VAEL

The first law of the hearth is older than the clans.

What falls from the sky belongs to no one. What chooses to stay belongs with us.

I have made war under that law. I have ended wars with it.

Tonight a light came down on my ice, and it is singing to itself in the wreck. I will keep the law if it kills me.

THEA

Somebody has tucked a blanket over my crashed pod, which is sweet, on a moon with nobody on it.

I know it's a blanket because it's pressed against the viewport. White fur, thick as my wrist, every hair rimed with frost. Something out there pegged it down at the corners and pulled it tight, neater than I would have. The back of my neck goes hot inside my collar.

The cabin readout is hovering just above freezing. The outside readout says minus one hundred and seventy. I'm a scientist, so that's Celsius, and it's bad in any unit you like.

My heater died when I hit the ice, and the viewport cracked corner to corner. The supply ship is nine days out. By every number I know, this cabin should have frozen solid hours ago, with me inside it like a sample.

It hasn't. Because of the blanket.

My fingers have stopped hurting, which is the part where you're supposed to worry. I tuck them in my armpits and look at the only other living thing on board.

"Don't look at me like that," I tell Dennis.

Dennis is a thumb of blue moss in a sample jar. I scraped him off a vent rim early on. He's the only life I've found this whole mission, and he hasn't grown a millimeter, out of spite.

On my knees, the emergency beacon blinks green. Signal sent, signal heard.

That's what I want. Nine days. Nine days, and a hot shower, and somebody to tell me I was right about this moon.

The heater won't give me two.

Something knocks on the hull.

Three slow knocks, by the hatch, at about the height of my head if I were standing on a chair.

My whole body goes hot and then very cold, and I'm on my feet hugging the fire extinguisher before my brain has finished the word knock.

Then the radio clicks.

Not the ship band. The open band, the one I've been talking into every morning for forty days because the silence up here is so loud you can hear your own eyelids.

"Good morning, ice ball," says a voice.

It's my line, exactly, down to the little lift on ball I do when I'm faking cheerful. The voice is so low the hull hums.

I key the mic with a thumb I can't feel. "Who is this?"

"You say that every morning," the voice says. "Good morning, ice ball. Day forty. Dennis has not grown. Nobody is listening, so I will sing."

My face goes hot in a freezing cabin.

"You've been listening."

"You talk a great deal."

"I talk to myself. That's different. There's a legal distinction."

"You sing to yourself also," the voice says. "Badly."

"Okay, wow." I sit back down, hard. "You listened to a woman who sings badly for forty days. Who's the one with the problem, buddy?"

The band hisses.

For the first time, the voice has nothing to say. I've won, and I'm sitting in a dead pod on a dead moon grinning at a speaker grille.

Then it comes back, quieter. "Your heater is dead. The fur holds what heat you have for one night. Not two."

"I know that."

"I know you know. You said so an hour ago. To Dennis." A pause. "I have a hearth. Under the ice. It is warm."

Every survival module I've ever passed says the same thing. Stay with your vessel.

The module didn't cover a voice with a hearth.

"If I come out," I say, "how do I get back in?"

"The same door."

"I'm serious."

"So am I." The hull creaks as something heavy leans against it, carefully. "The pod is yours. The beacon is yours. On the ninth day the ship comes down, and you walk to it, and I carry your jars."

"And if I want to come back here before that?"

"Then I carry you back. Any hour. You say it, I do it."

"Why?"

"It's the law."

"Whose law?"

"The oldest one. What falls from the sky belongs to no one." The voice stops, then decides something. "You belong to no one, Thea. I wanted you to hear that before you see me."

He knows my name. Of course he does. I say it on every log. This is Dr. Thea Okonkwo, day whatever, still alive, still single, still mad at moss.

I have a doctorate in plants nobody believes in. I wrote eleven papers saying something lived under this ice, and every reviewer said I was lonely and reaching.

I was lonely. I'm allowed to say that up here. Nobody knew where I was except a computer nine days away.

Somebody did, though. Somebody was listening the whole time.

I put Dennis in my chest pocket. I clip the beacon to my belt, where my hand can find it without looking. I pull on the outer suit. It's rated for two hours out there, and it smells of every bad decision I made in training.

"I'm coming out," I say. "If you're a bear, I'm going to be so mad."

"I don't know what that is."

"Good. Stay that way."

I open the hatch.

The cold comes in all at once. My visor fogs and clears.

The sky is black. The planet we orbit hangs huge across it, banded rust and cream, its ring drawn across the dark in silver. The ice runs blue-white to the edge of the world.

And three steps from my hatch stands the tallest person I have ever seen.

Eight feet, maybe more. Skin so dark it's nearly blue, like slate in the rain. Two black horns sweep back from his temples along his skull, with a silver ring on the left one.

He's in furs and hide, arms bare, at minus one-seventy, and steam is coming off his shoulders. He's so warm he's steaming. Fine silver lines branch under his skin from his wrists up into his collar.

