# CHAPTER SEVEN: FOUR BAD OPTIONS
They ran.
Elias didn't know where. The older boy wasn't explaining, just pulling him by the shoulder and running north, or what might've been north, and the ice was uneven under his boots and the wet slap of the squid's body against the surface behind them was doing something terrible to his ability to think clearly.
"How far back?" Elias managed.
"Don't look."
He looked. The tentacle was still half-emerged from the hole, feeling around the edge of the ice like a hand searching under a door. It hadn't fully surfaced. It was tasting the air above the ice, or whatever the thing did with its filaments, the hair-fine ones that caught light wrong.
"I said don't look."
"I looked."
The boy made a sound that was not quite a sigh. "Is it following?"
"Not yet."
They slowed when the chemical light from the Wrong Ship camp was just barely a smear behind them and the ice ahead was solid and dark and gave no indication of anything underneath. The boy crouched, pressed his palm flat to the surface. Held it there. His eyes did something strange, like they went slightly out of focus for a second.
Then he stood up. "We have maybe two minutes before it figures out where we are."
"How do you know that."
"I can feel it moving through the ice." He said it like it was a stupid question. Maybe it was. "My name is Idris."
"Elias."
"I know. I watched you crawl across the snow for about twenty minutes before I decided you weren't one of the—" He stopped. Looked at Elias's face properly for the first time since pulling him off the ice. "You're younger than I thought."
"You're younger than you're pretending to be."
Idris's jaw did that clenching thing again. He let it go. "Do you know what that squid is."
"Weaver squid. Juvenile. Probably Stage Two based on the web density." Elias paused. "Is it Stage Two."
Idris looked at him again, differently this time. "Stage Two, yes. You know your wildlife."
"I'm from Isle Three. Everyone knows that one." Everyone knew it the way they knew about house fires and floods. Not from seeing it, just from the stories people told to keep children from doing stupid things. Elias had done several stupid things recently and none of them had prepared him for the reality of the size of those eyes. "What can you do."
"I can work with ice." Idris spread his hands, a gesture that said both everything and not enough. "Ambient ice. Whatever's already here. I can move it, collapse it, fracture it. I can't freeze the water. I can't make new ice from nothing."
"Okay."
"It's not much."
"It's something." Elias looked at his own hands. "I have fire sometimes. I think. It doesn't really listen to me."
Idris stared at him.
"I know," Elias said.
"You're a regular."
"I know that too."
The ice groaned beneath them. A long, low sound, not cracking, just pressure from somewhere below. Both of them went still.
It passed.
"Alright," Idris said, quiet and fast. "Here is what I think. The squid has been tracking you for a while, not me. I've been out here for four days and it ignored me. Something about you drew it out. Which means if we try to simply run, it follows you. And we cannot outrun it, the ice is too unstable in the north section, I already tried."
Elias absorbed that. "So we deal with it."
"We cannot deal with it. We are children."
"I'm aware of that."
"What I mean is, we cannot fight it. We have to maneuver it." Idris crouched, pressing his palm to the ice again. Reading it. "There's a section about forty meters east where the ice shelf is wide but thin. Less than a foot deep in places, the river current hollowed it out from underneath. If I collapse that section, the squid goes through."
"Does it go through." Elias looked east. "It's a squid. That's water. That's its house."
Idris paused.
"It would just go back under. Then it comes up wherever it wants, which is under us." Elias watched Idris's expression. The older boy was doing the math and not liking the answer. "Right?"
"The idea was to trap it."
"In water."
Silence.
"It's a bad plan," Idris said.
"Yeah."
"But I don't have a better one."
Elias didn't either, which was the actual problem. He thought about the heat in his hands, how it had come when he wasn't thinking about it, when the toad had his arm and his brain was doing nothing but screaming. He tried to think about it now and felt absolutely nothing, which was exactly what he expected.
"If I'm free to move," Elias said slowly, "and the squid is distracted, and I'm scared enough, I might be able to do something. The fire comes when I'm not trying. When something is about to kill me."
"So the plan requires you to nearly die."
"The plan requires me to be in a situation where I genuinely believe I'm going to die."
"Which is not hard to arrange."
"Which is not hard to arrange," Elias agreed.
