo’s hand tightened on the bolt.
Don’t.
The first rule.
The only rule.
Stay invisible.
Let them handle it.
She had her father, her mother, a whole family who’d go into the water for her if it came to that.
Ivo had a secret and four days of practice keeping it, and one did not survive by spending both on a stranger.
The overlay held his eyes.
Judy’s signature dropped, steady and controlled, into the black until the ice sealed over her.
Then the current shifted and the hole closed.
Maureen’s voice cracked across the deck.
“John”
“I see it.” Running footsteps.
“Judy, do you copy?”
Static.
The hull groaned again.
The ice was tightening, shifting under the Jupiter’s weight, and the cut Judy had descended through was gone now.
Ivo could see it on the overlay, a seam of refrozen surface, thicker than the rest.
She was under it, and her signature hadn’t moved.
She was groping for the hole.
She wasn’t going to find it.
John hit the ice above.
Ivo heard the impacts, felt them in the hull, a man trying to crack three meters of frozen lake with an emergency axe and his own body weight.
Maureen was rerouting something, the ship’s heat maybe, burning fuel they didn’t have to melt what wouldn’t melt fast enough.
Judy’s signature was dimming.
Ivo looked at the bolt in his hand.
Iron.
Eighty-three percent.
Twelve grams.
Digestible.
The Line had been whispering it at him since he’d picked the bolt up, a taste at the back of his throat that had nothing to do with his mouth.
Now the whisper was a pull.
The overlay flared brighter along the bolt’s edges, and past it, past the hull, the battery casing three meters down.
Steel.
Forty kilos.
Close enough to reach if he had the fuel.
If he ate.
He turned the bolt over.
Looked at it.
Looked at the overlay tracking her signature, fading under three meters of ice the same woman who’d triaged strangers an hour ago because that was the job.
Now she was dying for a ship that was hiding a stowaway she’d never been told about.
One bolt.
One life.
Fair trade.
Ivo put the bolt in his mouth.
It tasted like blood before he bit down.
Iron flooded his tongue, electric and wrong, and the Assay spiked.
The bolt softened.
Not melting.
Dissolving.
He didn’t chew.
Didn’t need to.
The Line took it like a throat swallowing water, and the metal slid down in a gulp that burned straight to his sternum.
Heat.
Not heat.
Melt.
Charge.
The overlay flared white-hot along every edge and his vision doubled.
He tasted iron, then rust, then something under both older, the same taste the shard had carried.
The Line woke.
His hand moved without him.
Pressed flat to the deck.
The charge ran down his arm, into the plating, out into the water, a thread he could feel but not see.
Find the casing.
The Lodestone Pull answered.
A hair of force.
A whisper.
Not enough to drag forty kilos, but enough to nudge it.
Tip it.
Shift it six inches to the left, toward a hand reaching blind through black water.
Judy’s signature jerked.
Her hand had found something.
The casing moved again.
Ivo didn’t pull it.
Couldn’t.
He nudged.
Tilted.
Let her grip close around the steel handle, let her recognize the shape, let her haul it toward her on her own strength while he just kept it from slipping.
John broke through the ice.
The sound cracked across the lake the hole tearing open, John going into the water, surfacing with his daughter locked against his chest and hauling her up into air that was still cold enough to kill, just slower about it.
The pull cut off.
The heat bled out.
Ivo sagged against the cargo netting, his hand pressed flat to the deck, and tasted iron climbing back up his throat.
He rolled onto his side and vomited.
Nothing came up but spit and bile.
The bolt was gone eaten, the charge spent.
What was left rose in his blood, a sick weight behind his ribs that the overlay named in a flicker of new text he didn’t want to see.
Dross accumulation: marginal.
Hydrate and purge.
He wiped his mouth.
His hand was shaking.
Topside, Maureen was snapping orders.
John was breathing hard, his voice tight with a fury Ivo recognized from down here.
Judy was coughing.
Alive.
The battery casing clanged against the hull as someone hauled it up.
Ivo pulled the netting back over himself and listened.
“It came right to my hand.” Judy’s voice, thin and blue with cold.
“I was reaching and it just moved.”
“Current,” John said.
“There was no current.”
A pause.
Then Maureen’s voice, quieter.
Clinical.
“We’ll look at it later. Right now I need you dry and warm before we lose you to hypothermia.”
Footsteps.
The hatch sealed.
The hold went quiet.
Ivo sat in the dark with the iron sickness rising and his molars still aching, and understood the bargain he’d just struck.
Every gram of good he did would cost him a gram of poison.
He could live with that.
He wasn’t sure he could live without it.