The ship died the way Lin had died — slowly, then all at once.
Moss heard the first fastener go at dawn. A sound like a knuckle cracking, deep in the hull. Then another. Then three in rapid succession, and the starboard planking sagged inward and the sea came through in a sheet of black water that smelled like the inside of a dead animal.
"Off," Moss said. "Everyone off. Now."
They had rehearsed this. Seventy-four days at sea taught you to rehearse the things you hoped would never happen. The crew moved — twenty-three bodies that had been one hundred and eighty when they left Tidemouth, twenty-three survivors out of twelve ships, and every one of them thinner and slower and sicker than the day before. Jara passed the water barrels up. Osei threw the rope ladders over the port side, which was the side closest to the ice. Deshi carried the signal receiver in both arms like it was a child.
The ice shelf was three meters below the deck rail. White, flat, stretching south in every direction like a table set for no one. Moss had never seen ice. None of them had. In Tidemouth, water froze in shallow bowls on cold mornings and children broke it with their fingers and that was the extent of it. This was different. This was a country made of frozen ocean, and it was the color of bone, and when Moss dropped onto it his bare feet hit the surface and the cold went through him like a nail.
He did not cry out. He had stopped making unnecessary sounds weeks ago.
The others came down after him. Twenty-two people landing on ice in clothing meant for tropical water — cotton shirts, linen trousers, sandals or bare feet. The cold was immediate and total. It was not like being cold. It was like being erased. Moss felt his skin tighten, felt his fingers curl inward, felt his jaw clamp shut around a breath that burned his throat on the way in. Minus twenty. He did not know that number. He only knew that the air itself was trying to kill him, which made it no different from the ocean or the sulfide belts or anything else they had survived, except that this time they could not sail away from it.
Behind them, the ship settled lower. The remaining fasteners gave out in a sequence of pops and groans, and the hull opened like a mouth and the black water flooded in. The bow tilted. The mast — the one remaining mast, the other two lost to storms on days he had stopped counting — leaned and fell sideways across the ice with a crack that echoed off nothing. There was nothing to echo off. The world was flat and white and empty.
Moss watched the ship go down. It took less than a minute. The stern rose, showed the keel — eaten through, copper sheeting hanging in strips where the sulfidic water had dissolved the fixings — and then slid under. A ring of bubbles. A slick of oil. Gone.
That was the last ship. The last of twelve.
He turned south.
"Walk," Moss said. "Stay together. Walk south."
Nobody argued. Nobody had the energy to argue. They walked. The ice was not smooth — it was ridged and cracked and covered in a crust of snow that broke under their feet like old plaster. The wind came from the south and it carried nothing. No smell, no moisture, no warmth. It was the cleanest air Moss had ever breathed and it was freezing the tissue in his lungs.
He held the signal receiver against his chest. Deshi had handed it to him when her fingers stopped working, which happened about two hundred meters from the ship. The device was warm. Not from any battery — the battery had died six days ago. Warm because the signal itself was strong enough now to heat the casing. Moss could feel the pulses through his ribs. Regular, steady, close.
Two. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven.
He had followed that sequence for seventy-four days. Across the Crossing. Through the sulfide belts where the air turned yellow and the water turned black and three ships went down in a single night. Through the storms that scattered the fleet like seeds thrown by a furious hand. Through the calm days that were worse than the storms because the calm meant the gas was rising and the gas meant death, and Lin had known that, and Lin had ordered them to row, and Lin had breathed too much of it giving orders from the stern, and Lin had drowned in her own blood on day forty-seven while Moss held her hand and said nothing useful because there was nothing useful to say.
He had followed the signal because there was nothing else to follow.
Now the signal was a physical force. The receiver pulsed against his chest like a second heart. South. Keep walking south.
They walked for what Moss estimated was two kilometers. He could not be sure. Distance on ice was a lie — the flatness stretched every meter into something longer, and the cold made his legs heavy, and twice he stopped to pick up someone who had fallen. Osei went down first. Then the cook whose name Moss had forgotten, which shamed him, but his mind was full of cold and signal and the single imperative to keep moving, and there was no room left for names.
He saw the structures before he understood them.
