The sledge runners cut black lines across the ice.
Ivo walked near the back of the hauling line, hands wrapped around the guide rope, breath clouding white.
The fuel cell rode the center sledge recovered, intact, heavy enough that it took eight of them to drag it home across the glacier.
John led the line.
Judy walked midway, eyes on the terrain.
Smith walked closer to Ivo than he’d have liked, stepping careful, smiling at nothing.
The ice groaned underfoot.
The wrongness hit Ivo a half-second before the crack did a shift in the sledge’s weight, the rope jerking taut in his hands and then the lead runner punched through a snow-bridge and the whole rig lurched sideways.
The colonist ahead of him vaguely familiar, Jupiter camp, name lost stumbled.
The sledge’s frame twisted.
A steel strut tore free and swung wide, and the man went down under it before anyone could shout.
The scream cut off fast.
John was already moving.
Judy hit her knees beside the pinned man, hands on his chest.
“Don’t move. Stay with me.”
The strut lay across the man’s left leg from mid-thigh down.
Steel.
Two meters long, mass-stamped alloy, ship-skeleton stock.
The Assay flared without being asked.
STRUCTURAL STEEL (4140 CHROMOLY) 11.3 KG MASS-ANCHOR: CRITICAL
Ivo’s molars ached.
John dropped beside the strut and got both hands under it.
Lifted.
The metal didn’t move.
He reset his grip, braced his legs, hauled harder his face went red, tendons standing out along his neck and the strut shifted maybe a centimeter, then settled back.
“I need it off him now,” Judy said.
Her voice was clinical and sharp.
“Compartment syndrome sets in fast and we don’t have a hospital.”
The man under the steel made a sound that wasn’t words.
Ivo stood three meters back.
The hunger circled, vast and patient.
The strut sat in the Assay’s sight like a meal on a plate digestible, eleven kilos of exactly what the Line wanted and his hands were already drifting toward it until he caught them.
He couldn’t lift it.
Not visibly.
Not alone.
Whatever the shard could do beyond reading numbers, he’d never tested it against something this heavy, this watched, this now.
But John was already trying.
Ivo’s hand went to his jacket pocket.
The filings were still there a palmful of aluminum shavings he’d scraped off a damaged panel that morning and pocketed without thinking.
Hoarding.
Fuel.
He pulled the handful free.
Tilted it into his mouth.
Swallowed dry.
Taste hit first bright, electric, oxidized aluminum crackling on his tongue and then warmth bloomed in his chest and spread down his arms.
His Assay sharpened.
The strut’s outline lit white.
A pull.
The Line offered and he accepted.
Ivo stepped closer.
Knelt beside John.
Got his hands under the strut next to the older man’s.
“On three.”
John glanced at him.
Nodded once.
“Three.”
Ivo didn’t lift with his arms.
He lifted with the charge in his chest, the MELT he’d just swallowed, the gravitational wrongness the Line had taught him to feel.
The strut’s mass sang back to him eleven kilos, dead weight, every atom its own small anchor and he inverted it.
Repulsion where there should have been strain.
Steel rose.
Not smoothly.
It resisted, dragged, fought real mass didn’t stop being real just because he’d asked it to move but it rose off the man’s leg in a slow terrible arc, and John’s face twisted with effort as if the whole lift had come from his back.
Judy dragged the colonist free.
Hands fast and sure, hauling him clear, already checking the leg.
Ivo held the repulsion for two more seconds.
His pulse hammered.
The shard flared hot behind his sternum, a furnace he couldn’t bank, and the strut finally cleared the safe margin.
He let it drop.
The impact rang across the ice.
John sat back hard, breathing like he’d run a mile.
Ivo stayed kneeling, hands on his thighs, head down, and worked his jaw until the ache faded.
The warmth in his chest held and deepened.
It settled.
Locked.
Deeper than anything he’d carried yet not borrowed heat anymore but something forged in, bone setting after a break and coming back harder.
HEAT I (LODESTONE) ESTABLISHED.
SENSE | ATTRACT | REPEL.
