Chapter 121: Bent-Toe Called From a Gate Without Night

Bent-Toe called a third time, and the pale egg struck back.

The tap under the unnamed male’s brood fold was so light Jiang felt it through breast and stone rather than heard it. The male felt it too and dipped his head. For one breath, the Antarctic wind, the strange road, and every watching human lost to the life balanced on his feet.

Then white-blue daylight swept across the rest.

Bent-Toe’s answer came through the low gate without a tremor. It carried the same full ending Jiang had heard before the blood spread beneath the old penguin’s neck. The call was clean, certain, and dead.

Jiang’s throat opened.

Pale-Cheek cried from beyond the light. The younger voice broke high, found a lower note, and changed again.

Bent-Toe’s stolen call gave the answer that had once followed a different cry.

White-Nape cut across it. The living adult’s rough double voice bent around Pale-Cheek’s new ending, late in one part and hard in the other. Jiang knew no words in it. He knew the sound of one body listening to another.

His own answer pressed against the back of his tongue.

"Don’t," Valea said.

Jiang shut his beak.

The word should have angered him. He was tired of humans hearing danger in his voice before they heard him. This time Valea was staring past him, not at him.

A black filament had appeared along the Antarctic gate’s lower rim.

It looked too thin to cast a shadow, yet the daylight snagged on it. The strand crept across the joint toward the hair-thin slit that still reached the rookery beneath two moons.

The unnamed male saw it move. He turned broadside, placing his back between the black strand and the egg. His injured outer foot dragged against its cloth wrapping.

Pava lowered both hands. "I won’t touch him."

He watched her until she stepped back.

Cold air poured under his brood fold each time the Antarctic light widened. Pava saw the feathers lift. She took a folded length of dry wool from inside her coat and set it on the stone well outside his reach.

"Windbreak," she told Jiang. "Not a bandage or a trick."

Jiang caught one corner in his beak. Pulling sent a hot scrape through his shoulder, so he backed toward the male one short shove at a time. He left the wool beside the brood rest and moved away.

First the male pecked the wool. He pecked Jiang too, harder, for placing anything near the egg without permission. Then he hooked the cloth with his beak and dragged it against the windward edge himself.

Pava breathed out through her nose. "His idea, of course."

Against the wool, the worst of the draft broke. It did not warm him. Nothing in the hollow held enough heat for that.

Jiang looked at the three bronze breast rests left along the low road. The nearest lay beside the Antarctic gate. Another curved below the male. The last survived near a narrow drain joint where the buried traveler plate had cracked.

He had used changing call positions to expose a false road before. Gredudande could steal a sound. It had not yet learned how to stand in three places.

Jiang struck the nearest bronze rest with the side of his beak.

One tap, a pause, then two more.

Sound traveled beneath him. The Antarctic rim repeated it at once.

Varn crouched with his knife ready. His broken hook handle stuck from his belt, useless except as a reminder. "It swallowed that quickly."

"Let it," Valea said. She pressed her fingertips against the bronze without crossing into Jiang’s path. "Again, bird."

Jiang gave her a look.

"Again, please, Jiang." The added courtesy helped.

He tapped the same pattern, then pushed away from the rest.

His failed flipper scraped stone instead of helping. He caught himself on his good side, shoved with both webbed feet, and slid toward the middle rest. The movement pulled the dressing over his shoulder. Warm blood found the cold skin beneath his feathers.

Behind him, the gate repeated the pattern from its rim.

Jiang struck the middle rest before the echo ended.

Both sources collided in the bronze. The black filament twitched toward the first sound and then toward the second. Its pointed end flattened against the joint as if something on the other side had put weight behind it.

"It can’t shift the copied source," Valea said. "It can only make the rim pretend."

"Then we make the rim lie badly," Aylin said.

She stood on her own lane with one arm braced against the wall. Kedra held the shadowless lane across from her, pale with pain but upright. The slack cloth between their waists no longer bore weight.

Hest slid his wounded hands beneath a loose bronze lip. "Tell me which part."

"Not yet." Valea watched the filament instead of the gate. "If you lift early, it leaves."

Bent-Toe called again.

Jiang’s beak hovered above the bronze.

That perfect answer brought back a hollow in Antarctic ice, Pale-Cheek shoving under a dead body for warmth that was already leaving, and White-Nape pecking at Jiang because grief had nowhere else to land.

The need to answer hurt almost as much as his beak. He wanted to call through the opening. He wanted White-Nape to know that he had not vanished willingly, that the road had taken him and changed everything except the part that remembered.

Gredudande waited inside the call.

Jiang struck bronze instead.

"He knows them," Kedra said.

She was watching Jiang rather than the gate. One hand held her injured wrist against her chest. Pain had hollowed the skin beneath her eyes, but she had not missed the way his throat kept tightening.

"One of them," Aylin said. "Maybe both."

"Then why won’t he answer?"

Valea began to speak. Aylin stopped her with a look.

"Because it wants him to," Aylin said. "That is enough."

Jiang struck the bronze harder than he meant to. The pain ran from the split in his beak into his skull.

