Day 29 - The Hidden, Haunted, and Helped Finale

Hey guys! Grace Nask here with Day 29 of the April Challenge. Today we have the rest of The Hidden, Haunted, and Helped, a short story for teens and above. If you missed yesterday, our protagonist is trying to save her brother Manny and has enlisted the help of a guard from the other village with no loyalties to her and a dubious understanding of what they want him to do. This can't end well. So let's get to it!

We arrived at the thinned ice as fast as a fox pounces on prey. I ran to the ice near my pick and searched for Manny. But...his face did not appear. Something deep inside me screamed. Hands and knees on the ground, I scrabbled around the slick surface, pushing away the snow, reaching for the blue eyes that brought me home.

But nothing surfaced, not even a sob. I sat on my haunches against the ice, numb to the wind and cold. Let it take me, if it really wanted to. The water swirled underneath our snow, mocking me. Somewhere in it all Manny sank, unconscious or dead. My whole tribe drank from the water by boiling the salt away, but today it consumed. My brother was gone.

The bang of a pick on ice shattered my thoughts. My head turned with an immense tiredness as I witnessed the man take up my discarded pick and swing. With his strength, crevices in the icy barrier appeared. I stared. Water licked at the cracks, a promise for what was to come. The man looked at me with a question in his gaze, clucking in his walrus tongue at me. “Useless,” I murmured, but I didn’t have the strength to stop him, and he didn’t stop himself.

By the third swing, the water swallowed a human width hole of ice. Almost against my will, I got up and crouched down beside it, the man hovering over my shoulder. The water lapped against the foot-thick ice, gentle. Alluring. Dangerous. Deep inside, the same hole welled up in my heart. “Manny,” I whispered to it, staring into the water.

Something in my mind shifted as a new idea took form. Maybe Manny was still down there, alive. He had the lungs of a seal; maybe if I reached down deep enough, I could go get him! He couldn’t be too far down; it’s only been a few movements of the sun! I could just dive in and grab him!

A crazed smile corroding my face, I peeled off layers of coats and gloves in a wild frenzy, throwing them on the surrounding ice. The cold squeezed my fingers with the pinpricks of needles and noosed my arms into stiff rods, but I barely felt it. He was alive he was alive he was alive, and I was going to save him. Breath puffing like a thundercloud, I marched towards the water hole.

Faster than the waves that sprung up in Summer, the caribou bone end of a spear blocked my path. The man; I’d forgotten about him. He barked at me in his crazy language, something new flickering through his features. Was it...fear? No; what could he fear when Manny laid so close? He must not understand what I wanted to do.

“Manny’s down there,” I explained, gesturing to the hole and mimicking a swimming motion. “I have to go save him. He got trapped in the water.” I waited with incredible patience for the spear to shift away, but it remained firm. “Man-ny,” I repeated, stamping my foot. Couldn’t the man see that my brother and I didn’t have time for confusion as stupid as this? “Manny’s lost in there. He’s drowning! I have to go save him!”

The man held the spear steady and talked in a soothing tone. Using his free hand, he tapped where his mouth would be, made half of my help signal, and gestured west, toward his settlement.

West? No! Not. Without. Man. Ny. “DON’T YOU PEOPLE HAVE ANY COMPASSION!?” I screeched, tears dripping down my face. “My brother is down there! I-I have to go….” I trailed off as my tears froze against my face, tiny daggers piercing my skin. My teeth trembled and hands convulsed as I touched my mouth in the same motion the man had, where my lips surely shone blue.

I sank to my knees, shaking from more than the flurries drifting around me as the blunt truth clawed its way out of the snow: it was too cold. No one, not even Manny with his lungs of a seal, could survive the cold for this long.

“Lees?” the man choked out, pointing west. To some degree, I realized he mimicked my plea from earlier, but the rest of me didn’t care. My chest heaved for breath, but nothing brought in the air. The inside of my body, once frozen, now sloshed into a torrent of water, each wave bruising my skin from the inside out, screaming for release. But there wasn’t a release from the truth. I could not undo this. Manny was gone without question.

How could we have been so stupid?

The man gently tapped my shoulder and pointed west once more. My head the weight of a thousand caribous, I raised it and stared at the smoke billowing in that direction, imagined the warmth of the fire.

I shifted my east, toward home. But what home would that be, now that Manny was dead? The tribe, who hadn’t wanted us to leave in the first place in this cold, would hate me. Manny’s death, a child on the cusp of his prime, would be my fault. And it was; I would take full responsibility and have to leave.

I gazed at the man, who had helped a foreigner without question. Who had left his post on a mission he still didn’t fully understand. Who wanted me to leave with him, even though I must look and sound crazy.

As if reading my thoughts, he stared back at me, warmth flickering through his gaze like the bonfire in the west. Then, by an impulse stronger than himself, he put down his spear and held out a gloved hand to me.

I took it.