A Stranger Thing (The Ever-Expanding Universe) (30 page)

So Dad’s safe. That much is a relief.

But I’m not safe yet. Mimicking my father’s body positioning, I straighten out and aim myself as best I can at the raft. And all at once I’m zipping downward, air roaring in my ears as I cut through it like a goggle-wearing knife through butter. I’m focused on that raft, nothing else even entering my thoughts, until I hear the boom, so loud it resonates through my entire body. I feel a tremendous push from behind me, as though the very air is attempting to escape from something.

The elevator has exploded.

Right on the cable. A glance above tells me as much. The damage must have been more serious than it seemed. The spray of debris spans wide above me, but that’s not the scary
part. The scary part is the large, thick cable, which has been severed and is snapping down so fast that I barely have time to roll out of the way. My roll sends me spinning out of control, and even when I extend my arms again, I’m rolling too fast for the materials sensors to determine which way is up. The fabric tenses and relaxes erratically, sending me flipping end over end. As I am bounced around in the air, I watch in dizzy horror as the cable comes down and slices right through the air raft.

Dad . . .

The raft immediately deflates, two halves flapping flaccidly down toward the ever-approaching ground. The cable whistles past me, crashing into the train depot far below, creating a dozen more explosions that pop one after the other in rapid succession. I focus my attention on one half of the deflated raft. The half that seems considerably chunkier than the other.

I pull my arms in, a human arrow once more, and soon I’m righted and heading toward my father. What I
hope
is still my father. I speed down until I’m just above the tattered raft, and reach out to grab it. Doing so causes my cape to reengage, pulling me up and away from the raft, so I clamp my arms down again until I crash right into it, and I make hard contact with what is pretty clearly my father’s gut. Now the raft, my father, and I are spiraling down to the Earth as one, so quickly and loopily, I’m surprised I haven’t pulled a Ducky and spray-barfed everywhere, but I manage to gather my senses enough to pull at the folds of the raft until I find my father. He is half-conscious, but as far as I can tell, still alive.

I would cry with sheer relief, if I weren’t, you know, otherwise occupied.

Using my last reserve of strength, I yank the folds of the raft away from my father, and soon we’re both in freefall. I’m clutching Dad between my knees, like he’s a flipping pony, and my cape is struggling against the weight of two people.

“Come on, Dad, wake
up
!” I shout into the wind. But the words are only flung back into my face. I kick my father in the side, and—I’m not sure I’ve ever been so happy—I feel him stir. He lifts his head, looks around, and then seems to sense that I’m holding on to him. With one reassuring squeeze of my leg he wiggles free from my grip and extends his own arms.

Crisis averted. Now all we have to worry about is smashing to itty-bitty bits on the ice.

As we near the surface, I’m keenly aware that even with my cape, I have too much velocity. I have to either create more drag or—if I can’t lessen the speed of my impact—try to find a way to level out my trajectory, and land as close to parallel with the ground as possible. I lift my arms out and slightly over my head and pray that the sensors don’t bug out again.

Thankfully, they don’t, and I reach about thirty or forty meters above the ground before I level out. Beneath me the train depot is gone. The cable has smashed it to smithereens, and fires are scattered around the ruins.

Fire in the snow.

I circle down, closer and closer. Soon I’m only a few meters above the surface, but I’m still traveling so quickly, I know that I’ll break every bone in my body if I touch down. I arc instead toward one of the larger fires. The heat has melted a good deal
of snow, creating a slushy surface. My feet touch down and scrape along the ground before I drop completely, hitting the mush hard and plowing through it like, well, like a plow.

I come to a stop, breathless, and it’s several minutes before I can convince myself to move. I’m afraid I might be in shock and not even aware that I’m now a cripple for life. But as I lift one trembling arm, then the other, and push myself up, I realize to my very great relief that I am, in fact, still in one piece. I probably have the world’s worst case of snowburn, but hell, considering that I just
flew down from space
, I think I did all right.

I can’t quite muster the strength to stand. My legs feel a bit like wet spaghetti. So I merely sit in the snow, looking around me. I spot Dad, walking toward me from a short distance away. For a dude who nearly bit it numerous times in the past twenty-four hours, he’s looking pretty good.

He’s even smiling.

“Landed in the slush, right?” he asks, as if we were discussing our preferred shortcuts to the mall. “Used the softened surface to your advantage?” I nod rapidly, smiling back like a loon. Too much adrenaline. My dad is okay. I’m okay. My whole body is vibrating.

“Smart thinking,” Dad says as he reaches me. “You are your father’s daughter.” Then he gets a weird look on his face and turns his gaze skyward, where tiny bits of debris still trickle down like burning sleet. “Huh,” is all he says. And he collapses into the snow, unconscious.

After checking to make sure that he’s still alive and well, and finding the answer to be yes on both counts, I push myself up onto my knees and try to get a lay of the land. The train
depot was a several-hour dogsled ride to the camp, but there are no sleds remaining in the wreckage strewn around us, so we’re not getting to shelter that way. I shiver suddenly, and I realize that the skin on my face is covered in ice crystals. Not from when I landed but from the way down.

And it’s getting colder.

I might be able to survive the dropping temp for a while, but I don’t know if I can make it all the way to the camp, and that’s if I even knew which direction the camp
was
. And Dad, in his state, definitely won’t make it. There’s no shelter anywhere—the best we can do to offer us any protection against the chill is to stay close to one of the fires until it burns out, which probably won’t take very long. But I won’t die. I will
not
.

