this place exists any more than you do. But it’s here for a reason. Nobody down here would survive on the ice. There’s nowhere for them to go. Even if the the ice does run out thousands of miles to the south . . . none of them could ever get there.” Quell raised his open hands, muscles straining against each other as if he were trying to claw the truth from the air itself and make her see it. “We can save ourselves. I thought we could save Zeen. We tried and we failed. The rest of them we were never going to be able to help.”
Yaz shook her head. “I don’t accept that. I can’t accept it.”
“We need to forget this hole. Everything will be alright again once we’re out. The regulator said—”
Yaz looked at him sharply. “The regulator said what?”
Quell frowned and rubbed his forehead as if it pained him. He shook the question away and beckoned her to join him by the ice. “Make it darker!”
Yaz stayed where she stood out in the open. “Quell—”
The sound of running feet interrupted her. One person with a light footfall. “Maya?”
As though summoned by her name Maya came hurrying out of the gloom, trailing shadows into the chamber, her knife in her fist, the blade bloody.
“We should go,” she said.
25
THEY COULDN’T FIND Quina. For Yaz that was the last load that made the ice break beneath her. Something snapped deep in her chest, the loss of Thurin and Kao and Petrick hit her like a hammer and sobs broke from her. She found herself calling for Quina, careless of who or what else might hear. Quell had to wrestle her to the floor and all the walls pulsed and blazed as the stars echoed with her grief.
Maya spoke into the silence that followed. “We need to get to the city.”
Yaz allowed herself to be led. Quell at her side, Maya ahead, scouting for danger. Maya seemed to be a new person, as though the timid child had been shrugged away like a cloak to reveal something hard and full of purpose.
They saw no one, heard nothing save the groan and drip of the ice. Yaz’s resolve returned by degrees. The magnitude of her failure had frozen her thoughts but a slow thaw was setting in. She felt ashamed. She was Ictha and the Ictha endure no matter what is heaped upon them. The world above had been taken away from her, and now piece by piece the world below was being stolen too. Yaz knew she had been foolish to try to dream new dreams. She didn’t deserve happiness. But even so, she would fight to the end, just as all her clan did, even if their eyes were no longer turned her way, even if none of them ever knew what end she fell to. She would not surrender, not go gentle into her fate.
In one of the brighter chambers Yaz turned and went to the wall while Quell watched, keeping any questions to himself. She reached into the ice with her mind, listening to the song of the stars, filtering through the beats of their many tiny hearts. Then with both palms to the cold surface she sent out a slow rhythm, the heartbeat of a star as large as the ones inside hunters. She sped the beat, sped it again, and once more, until finally she found an answering resonance. Deep within the ice one star now burned far brighter than all the rest, the largest within many yards of her. She spoke to it, trying to picture the complex sigil set into the iron of the forging pot. The star dimmed, and almost imperceptibly it began to sink as the extra heat it now radiated melted a path through the ice. Yaz drew it to her. It took time and the blades of a headache began to cut their way inwards from behind her eyes, but before too very long the star popped from the ice wall and dropped into her hand amid a rush of lukewarm water. A greenish star about half the size of Pome’s. It reminded her of Erris among the trees, and for a moment she stood staring at it in her