Chapter 4
- Riley -
“I try,” I promise, because I don’t know the phrase ‘of course’ in the caveman language.
Cold air rushes in when Nator’ax opens the hatch again. It rolls across the tilted floor and bites straight through my dinosaur-skin dress.
I hug myself and watch him climb out. For a moment, his broad shoulders block the light, then he disappears, and the hatch seals with a soft hiss.
The saucer suddenly feels much quieter.
I stand there, listening to the faint wind outside and the low humming of the alien machine. The whole room is tilted now, which makes everything feel wrong, like the world has been hung sideways.
Then I notice where all the loose things have ended up.
At the lowest part of the saucer, a messy pile has formed. Tools, straps, containers, the bundle of sleeping furs from that time on the beach. Everything slid there during the crash.
I climb carefully across the angled floor and start gathering it together. There isn’t much. Some rusty iron blades. A few pieces of leather. Some baskets that used to hold food. Three thick furs that still smell faintly of smoke from the village fires.
I fold them and stack them against the wall, trying to ignore the knot tightening in my stomach. The saucer can make food. I know that much. The thin gruel isn’t tasty, but it keeps you alive. And there’s still water from the little spout. So, technically, we won’t starve.
But I look out through the glowing wall again and feel a chill that has nothing to do with the freezing air that leaked in.
Outside, there’s nothing. No trees. No animals. No huts. Just endless white ice and snow stretching out between towering blue walls of frozen water. It’s a glacier, if ever I saw one. This isn’t somewhere people live. This is like the middle of Greenland.
And if the saucer can’t fly again…
I shake my head and force myself to keep sorting through the pile. That’s when my eyes drift to the storage compartment along the curved wall.
The one Theodora closed carefully.
My stomach drops a little. Right. That.
For a moment, I just stare at it. Then I climb over and open it. Soft blue light spills out.
The proto-Plood lies inside, on its side, having taken no visible damage. We need it to fly the saucer. The thing won’t budge without a Plood inside. Or a proto-Plood, dead but with the potential to come alive. Or so we think—these things are growing all over the jungle now, in their thousands.
And I swear this one is not the same size anymore.
Its pale blue-white body presses against the sides of the compartment, smooth and shiny like some kind of horrible underwater fruit.
It has a round body with a big head, as well as protrusions where the legs and arms would be.
The eyes are matt black orbs among translucent skin.
One of them twitches.
I freeze. Did it just...
Another slow movement ripples through the other eye. Then the whole alien jerks, as if trying to stand upright.
A shiver crawls up my spine. “Oh great,” I whisper. “He’s coming alive.”
I slam the compartment shut faster than I meant to and lean my forehead against the cool metal wall.
Nator’ax should never see that. The cavemen already hate the Plood. Just the mention of them makes their faces twist with anger. If he finds out I’ve been carrying one around inside the saucer this whole time…
Yeah. That conversation would not go well, I think. Despite the fact that a Plood is as necessary for this saucer to fly as a key is for my old car to start. But I’m not sure how much Nator’ax knows about Hyundais.
“Probably not a whole lot,” I mutter. I exhale slowly and glance toward the hatch. Through the tilted wall screens of the saucer, I can see Nator’ax outside, climbing the steep icy side of the valley. His dark shape moves steadily upward against the blinding white.
He’s trying to see where we are. Trying to figure out how bad this situation really is.
Something tells me the answer isn’t going to be good.
Because a glacier like this isn’t going to be surrounded by an oak forest or a golf course.
It’s going to be a desolate, frozen wasteland for hundreds of miles in every direction.
For all I know, this could be the planet’s South Pole.
Or North, whichever’s worse. And if so… well, we’ll probably freeze to death, unless the saucer has good internal heating.
Even if it does, this is a terrible place to spend much time.
It was bad enough when it was the right way up, but on its side, it’s practically unusable.
We’ll survive, but for what? Who’s going to save us?
Nobody knows we’re here. And if we start walking in this cold, we’ll both die within a day.
“Heat,” I mutter, as an involuntary shiver goes through me. “We need heat. Make this saucer warm.”
The hatch hisses open again, and Nator’ax drops down inside the saucer with a bundle of sticks and twisted branches under one arm.