Idris looked at him for a long moment. Then at the ice. Then at the distant smear of chemical light that was the Wrong Ship camp, like he was doing one last calculation that Elias wasn't part of. "Okay. Here is what we do. I collapse the shelf section. Not to trap it, just to create confusion, make it retreat and reorient. While it's doing that, you need to move east, away from the new hole. The webbing it uses to hunt—it fires it from those filaments, anchors it to the ice. If it webs you, you can't pull free, I've seen it. The only thing that will cut it is heat."
"I can't just make heat."
"I know. But maybe if it's webbed you, and you're trapped, and it's coming—"
"Maybe my brain panics enough to do the thing."
"Maybe."
They both understood exactly how bad this plan was. It had about four points where it required luck and approximately zero points where it required skill, which was not a ratio Elias preferred, but it was the ratio he had.
"Go," Idris said.
He went.
Elias moved east, keeping his steps light on the ice, watching the surface for the faint pulse of blue light that meant something was moving below. Idris had circled wide north, crouching low, both palms pressed flat to the ice now. His eyes were fully unfocused. He looked like he was listening to a conversation too quiet for anyone else to hear.
Nothing happened for twenty seconds.
Then the shelf buckled.
It didn't crack slowly. One moment it was there and then it simply wasn't, a section of ice the size of a small room dropping away in pieces, the sound of it enormous and sudden in the flat silence of the wastes. Water surged up through the gap, black and immediate. Elias felt the displacement even from thirty meters east, a tremor in the ice under his boots.
He waited.
The hole sat there. Water churned at the edges. A few chunks of ice turned slowly in the current.
The squid did not fall through.
Of course it didn't. Elias stood there watching the empty, churning gap and thought, yes, right, I said that. He'd said that and Idris had agreed and then they'd done it anyway, which was a special kind of stupid that he could only attribute to the fact that neither of them had slept properly in two weeks.
Idris was already looking at him from across the gap, that mask of competence sliding, going uncertain at the edges.
Then the ice behind Elias rose.
Not loudly. That was the thing he hadn't expected, the quietness of it, the way the surface just lifted slightly and split and the tentacle came through in one smooth motion from below, and it was the new hole, the one the collapse had opened, not the old one, the squid had simply migrated under the ice and come up behind him while they watched the wrong gap.
The filament brushed his arm first. He didn't register it as webbing until it had already anchored to the ice on his right side and he turned to pull away and couldn't. The web was thin and dark and virtually invisible until it pulled taut and then it looked like a thread of black resin catching the dim light. He yanked. The ice held. The web held better.
Another filament caught his left side.
Elias pulled both arms. Nothing gave. He was spread between two anchor points now, held at about the wingspan, and the tentacle was still rising slowly from the new hole and the eyes were not on him, not yet, the squid was still orienting, feeling the surface, and Elias thought very clearly: this is the part where I die, isn't it.
His hands got warm.
He didn't do it. He did not decide to do it or try to do it or even think about trying, he was too busy watching the tentacle and doing the ugly math of exactly how many seconds he had left, but his palms went from cold to warm to burning-warm in the space of two seconds and the web on his left side started to smoke.
He thought: it's working.
He thought: Idris is right there.
Idris had moved east from the original collapse point, crouching over fresh ice, trying to get position on the new hole. He was maybe eight meters away. Between Elias and the squid. Standing on a thin section because all the sections near a fresh break were thin.
The heat in Elias's hands was either going to build until it worked, or it was going to go away like it always did. He had no way of knowing which. And if he blasted heat in the direction of the squid, Idris was in that direction.
The tentacle swung toward him. The squid had found him.
Elias's hands detonated.
He didn't aim. There was nothing to aim with. The heat came out of him in every direction at once the way fear does, no shape to it, no target, just out. The ice around him steamed. The web caught immediately, not slowly like before but all at once, and the resin strands just went, leaving his arms free and swinging. The new hole erupted in steam where the heat hit the water, a column of it, sudden and blinding.
The squid recoiled. Something struck the ice and Elias heard it from the inside of the surface, a massive impact, the squid slamming itself back under to escape the heat.
Then the steam cleared.
Idris was gone.
The ice where he'd been standing had a hole in it. Not the squid's hole. A new one. Jagged where it had given way under sudden stress, the edges pointing down not up, no force from below just gravity and a too-thin shelf absorbing a steam explosion it hadn't been built for. The current moved at the edges. Black water.
