32. Vesper
VESPER
“The pod?” I repeat, my eyes wide as I look at Locke. “What’s a pod?”
The boat tilts again, gently moving back and forth as something big, something much larger than the leopard seals, swims past. One of the creatures breaches the water in front of our boat and I stare at it in horror.
It’s at least four times as long as our little boat.
Like the penguins, it’s colored in black and white with a small mark of gray on its back.
There’s a large fin that sticks up far out of the water, at least a meter tall.
The “eye” we’d seen is only a white spot on its face.
The actual eye is a small black pinprick as it looks at us and then dives back under the water.
They start to make noises back and forth, a high-pitched singing that I can feel vibrate into my bones as we sit in the boat.
Locke’s face pales. “What are those things?”
“That is a pod of orcas,” Cipher answers.
“What do they do?” Locke asks. “Do they have some sort of magic powers? Do they talk like the penguins?”
“No,” Cipher answers. “These are just regular orcas, modeled after the ones that were prevalent in the oceans on Earth.”
“So, it’s like the Arapaima?” I say, my shoulders relaxing.
Cipher doesn’t immediately speak and his hesitation makes me nervous.
“No,” Cipher finally answers. “Not like the Arapaima. Orcas are highly intelligent and often work together in a pod. They have hierarchy, traditions, and even language. These particular creatures were nicknamed ‘killer whales’ due to their particularly ruthless hunting practices.”
My stomach drops. “Survival chances?”
Another long pause. “I . . . have enjoyed our banter, Vespera.”
If my stomach could drop any lower, it would. I meet Locke’s eyes and reach for his hand, threading my fingers through his.
“What did he say?” Locke asks, watching the water carefully. When I don’t answer, he whips his head toward me. “Vesper, what did he say?”
“How far are we from the safehouse?” I ask instead.
His fingers tighten in mine but he doesn’t ask again. “It isn’t far.” He points to a large shape in the distance. “I think it’s that thing.”
It isn’t far, but . . . it’s far for a tiny boat with wooden oars trying to outrun a pod of killer whales. I pick up the oar and carefully dip it in the water. “Do you think they’ll let us paddle?”
“Only one way to know,” Locke breaths, picking up his own oar.
Together, we slowly push forward, trying not to agitate the clearly curious orcas.
They swim in circles around us, dancing beneath the surface.
If I wasn’t so fucking terrified, it would almost be beautiful.
The sounds they make are unlike anything I’ve heard before, like they’re singing to each other.
Unfortunately, this is a boss battle, so I know the creatures are far from harmless.
In front of us, there’s a particularly large sheet of ice floating on the surface. We’ll have no choice but to go around it, but it’s so large, it’s going to take us longer than I’d like. I puff out a breath that fogs the air in front of me. My body is tense as I nod to the right.
“We go around this way,” I say.
Locke moves to adjust his paddle direction so that he can turn the boat, but before he can, the whale song changes from deep and pensive to aggressive. One moment, it’s a gentle song. The next, it’s a high-pitched battle cry.
“Brace yourself,” I cry, immediately pulling the oar in and grabbing the sides.
From my right, I see three of the orcas breach the water and rush toward us together. The water bunches up in front of them, and I realize they’re about to crash into us. They’re going to topple us over.
“Oh, fuck!” Svetlana shouts and climbs up as high as she can get on me, which happens to be the top of my head. “We are going to die!”
Neither of us contradict her and that scares me the most. If I die right now, then I won’t ever see Dox again. I won’t ever get to tell her about what happened. She’ll show up in the Harrow and I’ll be gone forever and she’ll never know how or why.
I grit my teeth. “This is not your grave,” I mutter under my breath. My fingers tighten on the sides of the boat. “This is not your grave,” I repeat louder, loud enough for Locke and Svetlana to hear.
The orcas dive down just before they can crash against our boat.
The water they’d been pushing rises over the edge of the boat and splashes ice cold water into the bottom of the boat with us, filling out boots and making the boat sink just a little lower in the water.
I gasp at the sudden ice soaking my socks.
“If we go in the water, we’re dead,” I grunt. “It’s too cold. We won’t survive it.”
Fighting through the snow on land had been one thing. The water is a different matter entirely. We’re on the Frostbit Sea for fuck’s sake. We can’t go in the water. It’s not meant for our too human bodies.