I scramble up from the pile of supplies. “Well?”
He dumps a brace of dry wood on the floor and rubs his hands together. “We will not freeze to death.”
Relief rushes through me so fast my knees feel weak. “There are tree?”
“Yes. Not close, but not too far either.” He brushes snow off his shoulders. “There are also tracks.”
“Big?”
He nods. “Tracks of Smalls and Bigs.”
Of course there are. I sigh. “Dinosaurs.”
“Hm?” He raises his eyebrows as if we’re having a casual conversation in a coffee shop.
“Bigs are danger,” I say. “They will come?”
He crouches and begins breaking the branches into shorter pieces with efficient, practiced movements. “Yes. There are many tracks. Very big, but I don’t know what kind of Big they are.”
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Fire.”
“Inside?”
“No.” He jerks his chin toward the hatch. “In the crack.”
It takes me a second to understand. “You mean… beside the saucer?”
He nods again. “The ice holds the ship upright. If the ice melts, the ship will fall down.” He tilts one hand to demonstrate. “Then we can try to fly again.”
I stare at him. “That’s actually… a really good idea.” Then I glance toward the curved wall of alien metal and feel my stomach tighten. “Or a really bad one.”
Nator’ax raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“This saucer maybe not like fire,” I say slowly. “It can fly in the air. And in space. But lighting fire beside it might still be… too heat.”
“Too hot? You think it may melt like the fat of a Big when put over a fire?” He shrugs in the calm way of someone who has probably set fire to a lot of things in his life. “We freeze if we do nothing.”
It’s a convincing argument. “Maybe,” I admit. “We do need heat.”
So we gather the wood and climb out, then drop to the ice from the hatch.
The cold hits my cheeks, and my arms immediately get goosebumps of the unpleasant kind. Yeah, we’ll need a fire.
The glacier crevice is already turning blue with evening light. High above us, the sky is fading toward purple.
Nator’ax kneels beside the saucer’s hull and begins arranging the sticks between the not-quite-metal of the saucer and the ice wall. He builds the little pile carefully, wedging thicker pieces beneath thinner ones.
“You’ve done this before,” I say.
“Many times.”
“On glaciers?”
“What is gleshers?”
“This,” I tell him, and look around as I hug myself. “Much ice. Ground is ice.” I stomp my foot to illustrate.
“Ah.” He finishes stacking the wood and sits back on his heels.
Then we both stare at it.
“How you start fire?” I ask.
“Usually we have embers from a previous fire. If not, rubbing two sticks together usually works.”
“Ah,” I say, falling into his economical speech pattern. “Maybe it not works now.”
He grunts thoughtfully, then nods toward the saucer. “I saw tools in there. Iron.”
“I get them,” I offer, wanting to be useful. Then I look up at the hatch. It’s too high up for me to reach easily. “Hm…”
Nator’ax calmly grabs me, lifts me, and then gives me a boost with one hand until I’m sitting on the hatch opening with my legs dangling inside the saucer, my butt tingling where his massive hand pushed me. “Um. Thanks.”
I get the blades, then realize that I’ll need help to get out, too.
Nator’ax has already seen the need, so he climbs up from the outside, leans in, and grabs my hand to pull me up and out. I land on the ice with moderate grace.
He checks the tools I brought out. He takes one of them, then pulls his sword out of its sheath and scrapes the edge of the rusty iron knife hard against the blunt side of the sword. A shower of sparks flies.
“Oh!” I say, impressed.
He does it again. A bright burst of sparks jumps into the little pile of dry bark he stuffed between the sticks.
We both lean close. For a long moment, nothing happens. Then a thread of smoke curls upward.
“Breathe on it,” I whisper instinctively.
“No, you.” He has a little smile on his lips.
“All right.” I bend down and breathe on the little ember, as carefully as on a feather. The blue smoke thickens, so I keep up the breathing. A tiny orange glow appears.
“Good blowing.” Nator’ax gently feeds a few thin twigs into the growing ember.
A moment later, the fire catches. Flames climb slowly through the little pile of wood.
We both sit back.
“Well,” I say. “There is fire.”
“Well done,” Nator’ax rumbles. “Let’s see if it works.”
