Chapter 129: Jiang Gave the Chick His Last Heat

Jiang heard the chick through stone and green water.

The weak call entered the route knot above him, crossed the carrier bell, and reached his breast as a thin vibration. His lungs tightened around air that had already lasted too long.

Between him and the spill mouth, a fallen bell rib lay across the upper arch.

Jiang struck it with his working foot.

Bronze answered. The rib shifted no farther than his claw. He hit it again, and the effort sent a pale burst across his sight.

Pressure Heart remained silent. His body had its ordinary dive response and nothing more.

Below, the green rope pulled.

At one careful stroke from below, the ray began to turn. It checked the movement when the hanging carrier frame cut the other side of its wound.

Its freed breathing slit opened and closed. The second remained crossed by bronze.

Jiang pushed off the fallen rib and swam into the ray’s sight.

The animal’s gold-ringed eye found him. Its near fin rose between Jiang and the lower hall. Current pressed him backward, toward the arch he could not clear.

Jiang stopped stroking and struck his beak against the loose carrier frame.

Pain flashed through the widened crack. Sound traveled into the metal. Once for the frame, once for the trapped gill, then once against the rib above.

He did not know whether a tide ray could understand a sequence. He barely understood it himself. The effort meant pain, obstacle, air. Those facts belonged to both of them.

The lower bell rang again.

This time the ray refused it.

The green rope pulled hard enough to bow between submerged rings. Another animal might have followed pain away from the upper chamber. This one held its course with one breathing slit working and one still pinned.

Its refusal lasted only as long as the next ache. That was long enough for Jiang.

He saw the loose carrier frame swing under the ray’s body. The animal could clear its remaining wound by rolling deeper, but that turn would take the small routes with it. Instead, it rolled toward the obstruction above.

Its broad body rolled toward Jiang. He tucked both flippers and let the fin’s pressure take him. The carrier frame caught the fallen rib from below.

Bronze screamed across bronze.

One end of the rib rose.

Jiang kicked through the gap before the ray’s weight could close it. His good flipper cleared. The failed one caught on a broken edge and tore the shoulder wrap completely away.

He left the cloth below.

Water moved along bare skin. Jiang drove upward on one side, turning wider with every stroke. Green light became Pava’s coat, Hest’s boots, and the underside of the male’s bronze rest.

His head struck air through the pressure seam.

He inhaled while water still covered his eyes. The breath came with a choking cough and enough strength to hook one claw over the rest.

Cold air hurt more than water. His wet feather layer opened under the draft, and every bare place in the molt seemed to touch Ninebell at once. A violent shiver began at his breast and failed halfway through the shoulder.

Jiang tried to cough again. His beak would not close squarely. Water and blood ran together from the tip.

Pava seized the stone beside his foot, not the foot itself. Varn pressed the empty sheath flat beneath Jiang’s breast. Together they made surfaces. Jiang dragged himself across them.

Pava counted his breaths aloud without using numbers. "One that reached you. One that did not. Give me another useful one."

Jiang pulled air past the blood.

"Ugly," she said. "I will take ugly."

The unnamed male met him with an open beak.

Jiang had enough energy to turn his face. The warning strike landed against his crown instead of the broken tip. Then the male saw what had come through the water with him.

Green wash covered one of the male’s feet. His outer feathers were soaked. Under the brood fold, the chick’s head rested against the dry inner foot, mouth open and quiet between calls.

He sank his breast over the chick.

His shivering moved the chick.

Jiang crawled to the wet side.

Pava caught him around the breast. "Your skin is open, your beak is bleeding, and I can feel the cold through you. Stay where I put you."

Jiang pushed one foot against her wrist.

It barely moved her hand.

"That is the least convincing argument you have made."

The chick called again.

Pava’s grip loosened before Jiang pushed a second time. She moved beside him, keeping one palm beneath his failed flipper as he crossed the last wet stone.

"I am helping you reach him," she said. "I am not agreeing with whatever comes next."

The male watched Jiang approach. Exhaustion had pulled his head low, but the beak remained ready.

Jiang stopped outside the marked place where the adult had warned him before. Water ran from his breast into the male’s flooded footprint.

He waited outside the mark.

The returning female called from the cracked notch. Her beak could not reach the higher rest, and the remaining fish stayed in her throat. She changed her answer around the chick’s weak sound.

The male looked toward her. Then he shifted his wet side against Jiang.

Contact began at the shoulder.

He could still leave. Jiang could still refuse. Their feathers touched while the chick moved beneath the male, and neither body was warm enough to make the decision sensible.

Jiang leaned into the contact.

The System entered his sight.

[HUDDLE PULSE I ACTIVE]

[HEAT SOURCE: JIANG | WILLING MEMBERS: 1]

Warmth left him before the male received it.

The pulse began where their shoulder feathers crossed. Jiang expected heat to move like water from one body into another. It went in beats.

Each beat took the warmth nearest his heart and pushed it outward through the wet flank. The male’s body answered with a smaller beat of its own. Their rhythms never became one. They passed heat across a living boundary that remained between them.

Jiang felt why the System had waited for consent.

An unwilling body could have fought the contact, pulled away, or been trapped against a power it had never chosen. The male stayed because the chick was cold. Jiang stayed because he had offered the cost and discovered he was afraid of paying all of it.