The orcas appear again, pushing more water toward us as a unit.
I grab the side of the boat. “When I tell you to lean, lean,” I grunt, bracing myself.
This time when the wave comes, we’re prepared. We tilt the boat away from the water so that it crashes against the side, but it’s not enough. Water still falls over the edges, filling the bottom of the boat, until I realize we’re in serious trouble.
We’re going to sink.
If we hadn’t tilted the boat, we’d already be sinking.
Looking around frantically for a solution, my eyes find the giant ice sheet we’re butted up against. It’s a stupid idea, but the ice sheet is a lot larger than the boat. And maybe, if we survive, we can use the oars to maneuver the ice sheet closer to one we can row to the safehouse.
“Locke,” I say, as the orcas swim away again and regroup. He looks over at me. “I have a bad idea.”
“Is it better than sinking?” he asks. When I nod, he gestures for me to continue. “Let’s hear it.”
“We abandon the boat. It’s clearly not going to last much longer.” I point to the ice. “We climb onto that and use it as our new makeshift boat.”
He hesitates. “It’s larger. I don’t see a downside.”
“They are coming back,” Svetlana warns. “This dingy won’t survive another wave.” She looks at the water splashing around the bottom of the boat. “I do not like the cold. I hate the cold.”
“Take your oar,” I tell Locke and stand.
The boat wobbles as I stand up. Locke tries to grab onto the ice, but can’t seem to hold onto it with how slippery it is.
That’s the first inkling that my idea isn’t going to work.
Still, I leap from the boat onto the thick ice.
It barely moves with my weight even as I fight to dig my heels in so I turn and offer Locke my hand.
He takes it and leaps from the boat . . .
Just as another wave crashes into it.
The back of the boat dips beneath the water as the boat we’d been in begins to sink.
We watch it for all of two seconds before the ice sheet moves from the wave and we have to fight to keep our feet beneath us.
My feet start to slide on the ice and I try to catch myself.
Locke tries to catch me, but he slips, too.
We go down, hard, and start to slide along the ice, thankfully away from the edge we’d just leaped from.
“Hold on!” I cry, trying to keep ahold of both Locke and the oar.
“Inventory!” I shout, putting the oar away, before I open my menu and grab the blunt dagger I still hold.
As soon as it’s in my hand, I slam it into the ice, once, twice, three times, before it embeds into it.
A crack shoots out from the dagger, a sound like a cable snapping echoing from it.
“Shit,” I whisper. It’s not as thick as I thought it was.
The ice cracks completely where I’d tried to use the dagger to hold on.
The large ice sheet we’d been on suddenly turns into two half its size.
Locke scrambles to be on the same side as me, quickly scooting away from the edge.
As the gap widens between the two chunks, I spy a dark form moving beneath the water, teasing me, rubbing it in.
“This is not your grave,” I whisper, but the sentence lacks the certainty from before.
Not even Cipher believes that.
Locke’s hand holds onto mine tightly. When I meet his eyes, he seems to realize the same thing I do. The Bone Breaker doesn’t get angry like I expect. Instead, his eyes crinkle.
“It’s alright,” he says, softly. “I lasted longer than I expected because of you.”
My eyes prick, stinging because of the cold. “No,” I growl. “We can’t think like that.”
The whales rush the ice sheet we’re on, creating another wave. As the wave slams into the ice sheet, it jars violently and we slide around on it, our screams echoing across the water. Water rushes across the ice, right before it breaks into smaller pieces.
The large sheet of ice we’d clamored on is now barely bigger than the boat we’d been in to begin with. My body is shaking from the cold, my fingers and toes going numb so quickly, I don’t even realize it until we’re on that tiny piece of ice.
“This is not your grave,” I tell myself as I watch the whales line up again. “This is not your grave.” I grit my teeth. “Hold on, Svetlana.”
I feel her on my head, her hands tangled in my hair beneath the hood of my coat. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t say anything, and for the first time since she’s become my familiar, I can feel her fear. Somehow, that makes this all the more real.
The whales come barreling at us again, the massive wave rising. Just before the edge of the ice, they dive and flick their tails. The water comes rushing over the ice sheet and takes us with it. I have just enough instinct to hold my scream in before I’m swept off the ice entirely.