“He stays where we can see him,” Maureen said.
Not to Ivo.
To the room.
She stood at the viewport, arms crossed, the ice beyond the glass flat and pale and endless behind her.
“Works if he’s able. Lies to us once, he’s out.”
The galley was warm.
Ivo felt the cold coming anyway.
John leaned against the bulkhead, face carved into angles Ivo recognized hard decisions, lived with too long.
Judy sat across from Ivo, fingers still resting on his wrist.
She’d counted his pulse three times since bringing him up the ladder.
Ivo had already said he understood.
Saying it again wouldn’t change anything a liability on probation doesn’t get to negotiate.
Don West tilted his chair back, Debbie the chicken perched on his knee.
“We’re not exactly overstaffed. Kid says he can fix things, we put a wrench in his hand and see if the wrench comes back bent.”
“Or,” John said, quiet, “we find out what he’s really here for.”
The silence stretched.
Ivo kept his breathing even.
His hands flat on the table.
The Assay overlaid faint glyphs across the table’s surface aluminum alloy, trace magnesium, 91% pure and he let the numbers wash past without reading them, the way he’d learned to let a full room wash past without staring at any one face too long.
She turned from the viewport.
“The ship’s listing. We’ve got a stress fracture somewhere in the substructure, and if we don’t find it before the ice shifts, Jupiter 2 goes into the lake and we lose half our supplies.” Her gaze landed on Ivo flat, diagnostic.
“You say you’re good with metal. Prove it. Dawn’s the deadline, or you walk to the next wreck on your own feet.”
Ivo met her eyes.
“Understood.”
“Out loud didn’t work the first time?” John’s voice had an edge that could strip paint.
“Understood,” Ivo said again.
Clearer.
Judy released his wrist and stood.
“He’s dehydrated, malnourished, and running a low fever. You send him out there in the cold for six hours, I’m telling you now, he might not come back standing.”
“Then he should work fast,” she said.
Judy didn’t argue just handed Ivo the water bottle harder than she needed to, a ration bar that felt like compressed dust and tasted worse following after.
“Eat. Drink. Don’t make me drag you back up that ladder unconscious.”
Ivo ate half the bar because she was watching.
Drank the water because refusing would go in some invisible tally against him.
The iron taste climbed his throat anyway.
Don tossed him a coat.
“Substructure access is through the lower hold. There’s an inspection hatch that’ll get you under the decking. You find a crack, you mark it, you report back. Don’t try to fix it yourself. We clear?”
“Clear.”
“Good. I like you. Don’t make me dislike you by doing something stupid and heroic.”
Ivo pulled the coat on too big, cuffs hanging past his hands like a kid wearing his father’s jacket.
The lower hold was colder than the galley, and the hatch was a narrow cut in the floor that opened onto darkness and the smell of lubricant and old welds.
Ivo dropped through, boots catching rungs slick with condensation, and landed in a crawlspace that barely cleared his shoulders.
The Assay lit the space in overlapping detail hull plating, composite reinforcements, titanium struts braced by aluminum ribs and stress concentrations glowed amber where metal had bent past spec.
He moved slow, hands on cold metal, breath fogging in the dark.
The ship groaned settling a few millimeters deeper into the ice and somewhere far off a plate snapped with a sound like a bone breaking.
Three ribs in, he found it.
A spar, load-bearing, running the length of the port frame.
The weld at its base had cracked not all the way through, but close.
Another shift and the whole frame would drop six inches, buckle the decking, cant the ship until the lake ice gave and the whole structure slid.
The Assay painted the damage in copper and rust-red.
Stress lines radiating like a spiderweb.
78% structural integrity.
Falling.
Ivo pulled the marker Don had given him and tagged the spar.
Then climbed back up the ladder, every rung a negotiation with legs that wanted to fold.
Maureen was waiting at the hatch.
She’d come down alone.
“Well?”
Ivo pointed.
“Load spar, port frame, third section. Weld’s compromised. It’ll go the next time the ice shifts.”
Maureen went still for half a second the stillness of someone recalculating.
“You found that in twenty minutes.”
“Good eye,” he said.
Flat.
Not bragging.
“I looked where the stress would be worst.”
She dropped through the hatch, boots precise on the rungs.
Ivo waited, listened to her move through the crawlspace the soft scrape of her glove on metal, the pause when she reached the marker.
When she climbed back up, her face hadn’t changed.
But something behind it had.
“That weld would’ve dropped the frame. We’d have lost the hold and everything in it.” She studied him.
“How did you know where to look?”
Ivo gave her the truth that wasn’t the whole of it.
“I’ve spent a lot of time under ships that weren’t safe. You learn what breaks first.”
Her gaze held.
He didn’t look away.
Finally, she nodded.
Once.
“John’s setting up the welding rig. We’ll reinforce the spar before the ice moves again.” She turned, then stopped.
“You’ve bought yourself a bunk. Provisionally. Don’t make me regret it.”
Ivo didn’t say thank you.
Useful was enough.
He just nodded.
The welding took four hours.
John worked the torch while Don handled the bracing.
Ivo fetched tools and held lights and kept his hands steady even when the iron sickness rolled back a thick wave that turned his vision gray at the edges and left him gripping the strut until it passed.
When the weld cooled and the spar held, John straightened and pulled his gloves off.
“You stay,” he said.
Flat.
Final.
“You carry weight. You don’t lie to my family. You do both, you’ve got a place here. Fail either one, you’re done. We clear?”
Ivo’s throat was dry.
“Clear.”
John’s expression didn’t soften.
“Good.” He handed Ivo the toolkit.
“Put this back where it goes. Then get some sleep. You look like hell.”
Ivo took the kit, climbed the ladder, and made it to the galley before the tremor in his hands became obvious.
Judy was gone.
The others had scattered to their bunks.
Only the low hum of life support and the occasional groan of metal settling on ice remained.
A woman stood at the viewport.
Blonde.
Older than Ivo, younger than the Robinsons.
She turned when he entered, and her smile arrived a half-second before her words.
“You must be the stowaway everyone’s talking about.”
Ivo set the toolkit down.
“Ivo.”
“June Harris.” She offered a hand.
Ivo didn’t take it.
Her smile didn’t falter.
“Dr. Smith, officially. Though I think we’re past formalities, given the circumstances.”
Ivo said nothing.
“You did well tonight,” she said.
Warm.
Reasonable.
“Mrs. Robinson doesn’t hand out compliments, but I saw her face when she came back up that ladder. You’ve made yourself useful. That’s a smart play.”
Her eyes were pale and steady, calculating something behind them he couldn’t reach.
“Careful boys always have the most to lose,” she said.
Softer.
Almost kind.
“I do so love to help. If you ever need anything.”
It wasn’t an offer.
It was a price tag.
Ivo picked up the toolkit.
“I’m good.”
Smith’s smile sharpened a fraction.
“Of course you are.” She turned back to the viewport.
“Sleep well, Ivo.”
He left without answering.
The bunk John had pointed him toward was a fold-down rack in the lower corridor, narrow and cold and his.
Ivo lay on his back, coat still on, and stared at the ceiling.
The Assay painted the structure above him in faint, ghostly lines.
Aluminum decking.
Composite insulation.
Titanium frame.
Everywhere he looked, metal.
Edible.
Waiting.
He closed his eyes and made himself stop totting up how much of the ship he could eat before somebody caught him at it made himself stop turning over the conditional forever packed into the word “provisionally,” how one slip would make him disposable again.
The taste of iron never left his tongue.