I have a little girl who’s counting on me.

“Elvie?” Dad’s voice calls out weakly from beside me in the snow.

“You still with me, Dad?” I ask, trying to sound cheery. My voice, though, is incredibly hoarse. No doubt a result of all the screaming I did on the way down.

“I fear I have concussed myself,” he tells me.

I try to laugh, but nothing comes. I feel completely empty. All I can muster is a cynical exhalation. Dad, still lying on his back in the snow, reaches out and pats my knee reassuringly.

“It’s okay,” he says. “We’re okay, Elvie.”

“I know, Dad,” I reply. But I
don’t
know. Literally the only thing we’ve got going for us right now is that we’re alive. And when you add up everything that’s against us, it really doesn’t seem like much at all.

“Maybe that penguin is coming to help us,” Dad says wistfully.

I look at my dad. His head is turned to the horizon, a dazed smile on his face. His ruddy windblown cheeks offset the slight-blue tinge that still remains on his lips.

“Unless the penguin has a sled, Dad,” I say, choosing to humor him just for the moment, “I don’t think it’ll be much good to us.” I stroke his face gently. It’s starting to snow, but the heat from the fires is causing some of it to melt on the way down, and the drizzle blurs my tears.
This is it
, I think.
This is where I’m going to lose him.

“Elvan Sabeth Nara, I did not raise you to be a quitter,” my father replies stubbornly. “Did I?”

Stay brave, Elvie. Stay brave.
“No, sir,” I say, and I even manage a smile. “I’m not giving up.” I squeeze his hand tighter. “Not ever.”

“Good, then.” He focuses past me into the distance again. “Because it appears that the penguin
does
have a sled.”

Um, zuh?

Sure enough, there is a single black speck on the horizon, waddling toward us.

No, not waddling.
Mushing.

I stand up, my legs unsteady underneath me, and wave my hands over my head. “Over here!” I screech. “Over here!” I don’t care who this person is—friend, foe, Almiri, Jin’Kai, human, hybrid, or Jehovah’s Witness. I just care that they see me. “Over
here
!” In this moment I could not care less about the genetic race war between warring alien factions. I am not concerned with the potential invasion from some even scarier
force that Marsden seemed so freaked about. An armada of those Devastator chumps? Get in line.

I’m getting my goddamn baby back.

“Over here!” I continue, shouting like a maniac against the wind as the sled looms ever closer. “We’re alive! Here!”

“Ahoy!” comes the call back, and I stop waving my arms, stunned. Perhaps, like my father, I too have suffered a concussion. Or a stroke.

Yes, I’m definitely having a stroke.

The sled swooshes up in front of us and comes to a halt. The dogs are yammering excitedly at the chaos around them, but the driver of the sled barks sharply at them to heel, and immediately they all fall silent and sit in place, looking up at him obediently. He’s wearing a long scarf wrapped around his head, but I don’t need to wait for him to finish unfurling it to recognize who it is underneath. I rush him, leap atop the sled with my wobbly legs, and give him the most gigantic hug in my repertoire.

“I thought you got eaten by killer whales,” I tell him.

“Whales?” Oates says with a dismissive laugh. “Me? That seems unlikely.”

I’m sobbing into his coat now, full-on shuddering sobs. The first good news in days, and it makes me bawl like an infant. I don’t know how he survived. Maybe the whale swallowed him and he punched his way out, like Jonah reincarnated. I’m just glad he’s here. The rush of emotion has allowed the pain to gush out, and it gushes all over Captain Oates’s chest. He holds me tightly.

“It’s all right, child,” he says as I blubber.

“They took her,” I gulp out between sobs. “Olivia. They
took her. Marsden and . . . and my mom. They’re gone.”

And he doesn’t even bother to ask how Marsden is still alive, or where he and my mother have gone off to. He just straightens up and replies coolly: “Well, then, I think we’d better go find them.”

I look up at Oates, tears streaking my face. He’s gazing down at me with a kind, loving expression, but it’s hard, too. This is a dude who wrestled with a killer whale under the ice and came back without so much as a scratch on him. If you had to go track down a bunch of asshole Jin’Kai who had kidnapped your daughter, this is the mofo you’d want on your team.

“Yeah,” I sniffle. “We’d better go find them.”

Oates helps me lift Dad out of the snow. Dad, for his part, doesn’t seem surprised in the slightest that Oates is alive, although he’s disappointed that there are no actual penguins on the sled.

“We’ll need to get Cole and the others from the camp,” I say as I settle myself next to Dad on the sled. “Cole, Ducky, the Almiri, the hybrids. All of them. And then we’re finding a way out of here. If Bernard can walk all the way to Cape Crozier from the coast, we can find a way back out. Together.”

“I see,” Oates says. Then, slowly: “There are many Almiri still at the camp who want nothing to do with you and your new friends.”

“They can remain here if they want,” I say matter-of-factly. “Or they can come with. But they sure as hell better stay out of my way.”

Oates looks at my superserious face and nods. He slides effortlessly into his seat on the sled. The dogs sit with their
heads turned, watching him anxiously, tails wagging, eager to get running again.

“All right, then, my dear,” he says, giving me a small nod. “What are we waiting for?”

Also by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal

Mothership