Jiang felt the loss behind his breastbone. His core tightened, trying to protect what the ability had already taken. The blood in his feet cooled. His beak went numb around the crack, and the failed flipper became a weight he could no longer feel cleanly.

The male’s shivering changed.

It did not stop. His outer feathers stayed wet, his hunger remained, and the wound at his foot did not close. Heat spread only where their flanks met, then moved beneath his brood fold because that was where his own body held the chick.

The chick pressed closer to the inner foot.

The male bent his brood fold lower. Warmed skin and feathers enclosed the chick from above while the salt brick guarded one side. Jiang felt the pulse end at the adult flank. From there, whatever reached the chick came through its father’s skin and feathers.

Its next breath lifted down along the male’s belly. A small beak found the brood fold and clicked against it.

Jiang wanted to end the pulse.

The ability had no generous stopping point. Contact remained willing. The member remained cold. Jiang paid while there was heat left to take.

He pulled his shoulder away.

The male followed for one step.

Jiang struck the bronze rest with his good foot and pushed harder. Their feathers separated.

Huddle Pulse ended without a victory notice.

The System withdrew from his sight. Jiang reached for the ability by instinct and found nothing available. He had spent the condition that made it possible along with the heat it had moved.

Cold filled the place the contact had occupied. Jiang’s head sagged to stone. His sight narrowed around the male’s feet and the gray body hidden above them.

The chick called once.

Stronger than before did not mean strong. It meant alive enough to ask again.

The male answered. His call carried more breath and no forgiveness for the water still climbing around them. He shifted between Jiang and the chick, choosing the living body under his fold over the body that had paid him heat.

Jiang loved him a little for that and resented how much it hurt.

Pava covered Jiang with what remained of her coat. Most of the wool was soaked. She used the dry collar along his bare shoulder and pressed her cheek against his crown as if anger needed to verify his temperature personally.

"You have nothing left for the water."

Jiang could not feel his beak well enough to click.

Across the chamber, Valea cried out.

The broad strip had tightened under both her forearms. Antarctic white cut across Aylin’s palms. Two-moon silver bent Kedra’s injured wrist toward the drain.

Hest’s back slipped from the loose stone.

Green water lifted the lid and drove him to one knee. Varn caught his coat before the opening took his arm.

Below them, the carrier bell rang Bent-Toe’s dead call.

The chick answered from the male’s feet.

Water rose in the shape of a shoulder under the brood rest.

It had no skin or bone. Pressure held the outline together around remembered calls. A dark forearm reached through the seam Jiang had used and felt along the stone for the chick.

Pava moved first. She put her soaked coat between the false hand and the male.

Hest abandoned the drain lid and struck the watery wrist with his boot. His heel passed through, but the impact broke its shape long enough for Varn to drag the coat free.

"We cannot hold this mouth and those roads," Hest said.

Valea looked at Jiang.

"The small lines cross under the carrier stem," she said. "I can keep them separate here. I cannot release either one from above."

Pava remained crouched over him. "Find another diver."

No second diver answered her.

Hest could hold the drain but not fit through it. Varn knew the drowned guild’s old grips and could not pass the first bend. Aylin and Kedra had human lungs, injured bodies, and two routes that would tangle the instant either woman let go.

Pava knew every part of that. She asked because asking was the only refusal she had left.

Aylin released one hand from Antarctic white.

Kedra’s head came up. "If you leave that line, it loops the feeding road."

"Then take it with yours."

"My wrist is failing."

"So is the bird."

"The bird can reach the knot. You cannot fit through his spill mouth, and you cannot hold your breath long enough to learn the drowned hall while it kills you."

Aylin stepped toward the water anyway.

Kedra pulled two-moon silver across her own bleeding palm. The movement made Antarctic white snap tight in Aylin’s remaining hand.

"Choose the work only you can do," Kedra said. "Stay angry at me while you do it."

Aylin looked at Jiang. He lay beneath Pava’s coat with one foot curled uselessly against his belly.

"I am already angry at everyone," she said.

She returned both hands to the Antarctic line.

Jiang pushed the coat off his head.

Pava put it back.

He pushed again. This time she held it above him without covering his face.

"Your pulse is wrong," she said. "Your skin is cold under the feathers. That water has your blood in it, and the route home is blocked."

Jiang looked toward the male.

The adult had drawn the chick higher against his warmed inner foot. He watched Jiang without calling him closer. Warmth had passed between them. The male’s posture offered neither an order nor a promise.

Jiang wanted to stay anyway.

That was why leaving hurt differently from being sent.

He crawled toward the seam.

Pava moved with him, one hand under the failed flipper. At the water, she took the clean wrap from Hest’s injured wrist. Hest gave it without asking what would cover him afterward.

She bound Jiang’s shoulder once.

"This will come off," Pava said.

Jiang rested his beak against her wrist.

"That is not an apology."

It was the nearest thing he had.

Valea lowered one burned arm. "When you reach the knot, White-Nape’s line will be the cold one. The feeding road will carry the female’s moonlight. Do not pull both."

Jiang entered green water with no warmth left to bargain with.

The current took his bad foot. His failed flipper opened a handspan and stopped. Above him, Pava’s coat vanished behind the pressure seam.

From the trapped Antarctic line, White-Nape gave a living call.

Jiang followed it down.