Page 25 of Below Zero

And just like that, a rushing terror punches through me. It knocks out the fabricated quiet of my Martian ocean, and the sheer magnitude of what nearly happened, of all the things I love that I would have missed out on if Ian hadn’t come for me, sweeps through my brain like a rake.

Dogs. Three a.m. in the summer. Sadie and Mara being absolute idiots, and me laughing at them. Hiking trips, kiwi iced tea, that Greek restaurant I never got around to trying, elegant code, the next season of Stranger Things, really good sex, a Nature publication, seeing humans on Mars, the ending of A Song of Ice and Fire—

“We need to be on our way before the storm gets worse,” Ian says. “Are you—”

Ian looks at me, and I don’t even try to hide my face. I’m well past that. When he comes closer, a dark frown on his face, I let him hold my eyes, lift my chin with his fingers, inspect my cheeks. His expression shifts from urgent, to worried, to understanding. I draw in a breath that turns into a gulp. The gulp, to my horror, morphs into a sob. Two. Three. Five. And then...

Then I’m just a fucking mess. Blubbering pitifully, like a child, and when a warm, heavy body wraps around me and grips me tightly, I offer no resistance.

“I’m sorry,” I murmur into the nylon of Ian’s jacket. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I— I have no clue what’s wrong with me, I—” It’s just that I hadn’t known. Down in the crevasse, I was able to pretend it wasn’t happening. But now that I’m out, and I don’t feel numb anymore, it’s all flooding back, and I cannot stop seeing them, all the things, all the things that I almost—

“Shh.” Ian’s hands feel impossibly large as they move up and down my back, cupping my head, stroking my snow-damp hair where it spills from under the hat. We are in the icy middle of a storm, but this close to him, I feel almost peaceful. “Shh. It’s okay.”

I cling to him. He lets me sob for long moments we cannot afford, pressing me against him with no air between us, until I can feel his heartbeat through the thick layers of our clothes. Then he mumbles “Fucking Merel” with barely restrained fury, and I think that it would be so easy to blame things on Merel, but the truth is, it’s all my fault.

When I lean back to tell him, he cups my face. “We really need to go. I’ll carry you to the coast. I have a light brace for your ankle, just to avoid messing it up even more.”

“The coast?”

“My boat is less than an hour away.”

“Your boat?”

“Come on. We have to get going before more snow falls.”

“I—maybe I can walk. I can at least try—”

He smiles, and the thought that I could have died—I could have died—without being smiled at like this, by this man, has my lips trembling. “I don’t mind carrying you.” A dimple appears. “Do try to contain your love for crevasses, please.”

I glare at him through the tears. As it turns out, it’s exactly what he wants from me.

•••

Ian carries me almost all the way.

To say that he does it without breaking a sweat, in the whiteout of a thickening snowstorm, in negative-ten-degree-Celsius weather, would probably be a bit of an exaggeration. He smells salty and warm as he deposits me on one of the bunks on the lower deck of the boat, a small expedition ship named M/S Sjøveien. I do spot little droplets of perspiration here and there, and they make his forehead and upper lip shine before he wipes them with the sleeves of his coat.

Still, I can’t quite get over the relative ease with which he made his way through glaciated plateaus for over an hour, wading through old and fresh snow, sidestepping rocky formations and ice algae, never once complaining about my arms coiled tight around his neck.

He almost slipped twice. Both times, I felt the steel of his muscles as they tensed to avoid the fall, his large body solid and reliable as it balanced and reoriented before picking up the pace again. Both times, I felt bizarrely, incomprehensibly safe.

“I need you to let AMASE know that you’re safe,” he tells me the second we’re on the boat. I look around, noticing for the first time that there are no other passengers on board. “And that you don’t need responders to come out once the storm lets up.”

I frown. “Wouldn’t they know that you already—”

“Right now. Please.” He stares pointedly until I compose and send a message to the entire AMASE group, in a way that reminds me that he is very much a leader. Used to people doing as he says. “We have a space heater, but it’s not going to do a whole lot in this temperature.” He takes off his jacket, revealing a black thermal underneath. His hair is messy, and bright, and beautiful. Not nearly as disgustingly hat-squished as mine, an inexplicable phenomenon which should be the object of several research studies. Maybe I’ll apply for a grant to investigate it. Then Ian will veto me, and we’ll be back to Mutual Hate square one. “The winds are more severe than I’d like, but on board is still a safer option than ashore. We’re anchored, but the waves might get nasty. There’s anti-seasickness meds next to your bunk, and—”

“Ian.”

He falls quiet.

“Why are you not wearing a NASA survival suit?”

He doesn’t look at me. Instead he drops on his knees in front of me and begins to work on my brace. His large hands are firm but delicate on my calf. “Are you sure it’s not broken? Is it painful?”

“Yes. And yes, but getting better.” The heat, or at least the lack of freezing winds, is helping. Ian’s grip, comforting and warm around my swollen ankle, doesn’t hurt, either. “This isn’t a NASA boat, either.” Not that I expected it to be. I think I know what’s going on here.

“It’s what we had at our disposal.”

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