I have written eleven papers on complex life under this ice. None of them predicted horns.

"Hi," I say.

"Hello." In person the voice is worse. It goes straight into my ribs. He touches his own chest, so I'll have it. "Vael."

He doesn't come closer. Three steps exactly, and not an inch nearer. The hatch step under my boots is glazed, and the drop to the ice is longer than my legs.

"You could help," I say. "Lift me down. Throw me over a shoulder. That's what the eight-foot guy does in the movies."

"I don't know movies." His eyes are gold, and something clear blinks sideways across them against the wind. "Nothing on this ice reaches for what falls. It reaches first. Or it doesn't, and we leave it be."

So I reach. I step down, my boot skates, and I grab the nearest solid thing in the world, which is his forearm.

Through my glove and two layers of suit, he's as hot as a radiator. He doesn't flinch. He doesn't move at all. He takes my weight, every pound of it, and waits for me to let go.

I let go. Slower than I need to.

"You're very tall," I say, to say something.

"You're very small." He tips his head. "You sound taller."

"Everybody says that. How old are you?"

"Thirty-eight, in your years. I worked it out on day nine, when you said how long a year is."

"That's either very romantic or I need a lawyer."

"I don't know what a lawyer is."

"Lucky you."

He looks past me at the roof of the pod, and I turn to look too.

My antenna snapped in the landing. I watched it go. Now it stands straight, braced in a collar of cut ice blocks, angled at the southern edge of the sky.

"You fixed my antenna."

"On day twelve you said it has to point south or the ship can't hear you." He says it like it's nothing.

Like he didn't stand out here in the dark, cutting ice to the angle of a thing I said once, bored, eating rehydrated eggs.

"The wind turns soon," he says. "Then the snow comes sideways and buries the pod, and your beacon talks to the snow."

"How soon?"

He lifts his face to the dark. "Less than an hour."

"So I come with you now, or I sit in a snowdrift with a dead heater talking to Dennis."

"Yes."

"Those are both bad options."

"One of them is warm."

The shaft is a round mouth in the ice, twice as wide as he is, breathing steam slow and gold. A stair is cut into its wall, spiraling down, with a blue rope pinned along it.

The air at the lip is close to zero. Zero feels like a beach.

My suit says the air is breathable. It's said so since orbit, and nobody at home believed that either.

I get my helmet off. The warm air hits my face, wet and mineral, with something under it like cloves. I'm crying a little, from the cold or the warm or forty days.

"The rope goes back up," he says. "Any hour."

"Okay."

"You don't have to—"

"Vael." My hands won't work the glove seal. My fingertips are white. "Can you just. Help me with this."

He holds still.

I mean it. Not calm. Still, like a man on a ledge, and the silver lines on his forearms brighten very slightly.

I realize he won't touch the glove until I give it to him. So I do. I hold out my hand.

He takes the seal in two enormous fingers and opens it like he's opening something that might break. The glove comes off. My bare hand is in the air between us, white and shaking.

"On day nineteen," he says, low, "you said you'd give your whole grant for somebody to hold your hands until they were warm."

I did say that. I said it to the stars, in the middle of the night, sure that nobody would ever hear it.

I put my bare hand on his wrist.

He's hot. Not warm. Hot, like a stone that's been in the fire, and the heat goes into my fingers so fast it hurts, and I don't take them away.

The silver lines under my palm wake up. They turn gold, and the gold runs from my fingers up his arm and into his collar, slowly.

His face doesn't move at all. His arm is lit to the shoulder.

Nobody has ever wanted me so much it showed through their skin.

"Does it hurt?" I whisper. "The light?"

"No." His voice has gone rough. "It tells."

"Tells what?"

He doesn't answer. He lets me hold his wrist, and I do what I've done to every new organism I've ever found. I take its pulse.

There are two. Two beats under my fingers, out of step, a strong one and a quicker one behind it.

And as I stand there with my thumb on him, the two of them slow. They slide toward each other. They fall into step.

They fall into step with mine.

I don't say it. I file it, the way I file a reading I don't trust yet, and I keep my thumb exactly where it is.

"Okay," I say. "Okay. New organism. Two hearts. Very hot. Has opinions on my singing."

"One opinion."

"It was a hurtful one." My fingers are pink now. They're starting to burn, the good kind. "Vael. How much of the band did you hear?"

"All of it."

"All of it, all of it?"

His gold eyes don't leave mine. "Day thirty-one also."

Day thirty-one was the night I couldn't sleep, and told the empty band in some detail what I would do to the next warm man I met.

The heat in my face could run the pod.

"Great," I say. "Cool. Love that for me."

Behind me, my pod is a white lump under a stranger's fur, with its antenna pointed home. Below me, the stair goes down into gold.

The beacon blinks on my hip. Green. Nine days. My door out, and it's on my belt, and he hasn't once looked at it.

I keep the beacon. I give him my other hand.

"Show me," I say, and I take the first step down.