Elias stood there. The web was gone. The squid was gone. He was warm and his arms were free and the ice around him was still lightly smoking and Idris was in the water.
He stood there a second longer than he should have.
Then he moved to the hole.
He couldn't see anything. The water was black and the current was moving and the hole was barely wider than a body. He pressed his hands to the ice and tried to feel for something, tried to do what Idris did, tried to listen for anything through the surface, but he had no ability to do that and felt nothing. Just cold.
Okay.
Elias sat back on his heels and went through his options the same way he always went through options, fast and mechanical and without sentiment, because sentiment was expensive and he was already overdrawn.
He could go in after Idris. Jump through the hole, hope to find him in black water with zero visibility, while a Weaver squid was also in that water and would be less confused about the temperature by now. Elias would last about four minutes before the cold made him useless. Probably less.
He could track the holes the squid had already punched and look for patterns, figure out where it was storing things, hope it stored Idris somewhere accessible. But tracking took time and the cold water was doing to Idris right now what it had done to him over a period of days, except faster.
He could use himself as bait. Get to the water's edge, make noise, create heat if he could, draw the squid back up. It had been tracking him. Maybe it would surface. Maybe it would bring Idris with it, or drop him, or do something that gave Elias a variable to work with. Or maybe it would grab Elias and now two kids were in the water.
Or he could go back to the camp.
He held all four in his head for a moment and tried to find the version where he didn't hate himself, and there wasn't one. There genuinely was not a version of this where he ended up on the right side of his own standards.
The smartest option was the camp. He knew that. The Wrong Ship had Water-Evolved. People who could actually dive, who could breathe down there, who could fight a Weaver squid in its own element and survive it. If he went back right now, ran the entire way, threw himself on the mercy of Nadia and Amar and whoever else wanted to calculate his value to the group—they might go in. They probably would. Evolved were terrible and self-serving, but even Evolved didn't leave a kid in a Weaver squid's territory without at least trying.
And he had cut Amar's wrist three hours ago.
He looked at the hole.
Idris had asked if he was a Trueborn. Like that meant something. Like whatever Elias was doing with his hands had a name, a category, a reason. Like he was something other than a regular kid from Isle Three who had bitten a bird out of desperation and ended up on fire.
He'd pulled Elias out of the water. The first person in this entire crossing who had done something for him without accounting for it first.
Elias put his hands against the ice one more time. Pressed his forehead down next to them. Tried the way he'd been trying all month, to will the heat somewhere useful, somewhere directed, something other than panic-shaped explosion.
Nothing.
He straightened up.
There was one thing he could try before admitting he needed adults. It was the stupidest of the four options. It was so clearly the stupidest that he was almost embarrassed to be considering it, except that embarrassment required an audience, and his audience was currently under the ice.
He walked back to the squid's original hole. The first one. The one it had used before the plan, before the collapse, before everything went wrong. The water was still there, moving slightly, black. He crouched at the edge of it.
"Hey." His voice came out quieter than he meant it to. He cleared his throat. "Hey. I'm right here."
The water didn't respond.
"I know you've been following me. I know I'm the one you want. I'm right here on the ice and I'm not running." He pressed his hand to the surface just next to the hole. Palm down. As much skin contact as he could manage. "Come get me."
He waited.
Nothing.
He waited longer.
The cold came up through the ice and into his knees where he was crouching and the water moved with the slow, mindless patience of water and below it somewhere was a creature the size of a cart that had already taken one person and could take him in under a second if it felt like it, and he was sitting here asking it to, which when he thought about it directly was insane. He was a thirteen-year-old boy with intermittent fire who couldn't swim fast enough and was afraid of seafood asking a Stage Two Weaver squid for a confrontation.
A pulse of blue light moved slowly under the ice. Maybe ten meters out. Maybe fifteen. It stopped. Held there for a moment like a second heartbeat.
Then it moved away.
It knew he was there. He was certain of that. It knew and it chose not to take him.
And that was maybe the worst thing it could have done.
Elias stood up. Looked at the Wrong Ship camp. The chemical lanterns made their blue-white smear against the dark horizon, perfectly still, waiting in the way that things wait when they don't know they're waiting.
He started walking.
