Chapter 138: Underice Sight Saw Too Many Lives

A pale mouth plate worked farther through the green shutter.

Tir drove his shoulder into the lever below. The plate pinched out of sight. Metal groaned beneath Ninebell, followed by three uneven blows from his damaged hand.

They were alive and holding, though the metal had begun to lose.

Brinn reached for her mask.

Pava caught its leather strap first. "You will get this back when he can follow my hand with both eyes."

"That door is being eaten."

"And this penguin is bleeding into his throat. Pick which one you can help by killing him."

Brinn’s fingers remained around the mask cup. Pava’s remained around the strap. Neither woman looked away.

Jiang coughed red into the cloth at his beak and ruined any argument he might have made.

The Bellmaw pushed again. The green dent widened, but the internal ribs caught its blunt plates. Tir and Elen put their combined weight on the lever. The shutter held with a grinding noise that Jiang felt through his breastbone.

Brinn let Pava take the mask.

Pava pulled the warmed hide around Jiang and set him against the unnamed male’s flank. The adult shifted enough to accept the contact while keeping the chick centered over his inner foot. His outer leg trembled after the movement.

Beyond two-moon silver, the female called through the braced notch. The fish stayed crosswise in her beak. The chick answered, and the male’s brood fold tightened around the sound.

Aylin kept both hands on Elen’s glass fork. "I stay here. If the stone twists, Valea cannot hold both arms alone."

Brinn looked at the drain, then at the chick hidden under the male.

"You stay," she agreed. "Do not let Kedra close the throat while we are below."

Kedra rested her palm on the loose drain stone. "Bring them up, and I will stop wanting it closed."

"That might be the kindest thing anyone has said to Tideglass."

Pava pushed a fish strip against Jiang’s beak. Bitter oil had soaked through it. He took the strip carefully around the crack and discovered that medicine could insult fish without making it less edible.

The first swallow hurt. The rest stayed down.

Fresh pressure went around his beak. Pava changed the shoulder cloth and left the failed flipper bound where water could not wrench it open. She tucked a warming stone outside the hide, close enough to heat the damp feathers without touching the injured skin.

Nothing mended. His foot still folded when he tested it. The backward claw remained where no sensible body would have put it, and the shoulder answered every breath with a separate ache.

Slow warmth reached him anyway.

Jiang slept because his body took the decision from him. He woke when the shutter scraped, when the chick called, and once when Pava lifted the cloth under his beak. Each time the stain was smaller. On the last waking, he found Aylin still bent over the glass brace and Brinn sitting beside the drain with her mask in her lap.

Pava moved two fingers before his face.

The first pass left a blur. The second became one hand instead of several.

The System opened a line across his sight.

[UNDERICE SIGHT I AVAILABLE] ℯℯ𝑙.

Jiang pushed his beak out of the hide.

Pava saw the change in him. "Whatever just told you that was a good idea can come here and hold your packing."

The complaint came out as a rough contact note.

"That is what I thought."

Brinn fitted her mask. She placed the safety loop around Jiang’s breast herself, clear of the bound shoulder. When Pava pulled it twice, Brinn answered with two pulls and waited for her to let go.

The male opened his flank as Jiang crawled away. It was only enough room for one injured body to leave. Jiang pressed his beak briefly to the wet feathers before crossing to the drain.

Jiang wanted to remain there until the chick swallowed something. Tir’s next uneven strike traveled through the floor, and Jiang crawled toward the drain anyway.

Brinn rolled backward into the throat with her mask tilted against the draw. Jiang slipped after the green glass before the current could take her out of reach.

The crushed carrier bell had rolled against one wall. Its mouth hung empty and crooked, one green rib folded through the broken crown. Silt turned around it whenever the Bellmaw pressed the shutter.

Tir and Elen waited behind the near pane. Tir’s shoulder stayed under the lever. Elen had planted both boots against the wall and wrapped her arms around its lower bar. Neither could leave without opening the thing they held closed.

Small silver bodies flickered through cracks around the east arch.

Cavefish had entered with the pressure wake. They gathered in the quiet pockets beside the trapped predator, scattered when the shutter flexed, then crowded back into every place where the water eased.

Jiang reached for Underice Sight.

Dark water remained dark. Life moved inside it.

Tir and Elen appeared first as two human disturbances folding around the lever. Beyond them, living marks darted everywhere. A fish turned. Another crossed it. A whole school broke apart and remade itself around something too broad for Jiang to separate from their motion.

The Bellmaw had no clean edge.

Every fish was real. Every movement belonged to a living body. The sight lied about none of them and still gave Jiang too many answers to use.

He stopped trying to find the predator.

Ordinary bubbles leaked from the lost leather skin behind the shutter. Most climbed. A cluster near the center vanished sideways. The fish fled that same place in a widening curve, and the green metal bowed around a circle rather than a shoulder or head.

The mouth was there.

Jiang kicked toward the crushed carrier bell. He touched its broken crown with his beak, then crossed to the pane and traced a ring around the place where the bubbles disappeared.

Brinn followed his motion. Her eyes moved from the empty bell to the circular bend.

Tir understood her before Jiang finished the second ring.

He shifted one hand from the lever and struck the bell frame. Then he pointed to the black stone teeth holding the flooded carrier arch above them.

Elen shook her head hard. She pointed at the shutter under her arms, then at Tir’s shoulder. Releasing the arch while the Bellmaw remained behind the door would bury a closed room and leave the predator free to turn elsewhere.

Brinn laid one hand flat on the pane. She touched the bell, the mouth circle, and the arch teeth in that order.

Bell first. Arch after.

Tir nodded. He pointed up at Brinn and closed his fist around the hanging carrier chain. Hest and Varn would have to swing the bell from Ninebell. Brinn had to reach them and keep the feeding notch from tearing when the weight moved.

Then Tir pointed at himself and Elen.

They would stay with the lower releases.

Brinn’s hand flattened harder against the glass.

Jiang’s sight began leaving fish behind after they turned. Silver movements crossed one another and remained, until the water looked packed with living scratches. Pain gathered behind his damaged eye.

He released the ability.

Green light returned in several wrong places. His beak struck the pane when the hall tilted beneath him.

[UNDERICE SIGHT I LOCKED: AFTERIMAGES]

Brinn caught his safety loop before he drifted into the carrier frame. She pulled him against her side and pointed up the throat.

Jiang touched the crushed bell with his good foot.

The empty bronze shifted under him.

Behind the east arch, the Bellmaw stopped pressing.

Tir looked over his shoulder. Elen tightened both arms around the lever.

The shutter did not open. Its upper hinge tore out of the stone.

Green metal crossed the hall in a spinning sheet. Behind it, the Bellmaw opened its pale ring toward the last carrier bell.