Low shapes on the horizon. Not rock — too regular. Not ice — too dark. They resolved as he got closer into smooth, curved surfaces that rose from the snow like the backs of animals half-buried in the ground. Gray-white. Clean-edged. No rust, no weathering, no sign of age. They could have been built yesterday or a thousand years ago. The material was nothing Moss recognized. Not stone, not metal, not wood. Something else.
The structures were arranged in a pattern. A cluster around a central depression — a ramp, he realized, leading down into the ice. And at the edge of the ramp, a hatch. Circular. Large enough for three people side by side. Closed.
Moss stopped the group. They stood in a ragged line, shivering, some of them no longer shivering — which was worse, he knew, because when you stopped shivering it meant your body had given up trying.
"There," he said, and pointed.
The hatch opened.
No sound. No mechanism visible. It opened the way a mouth opens — smoothly, as if the motion were the most natural thing in the world. And from the dark below, figures came up.
Four of them. Sealed suits, head to toe, the material close-fitting and featureless. Helmets with curved visors that reflected the white sky. They moved with a precision that Moss recognized from a place he could not name — not military precision, not dance, but something like the efficiency of a well-run crew where every motion served a purpose and no energy was wasted. They came up the ramp in single file and stopped at the top and stood and looked at the twenty-three wrecked people standing on the ice.
They were small. Shorter than anyone in Moss's crew by a head. He had expected — he did not know what he had expected. The body diagrams Kael had shown him were abstractions, numbers and proportions on paper. These were people. Small people in sealed suits, standing in minus-twenty air as if it were a mild afternoon, looking at him with visors that showed him nothing but his own reflection.
One of them raised a hand. Open palm. Held it there.
Moss raised his hand in return. His fingers were white at the tips. He could not feel them.
The figure turned and gestured toward the hatch. Come.
No words. No sound. Just the gesture, clean and unmistakable, and then the four of them moved to flank the group, two on each side, and guided them toward the ramp with the patient choreography of people who had practiced this, who had known exactly when and where these strangers would arrive.
Moss walked. His crew walked behind him. Down the ramp, into the dark that was not dark — the walls gave off a soft, even light with no visible source — and toward the hatch, which was an airlock, and Moss knew this because he understood doors and seals and the logic of keeping one kind of air separated from another.
The outer door closed behind them. The inner door did not open immediately. Moss heard a hiss — pressurization, equalization, the airlock doing its work. His crew pressed together in the space, which was large enough for all of them but not comfortably. The walls were the same gray-white material as the structures above. Smooth. Warm to the touch. Moss leaned against one and the warmth went into his shoulder and he almost buckled.
Then the inner door opened, and the air hit him.
Warm. Clean. Humid. It came through the door like a wave and Moss's body reacted before his mind could. His skin flushed. His lungs expanded. His eyes watered. After seventy-four days of salt air and sulfide stench and the thin, frozen atmosphere of the ice shelf, this air was an assault of comfort. It smelled like nothing. No — it smelled like something, but something so faint and unfamiliar that his nose could not name it. Minerals, maybe. Stone. The deep interior of the earth.
Around him, his crew made sounds. Someone sobbed. Someone laughed — a short, broken laugh that turned into coughing. Jara sat down hard on the floor and put her face in her hands. Osei stood with his arms at his sides and wept without moving, the tears cutting lines through the salt crust on his cheeks.
Moss watched the suited figures.
They removed their helmets. One by one, with the same unhurried efficiency. And Moss saw them.
Kael's diagrams had been accurate. He understood that now, standing three meters from a face that was human and not human in ways that made his eyes work harder than they wanted to. The skin was pale — not sun-deprived pale, not sick pale, but a deliberate, even white that had no variation, no freckling, no sun damage. The eyes were large. Not grotesquely large, but noticeably, unmistakably larger than any eyes he had seen, with gray irises that took up more of the visible area than seemed right. Wide pupils. The skull was broader at the temples than a Continental skull. The body beneath the suit was compact, lean, proportioned differently — shorter limbs relative to torso, broader chest, the build of someone engineered for efficiency in enclosed spaces.