The cut on Amar's wrist had been short. Not deep. He'd done it with the bone knife in about half a second of pure bad decision-making. He hadn't thought about what he was doing; his hand had simply moved.
He'd have to explain that.
He'd have to explain all of it. The two weeks on the ice, the toad, the bird, the heat that didn't come when he wanted it and came when he didn't, the fact that he'd just gotten someone pulled under a frozen river and the best solution he could arrive at after trying to fix it himself was to come crawling back to people who had been deciding whether to leave him to die an hour ago.
He walked.
The ice groaned somewhere behind him. He didn't look.
The chemical light got closer. He could see shapes in it now. Someone moving near the stern of the ship. One of the evolved with the injured shoulder, probably, or one of the regulars.
He thought about Idris saying: I'm not just a kid.
He thought about how he'd looked when he said it. That bone-deep exhausted defensiveness. Like it was something he'd had to say enough times that the words had gone smooth from use.
Yeah, Elias thought. I know that one.
He stopped about twenty meters from the camp's perimeter.
From here he could see the narrow windows of chemical light along the hull, and the figure by the stern who was definitely Amar, that impossible height making him unmistakable. He was looking out at the ice. Not at Elias. Just out, like he did that sometimes. Watching for things.
Elias held still and tried to figure out if there was a version of this that didn't end with him asking for help.
There wasn't.
He stepped into the light.
Amar saw him in about three seconds. His head came around, those wide green eyes catching the lantern light, and for a moment he just looked. Not surprised. Not angry. More like he'd been running his own probability calculations and Elias showing back up was one of the outcomes he'd considered.
"You cut me," Amar said. His voice was flat and informational.
"I know." Elias stopped about four meters away. Close enough to talk, far enough to run, which was automatic at this point. "I need you to come with me."
Amar looked at his wrist. The cut was visible, dried dark against his pale bluish skin. "You cut me and ran."
"Yes. There's a Weaver squid. Stage Two. It's been under the ice near here since before I arrived and someone just fell through because of me and I can't get to him." Elias kept his voice level, because if he let his voice go the rest of him would go with it. "He's a Trueborn. He can control ambient ice. He's maybe fifteen. He's been out here alone for four days and he pulled me off the ice when the squid had me and then I blew up the ice under him and now he's in the water."
Amar was very still.
"I tried to draw the squid back up myself. It ignored me." Elias hated how that sentence sounded. "I need someone who can go in the water."
Behind Amar, a door opened in the hull. Nadia leaned out. She looked at Elias. Then at Amar's face.
"What happened," she said.
"Weaver squid," Amar said.
Nadia's expression did not change in any visible way. She pulled the door wider and said something back into the ship in a voice too low for Elias to catch.
"How long ago." Amar was already moving, not toward the ship, toward the ice field, pulling on something waterproof that had been hanging from the railing.
"Maybe ten minutes."
"Where."
Elias pointed north. "Forty meters past the first big hole. There's a second collapse, that's where it happened. The squid went back under after I—" He stopped. "After the steam."
Amar looked at him. Looked at his hands. Looked back at his face.
"We're going to talk about that," Amar said.
"I know."
"Come."
Elias followed him onto the ice.
Behind them, he heard Nadia coming too, and the sound of the hull door again, more footsteps, people being woken up, the specific sound of a camp reorganizing itself around a problem. He didn't look back. He kept his eyes on the dark field ahead and his hands loose at his sides and thought about Stage Two Weaver squids, and the four bad options, and which of them he'd actually chosen in the end.
Not the bait. The bait hadn't worked.
Not the dive. He couldn't survive a dive.
Not the scout. He'd run out of time while he was sitting there trying to be brave.
He'd chosen the one he'd walked away from twice.
He'd gone back.
He wasn't sure if that made him smart or just out of alternatives. Probably both. In his experience they were usually the same thing.
The hole was forty meters north. He could already feel the squid below, or he imagined he could, the faint pressure of something large moving in the dark.
He hoped Idris was alive.
He hoped the squid had stored him somewhere instead of eaten him, because squid stored, that was in all the wildlife descriptions, they cached prey for later, and later was not now, and later was survivable.
He hoped, which was not something he did much, because hope was expensive and he was already overdrawn.
His boots crunched on the ice. Amar moved beside him, longer stride, quiet for a very tall person. The chemical lanterns of the camp receded behind them.
They walked.