The fire crackles softly between the saucer and the glacier wall. Heat spreads outward, licking the ice beside the hull. For a while, we just watch. Water begins to drip down the blue ice.
“See?” Nator’ax says with quiet satisfaction.
He’s right: the glacier is melting. But slowly. Very slowly. We add more wood.
And more. The flames grow higher. Steam hisses as ice turns to water and runs down into the crack beneath the saucer.
“Look!” I exclaim, and we both tense up. The saucer moves. Just an inch, toward a patch where the ice has melted.
But that was it. The saucer doesn’t move again. Not even a little.
After a while, the pile of firewood gets smaller. Eventually, Nator’ax places the last branch onto the flames.
We watch it burn, but if anything, the ice is refreezing and growing back.
The sun slips behind the glacier walls. The fire dies to red coals, and the saucer remains stubbornly wedged exactly where it was.
Nator’ax exhales slowly through his nose. “That was all the wood I brought.”
“It melted,” I say as brightly as I can, wanting to be encouraging. “Plan is good. It just not… work.”
He puts his hand to his mouth as if hiding a smile. “Mmm. Just not work.”
Night settles around us, and the temperature drops so quickly my fingers start hurting again.
Nator’ax stands up and brushes snow off his legs. “Let’s go inside.”
I see no reason to argue.
We climb back into the saucer and seal the hatch behind us. Outside, the glacier wind begins to howl around the saucer. Inside, the tilted floor waits with our pile of furs.
We spread the furs over the least tilted part of the floor, though that still means sleeping half against the wall.
The saucer hums softly around us, the strange alien machine sounding almost peaceful now that it isn’t trying to kill us.
I try not to think of the half-awake Plood in that compartment.
What happens when he wakes up fully and sees us outside his locker?
Those things were the servants of the dragons, and they are the aliens that abducted all us girls from Earth. Having one this close is unpleasant.
But of course Nator’ax is here, too. I banish the Plood from my thoughts as I curl up in the furs and pull one over my shoulders. It doesn’t help much. Cold seeps in through everything. The air in here isn’t freezing, but it’s close enough that my hands and feet ache.
After a while, Nator’ax shifts beside me. “You’re shaking.”
“Is fine.”
“No, I don’t think that’s fine,” he rumbles.
Before I can protest, he pulls one of the furs aside and moves closer. A moment later, a thick, powerful arm wraps around my waist, and he pulls me back against him.
I stiffen in surprise and have an urge to scramble away from him. Then I realize what he’s doing.
“Oh,” I murmur.
His chest presses warmly against my back, and another fur comes over both of us. He folds himself around me like some kind of living furnace, long legs bracketing mine, one heavy arm across my stomach.
The difference is immediate. Heat spreads slowly into my frozen limbs.
“This is better,” he says, warm breath in my ear.
“Mhm,” I admit.
His breathing is slow and steady behind me. I can feel the warmth of him through the thick dinosaur skin of my cavewoman dress, the solid strength of his body pressed along mine, and his heat seeping into me.
Then something else presses against me too, right at the small of my back.
I freeze for a second before realizing what it is.
Oh. Right. He’s a healthy adult male caveman, and I’m currently spooned against him under a pile of furs, with my butt pressed against him. Honestly, it would be weirder if that didn’t happen.
Still, I can’t help being aware of it. I stare into the dim glow of the dying fire and try very hard not to think about how good it feels being held like this.
Nator’ax doesn’t move. His arm stays loosely around me, steady and protective. He doesn’t try anything.
For some reason, that makes my stomach twist even more. Because on the one hand, that’s good. Very good. Things between us are already complicated enough without adding caveman sex in a crashed alien saucer on top of everything else.
On the other hand…
I shift slightly under the furs and immediately regret it.
Yeah. Definitely aware of that now.
Great.
I close my eyes and try to sleep. Somewhere outside, the glacier wind howls softly between the walls of ice, and for the first time since the crash, I realize that if Nator’ax weren’t here beside me, I would probably be terrified right now. And likely dying.
Instead, I’m just confused in a way that feels kind of… good?
And very, very warm.
I jerk awake when a deep ‘bong’ echoes through the saucer.