The chick called through the wound in Aylin's throat.
Its note came thin and high through the green tear, nearly lost beneath the scrape of snow across stone. Jiang's breast tightened before he understood why.
His beak opened halfway.
He caught the thermal sheet between its edges and bit down. The material crackled loudly enough to turn every face toward him.
"Keep doing exactly that," Nerea said. "Any answer helps the thing across."
Her broken sight rod lay in two pieces over her knees. She had tilted her head toward the tear, listening with an ordinary ear because the magical one was gone.
Jiang hated how much his body wanted to call.
Hundreds of voices pressed through the opening. Deep adult songs crossed the wind with rough beats where two notes touched. Short chick cries slipped between them. Hunger sharpened the whole colony into a question nobody could answer with warmth.
Penguin Instincts gave him pressure rather than words: mates searching, young birds begging, adults warning, bodies gathering close.
One adult song ended.
Its second beat kept going.
The sound had no chest behind it, yet it tucked itself beneath another bird's call and changed the rhythm. A chick answered from much nearer than the adult.
Aylin dropped to one knee. Green light ran between the fingers clamped over her scar, and a dark grain moved inside that light toward the ice.
"It is using the Link," she said. Her damaged voice made each word coarse. "I can still cut mine."
Martelli shifted against the silver-bound door. His right hand slid from his lap and struck the floor without bracing him.
"Close it," he said. "Nothing else crosses from here."
Devika pressed fresh cloth into his side. "You have lost enough blood to make bad ideas sound noble. Save your strength."
"Earth is clear of it."
"Earth has two pieces of it on my treatment sheet and five people breathing badly. We are not clear of anything yet."
Above the stair, Lucia pulled the return line twice. Matthews answered with one slow pull, their agreed signal carrying through iron instead of a voice Gredudande could borrow.
The black halves between them remained dead.
On one broken surface, snow melted into harmless water and raised no shadow.
Cold spilled from whatever waited beyond Aylin's trace, crawling into Jiang's beak when he released the sheet to breathe and tightening the muscles around his throat.
Pain belonged to him. This urge promised relief: answer the chick, hear the colony return him, stop standing alone inside a body built to find others by sound.
He bit down on silver.
Devika knelt beside the sling. "Good judgment. Terrible dental technique."
Jiang glared at her over the silver fold.
"Your beak is not a pair of pliers," she added. "Samira was very specific."
The mention of Samira hurt in a place Gredudande had not touched. She was an ocean and a sealed world away, probably still explaining to someone why a wounded emperor penguin had vanished from a locked room.
At least she had people around her.
Aylin's shadow bent toward the tear.
Jiang saw it before anyone standing did. A crust of black-green frost had formed at the shadow's narrow edge and was creeping over the stone wherever Aylin's outline touched snow.
He jabbed his beak toward her boot.
Devika followed the motion. "Aylin, lift your heel."
Aylin obeyed without asking why. The frost beneath her boot stretched toward the opening, snapped, and recoiled into the green light at her throat.
Nerea set one rod half aside. "It is beyond us and still pulling on her. That is an anchor, not an escape."
The System cut through Jiang's sight.
`[ESCAPED FRAGMENT: LIVING ANCHOR FORMING]`
`[ANCHOR SITE: LIVING COLONY]`
`[LINK CLOSURE CANNOT RECALL IT]`
The words vanished while the chick kept calling.
Aylin read Jiang's face. "Closing the Link leaves it there."
"It also keeps you alive here," Martelli said.
She looked at his useless hand, then at Nerea's ruined rod. "You both paid to break the Earth body. I will not pretend that gives you the choice over the next one."
Martelli lowered his gaze. The rebuke landed without a title to soften it.
"I meant to give you an option," he said.
"Then let it remain mine."
Devika touched two fingers beneath Jiang's jaw and watched his breathing. Her other hand stayed on the cloth over Martelli's side.
"Everyone is discussing worlds," she said. "My immediate problem is that the bird who wants to chase a monster cannot stand, and the woman holding the door open is bleeding into her own mouth."