The nearest one looked at Moss. A woman — or what Moss read as a woman, though the features were androgynous enough that he was guessing. Her expression was calm. Not surprised. Not afraid. Not happy. She looked at him the way a navigator looked at a coastline that matched the chart — confirmation, not discovery.
She had been expecting him.
They had all been expecting him. He understood this in his body before his mind caught up. The hatch had opened before they arrived. The suits were ready. The airlock was warm. Someone had told these people that twenty-three half-dead sailors were walking across the ice shelf toward their door, and they had prepared for it the way Moss would have prepared a mooring — practically, without panic, because the arrival was known.
Surya. The name surfaced from the briefings Kael had given him. The person on the other end of the signal. She had told them.
The woman with the gray eyes held Moss's gaze for three seconds. Then she looked past him at the crew and back at him and made a gesture that he interpreted as: we will take care of them.
He nodded.
She turned and spoke to the other three. The language was nothing Moss had ever heard — soft, clipped, vowels he could not place. The three suited figures moved among his crew, guiding them through the inner door into a corridor beyond. Gently. No pulling, no rushing. Hands on elbows, on shoulders. Touching them the way you touched someone who might break.
Moss was the last to move. He stood in the airlock and looked at the inner door and the corridor beyond and the figures moving through it. This was the dream. Not exactly — the shore was not white, it was gray, and the figure waiting had no single face but four — but the shape of it was right. He had crossed the water. He had arrived.
Twelve years of dreaming and seventy-four days of dying and he was here.
He made it eleven steps past the airlock.
The corridor was lit by the same sourceless glow. The floor was smooth and warm under his ruined feet. The air wrapped around him. His body, which had held itself together through willpower and necessity for seventy-four days, received the signal that the emergency was over and began to shut down.
It started in his knees. They went soft, the way rope goes soft when you cut the tension. Then his vision narrowed — not darkening, but constricting, the edges going gray and pulling inward like a sail furling. His hands opened. The signal receiver fell and hit the floor with a sound he heard from very far away.
He did not feel himself fall. He felt the floor arrive — warm, smooth, against his cheek. The corridor tilted sideways. Boots appeared. The woman with the gray eyes knelt beside him, and he saw her face from below, tilted, her expression a kind of concern that was precise and measured and contained no urgency. She was assessing him the way Moss assessed a damaged hull — systematically, without sentiment. Her hand touched his forehead. Her fingers were cool and dry.
Her eyes. Up close, they were not gray but a color between gray and violet that he had no word for. The pupils were wide, wider than they should have been in this light. She looked at him and he looked at her and the distance between their two kinds of human felt larger than the ocean he had crossed to close it.
Behind her face, above her, in the warm and perfectly controlled air of the corridor, Moss became aware of something.
Not a sound. Not exactly. A vibration at the base of his skull, in his teeth, in the bones of his inner ear. A hum so low it was less heard than inhabited. It was in the walls. In the floor beneath his cheek. In the air. It had no direction and no source. It was everywhere, the way water was everywhere when you were underwater — not coming from a place but being the place.
He thought, in the last clear moment before the dark took him: something is in this building that has no body.
The woman's mouth moved. Words he could not hear. Her hand stayed on his forehead. The hum stayed in his bones.
Moss closed his eyes. Behind the dark of his eyelids, the hum continued. It did not diminish. It was patient. It was vast. It was paying attention to him specifically, the way the ocean paid attention to a single boat — not with malice, not with love, but with the absolute indifference of something so large that attention and indifference were the same thing.
He let go.
The crossing was over. His body knew it even if his mind could not stay awake long enough to understand what that meant. Seventy-four days. Eleven ships lost. One hundred and fifty-seven people dead. One surviving vessel sunk within sight of landfall. Twenty-three sailors delivered onto ice they were never built for, into air they could not have breathed for another hour, through a door that opened because someone fourteen thousand kilometers away had sent a woman named Kael a string of prime numbers and trusted that the rest would follow.
The rest had followed. Moss had followed. And now he was on the floor of a corridor inside a mountain of ice at the bottom of the world, and the hum held him the way the ocean had held his ship — completely, without effort, without opinion — and the last thing he knew before consciousness left was the weight of being watched by something that had been watching for a very long time.