White-Nape called again through the narrow bar of light. There was no greeting Jiang could give without also feeding the thing between them. No way to explain where he had gone. No proof that silence meant he was alive rather than dead on another patch of ice.

He had once believed becoming human again would be the hardest part of this life.

Now he would have traded every imagined human word for one safe penguin answer.

A bright line of pain ran through the crack in his beak. He kept the rhythm uneven, adding the next tap only after his body had begun sliding toward the third rest.

Antarctic bronze copied the first half.

It finished from the wrong place.

Black filament jerked across the joint.

"Now," Valea said. Hest lifted the bronze lip with his hands. Varn drove the flat of his knife beneath the black strand. It bent around the steel and clung.

Varn’s grin held no pleasure. "Found you."

Its loose end whipped across the hollow.

His knife tore free and struck the wall. Hest caught Varn by the collar before he pitched face-first into the low gate. The filament retreated a beak’s length, carrying a bright shaving of steel into the seam.

Kedra stamped on her shadowless catch.

Stone under the filament lurched. Aylin leaned the opposite way on her lane, keeping the two current paths from folding together while Valea struck the call bronze with the heel of her hand.

Antarctic daylight narrowed. Wind screamed through it. Powdered ice swept across Jiang’s face, salt-sharp and real.

On the other side, Pale-Cheek called.

White-Nape answered differently again.

Instead of retreating, the black strand turned away from the old rookery and reached for the unnamed male.

He was no longer looking at it.

A call had risen from deep within the two-moon colony.

Hundreds of emperors murmured beyond the slit, their voices rolling over one another. This call did not vanish into them. It came again, closer than before, with two notes rubbing through each other in a pattern Jiang had never heard.

A dark head appeared beyond the feather-width opening, then vanished behind passing bodies. The adult was moving against the colony’s slow press, stopping only to call. Each time the voice came nearer, the male’s weight shifted toward it before he forced himself flat over the egg.

At last, the male lifted his head.

His brood fold remained sealed over the egg, and his feet did not move, but the tight line at his neck loosened. His beak opened, closed, then opened again on a call roughened by hunger.

Before his final note died, the far adult answered.

"His mate?" Pava whispered.

"Could be," Valea said. "Listen to what they do. Don’t decide for them."

Another call came. The male interrupted this time, and far beyond the slit, the dark head turned at once. Two exhausted birds kept finding each other inside a colony Jiang could barely see.

Gredudande copied the exchange.

Antarctic bronze produced the male’s call. The two-moon slit answered with the far adult’s first response. Both were exact, and both were already wrong.

Across the slit, the living adult changed.

So did the male.

Between the copied pair, black filament quivered and thrust beneath the male’s breast rest.

Jiang shoved away from the middle bronze.

Pava caught the loose end of his shoulder wrap. "You’ll strip it."

He pulled harder, and she swore under her breath. "Fine. Make me useful." She moved with him, feeding the cloth around his body rather than holding him back.

Jiang reached the third rest with one foot turned partly under him. The damaged cradle at his belly struck stone. He nearly bit through his own tongue.

Beside the male’s bleeding foot, the filament rose.

Without leaving the egg, the male pecked it.

Blackness snapped around his beak. He recoiled without leaving the egg, wings flung out for balance. The brood fold shifted.

Jiang hit the third rest.

He struck once and pushed off before the sound finished.

His cracked beak struck the bronze again while his breast was already moving. The second tap came from the edge. The third came from bare stone when he slipped beyond it.

Gredudande’s gate tried to copy him.

Its three taps came from one fixed rim.

Hearing the difference, the male refused the imitation. He drove his beak down on the real filament a second time as Hest wrenched the bronze lip upward and Varn sawed through the strand with the damaged edge of his knife.

Valea slammed both palms against the joint.

"Aylin, hold!" Aylin braced her boots.

"Kedra, release!" Kedra lifted her injured foot from the shadowless catch.

Their separate lanes shifted without merging. The drain joint opened beneath the black strand.

Blackness dropped into the drain.

Varn cut. Something pulled from the far side with enough force to bow his knife. Hest closed both hands over Varn’s wrist. Pava planted a knee behind Hest. Aylin held the visible lane. Kedra, jaw shaking, brought her boot down on the far catch.

Stone bit shut. Its parted end made the sound of wet hair drawn across glass.

Antarctic daylight collapsed to a thin white bar.

It did not go out.

Jiang lay beside the third rest, tasting blood. Pava wound cloth over his shoulder with fingers that had begun to shake from cold.

"You get one body," she muttered. "Try living in it."

He nudged her wrist with his beak. Not hard enough to bruise. Hard enough to object.

"Yes, yes. Heroic disagreement."

At the second rest, the unnamed male had lowered himself over the egg again. His outer foot trembled. He kept his gaze on the distant slit.

Far across the slit, the returning adult called.

This time the male answered softly. ℴ

A faint dry scratch rose beneath the fading call, from inside his brood fold.

His gaze dropped at once.

Jiang dragged himself close enough to see without entering the male’s reach. Pava stopped behind him. Every human went quiet.

For less than a breath, the male lifted the edge of his brood fold.

A hairline crack crossed the pale shell.

From the two-moon rookery, the returning emperor called again and did not wait for an old answer.