Green light shivered between Aylin's teeth when she swallowed.
"How long can you keep it open?" Devika asked.
"I do not know."
"That answer I trust."
Lucia appeared at the top of the lower stair, one hand on the line. Matthews remained behind her with the hooded lamp and a folded silver sheet.
"The opening is shrinking," Lucia said. "It was wide enough for my shoulders. Now I would have to crawl."
Jiang looked at the tear.
Its lower edge rested against the floor. Snow showed through an opening made for a body close to the ground. A human would have to crawl. Jiang could enter without turning his injured shoulders.
He disliked that more than the cold.
The colony's next wave of calls rolled through his breast. Somewhere beyond the tear, adults moved around vulnerable young. They had answered a stranger because Gredudande had hidden in the sound they used to find one another.
Copper-Band had once refused Jiang warmth to protect a zoo colony that owed him nothing. Jiang had understood the choice only after it cost him.
He would understand this one sooner.
Aylin touched the front of the sling, then stopped before taking hold. "If I go, I follow the fragment. The trace may close behind me."
Devika's mouth tightened. "That was not a question."
"This is." Aylin looked at Jiang. "Do you choose the ice in this condition?"
He wanted hands for the answer.
Hands could have listed his torn shoulder, deadened foot, the people staying behind, and the stupidity of entering another wound in reality. His answer still ended at the chick.
Jiang released the thermal sheet. Before his throat could answer the colony, he pressed his beak once against the sling buckle: yes.
Aylin held his gaze. "I will hold the opening. You keep stop authority."
He tapped the buckle again.
"Nobody crosses yet," Devika said.
Aylin turned on her. "You heard him."
"He chose pursuit," Devika said. "He also needs the blood inside him. Hold the tear or close it, but give me his shoulder."
Aylin's hand twitched toward Jiang, then returned to the green light shaking at her throat.
"Do it," she said.
Devika opened the care roll. She cleaned the new blood without pretending the deeper injury had improved, shifted the support away from Jiang's breast, and pushed a fish strip against the side of his beak.
"Swallow before you become heroic," she told him. "I am unwilling to lose an argument to low blood sugar."
Jiang swallowed. Hunger seized the fish so fast that dignity never entered the decision.
Nerea listened beside the tear while Devika worked. Her empty hand kept reaching for the broken aperture, finding only a jagged rod end, and drawing back.
"The false beat is moving," she said. "It enters whichever adult the chicks answer."
"Can it take the chick?" Lucia asked.
"It can make the chick walk toward a voice. That may be enough."
Matthews came down one step and spread the thermal sheet around the dead anchor halves. He kept his face turned from the green opening.
"We keep these here," he said. "If the dead pieces move, Lucia and I burn the sheet and seal the room."
Martelli tried to close his right fingers. None reached his palm.
"There will be no second chain," he said. "Do not plan around one."
Jiang appreciated the clean limit. He appreciated it less when another adult call came through the tear and his own throat prepared to answer again.
Devika tied the outer support where belly movement would pull cloth instead of skin. "There. Still injured, still hungry, still a terrible candidate for interworld travel. Slightly less likely to open on the first shove."
Jiang leaned his beak against her wrist.
He meant thank you. The pressure was easier than inventing a gesture that looked dignified from inside a sling.
Her fingers rested between the intact feathers behind his jaw. "I know. I am still allowed to be angry."
The tear narrowed another handspan.
Aylin's knees slid across the frost as it pulled her closer. She caught herself with one palm and kept the other over her scar.
"I am going," she said. "That ice belongs to my world, and it reached the colony through what I gave Gredudande."
Jiang struck the buckle once more.
His choice remained beside hers, separate and equally inconvenient.
The chick called again.
An answer rose from under the sea ice, deep enough to vibrate through Jiang's breast. One voice carried the rough lower note he had found in the pressure chamber. The second formed the beat his own body made when both sides of his syrinx met on one breath.
From Devika's sling, Jiang heard Gredudande wear the identity that belonged to his living breath.
Across the narrowing tear, the chick answered him.