PERMANENT.
Cold and factual, the notification sat in the corner of his vision.
Underneath it the hunger purred like an engine idling hot.
Ivo stood.
His hands were shaking.
John clapped him on the shoulder once, hard, all gratitude and no questions.
“Good work.”
Ivo dipped his chin.
Couldn’t trust his voice yet.
Judy had the man stabilized, leg splinted with a broken sledge plank and tape from her kit.
She looked up at John, then past him to Ivo, and her eyes caught on his hands.
The shaking.
Her gaze flicked to his face.
Back to his hands.
Said nothing.
Went back to her patient.
Ivo turned away.
Forced himself to breathe slowly.
The heat in his chest was enormous and wrong and exactly the size of the space the hunger had always promised to fill.
Fever close.
He could taste it building.
He’d lifted the strut.
Saved the man.
Locked the next rung.
A costly demonstration dressed as teamwork.
And someone had been watching.
Smith stood five meters back, arms folded, head tilted curiosity worn over appraisal like a thin coat.
She met his eyes.
Smiled.
Said nothing.
Ivo broke first.
They hauled the sledge the rest of the way home in silence.
The saved man rode the fuel cell’s sledge, leg elevated, Judy walking beside him.
John told the story twice to the colonists who met them at camp the ice, the fall, the lift and every time he told it the strut got heavier and the effort got more human.
Ivo stayed at the back of the crowd and let the story cover him.
Nobody asked Ivo what it had cost.
Nobody asked how a nineteen-year-old who barely touched his rations had just helped John Robinson move eleven kilos of chromoly off a man’s femur.
Nobody except Judy.
She found him an hour later, near the supply tent, while he was checking a damaged heating coil someone had asked him to look at.
Her footsteps crunched on the frozen ground unmistakable gait, even without looking up.
“Ivo.”
He looked up and set the coil down.
Judy stood close enough that her voice wouldn’t carry.
She reached out slow, professional, every motion calibrated for a patient who might bolt and pressed two fingers to the inside of his wrist.
Her face stayed flat.
She counted.
Let go.
“Your pulse is doing the thing,” she said.
Quiet.
Precise.
“The thing it does right when your toxic exposure is about to spike and you end up shaking in my med bay for six hours.”
Ivo let the silence answer for him.
“What were you doing just now?” Judy asked.
“Out there on the ice. What were you doing that you aren’t telling me?”
The question sat between them honest, unbearable, and shaped like every conversation they’d had since his first spike.
Ivo met her eyes.
Held them longer than he should have.
Longer than was safe, with the heat still singing in his ribs.
“Helping,” he said.
Judy’s stare didn’t waver.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one I have.” The words came out flat and final, a door closing.
She studied him the medic’s gaze stripping every lie down to symptom and fact.
The warmth in his chest pulsed, steady as a second heartbeat, and he knew she couldn’t see it but she could read what it cost.
Judy stepped back and drew a small medical pen-light from her jacket.
Clicked it on.
“Look at me.”
He did.
She checked his pupils both sides, fast and clinical then killed the light and pocketed it without breaking eye contact.
“You’re going to tell me eventually,” she said.
“Because whatever this is, it’s getting worse. And I can’t keep you alive if I’m guessing.”
No argument left in him.
He stood still under her certainty and said nothing.
Judy turned to go.
Stopped.
Looked back.
“The strut moved before John’s lever bit,” she said.
“I was watching. The timing was wrong.”
She left.
Ivo stood alone beside the supply tent, hands still shaking, the heat of Lodestone humming under his skin like a song he’d always known the words to.
He’d saved a man today.
The threshold behind him now.
And someone had seen him cross it.
The Line offered no commentary.
No praise.
It had burned the new sense into him and left the fever as ash, the way it always did, and now the heat was his to walk with.
His hands filled his vision.
Trembling.
Felt the iron taste settle on his tongue, faint and persistent, a companion that wouldn’t leave.
He was stronger than he’d been yesterday.
He was more suspected.
And Judy’s question followed him into the cold like a shadow he couldn’t outrun.