Elias Wood didn’t have time to brace. He was halfway up the stairs when the ship tore sideways. Metal screamed against stone. His leg caught the edge of a step—low, fast. More bruised ego than blood.
He hauled himself upright, breath sharp. The Solstice had folded into ice and rock both, a sideways carcass grinding deeper with every wave.
“Fuck,” he muttered, scanning for damage. For names he’d have to cross off. Crew. Dead. Survivors. He wasn’t sure which number would haunt him more.
He stumbled back down, half sliding as the ship groaned beneath him. The galley came first. Pete lay across the floor, one of his knives buried in his gut, another through his palm like pinned meat.
“One,” Elias said. “Fuck.”
He moved on. Lin, curled in a corner, arms over her head like that might still protect her. Emilie, legs twisted beneath her, skirt high—almost erotic, if the room weren’t bleeding. Yusuf—yes, that was the name—rocked and prayed. Anne, the old woman, still seated. Still staring at nothing.
Then he remembered—the girl and her mother.
He turned down the slanted corridor, boots slipping. Found them crumpled together in steel and cold. Bruised, bloodied, both bleeding from deep gashes in their heads.
Still breathing.
“Emilie!” he barked. Then louder: “Emilie!”
He ran back to the tech room. Nothing had changed. Emilie still sprawled like a forgotten doll. Yusuf still whispering. Lin still trembling. Anne finally looked up.
The med kit sat on the table. He grabbed it, turned, then froze. Something in him snapped.
“For fuck’s sake,” he roared, voice hard as steel. “I will slap you back to reality if I have to—but right now, get the fuck up and help the girl who saved your asses!”
“Mon Dieu,” Emilie muttered, as if she’d traded science for prayer.
“There is no God here,” Elias spat, slamming his fist on the table in front of Yusuf. “Not of any kind.”
Yusuf looked up at the man towering over him, shouting, shaking, trembling with something that had no name. Rage, maybe. Despair.
Yusuf blinked. Once. Calm.
“God is great,” he said.
“So he may be,” Elias hissed, “but he’s sure as fuck not helping those women.”
Now Yusuf understood. Not why Emilie lay crumpled, or why Anne hadn’t spoken—but Lin? Curled in the corner, puking up her silence? That he recognized.
He stood. Lifted Emilie. Followed Elias down the corridor.
Helen opened her eyes, but the dark didn’t lift. Pitch black. No outline. No shadow. Maybe the lights were out. Maybe her brain had quit them.
Her head throbbed. Her leg felt dead.
Something warm pressed against her—a thigh, maybe an arm. A body. Her daughter’s. She knew the scent: stale sweat and overworn sweaters. Ivy always wore them too long.
“Ivy?” she whispered. But the name came out strange, blood-soaked.
No answer.
No. No, no, no.
Mothers always fear the worst from their daughters. And to a mother, dying is a daughter’s greatest sin.
What had she asked, just before the dark, just before the pain?
Just live long enough to know.
Why was Elias yelling? Somewhere distant. Somewhere in the dark.
“Ivy!” she croaked, louder now.
Still nothing.
She reached. Found a thigh. Groped—an ass, an arm, fingers.
Still warm. A pulse.
Then her head screamed. A sharp, white pain.
And silence again.
Elias nearly stepped on them in the dark. His boot grazed Helen’s temple before he caught himself.
Behind him, Emilie trembled, her flashlight shaking in her grip.
“Steady,” he said. She steadied.
“A little light. Just here.”
The beam found Helen’s face—pale, bloodied, still breathing.
He crouched, lifting her as gently as the tilted floor allowed, boots slipping on metal, the hull groaning beneath them.
“Grab the girl,” he told Yusuf. “Carefully. I don’t know how bad she’s hurt.”
***
Ivy woke—and wished she hadn’t.
Everything hurt, but softly, like pain muffled under snow. Her limbs felt foreign. Breathing, shallow. Instinctively, she reached for her phone. Still in her breast pocket. The screen was cracked. Dead.
Her skull throbbed—too tight for thought.
“Mom?” she whispered. “Mom?”
Fingers found hers. Squeezed—too tight.
“I’m here, honey. I love you so much.”
Ivy coughed. Her mouth tasted like metal. Metal and seawater.
“I still hate you, Mom.”
“It’s okay. We’re breathing,” Helen managed, swallowing tears.
“I’d hate you a little less if you found my power bank.”
Helen rummaged through the duffle beside her. Batteries. Comics. A vibrator.
Power banks.
“Here, honey,” she whispered, tugging a sweater over the vibrator like it hadn’t been there.
A whole different conversation. Maybe for never. Yes, never sounded good.
Ivy plugged in her phone. Waited for the screen to flicker awake. Her fingerprint unlocked it. She opened the camera. Hit record.
“So,” she said. “This happened. I don’t know what this is exactly, but—”
She paused. Tilted the lens toward her mother.
“My mother—who isn’t always the monster I’ve made her out to be—was just about to tell me.”
“Ivy,” Helen whispered. “This isn’t the time—”
“Just talk, Mom. I’m in too much pain to yell at you.”
So Helen talked to the phone. About the shipwreck. The islet without a name. About Ivy, unconscious for five days. She didn’t mention the moaning in her sleep. Not the name she’d moaned. Not the vibrator.
But Ivy did.
“By now, my mother would have—should have—found my vibrator. Any loving mother would’ve rummaged through her daughter’s bag, to see if there was anything…”
She stopped there.
“Five days, Mom? Five?”
“Five,” Helen said. “But you’re here now. And the vibrator? You’re eighteen. If that’s all I have to worry about—”
“Elias,” Ivy cut in. “I want him.”
Helen didn’t know how to—
Elias watched Emilie get dressed.
He didn’t feel connected to her. Not really. But she served a purpose: warmth, weight, something human that didn’t scream when touched. That didn’t sound like gunfire. That didn’t explode behind his eyes.
“The camp’s nearly up,” he said. “Enough propane to last a few months. We’ll be found by then. Shame about the generator—seawater got in. It seeps into everything.”
“Do we have to set up camp?” Emilie asked, voice soft. Flat. “We could stay here. Fuck. Be forgotten, no?”
“Yes,” Elias said. “We need to set up camp.”
Helen looked at her daughter and swallowed. Again.
“You… him?” she managed, barely above a whisper.
“Yes, Mom. If we’re going to die, it should be him. Would you prefer Pete? Or—”
“Pete’s dead,” Helen said. Flat. Just like that.
“Oh.” Ivy blinked. “Then it has to be Elias. Yusuf’s a Muslim, right? So…”
“Ivy,” Helen cut in—but there was nothing else. No follow-up. Just her name, just the weight of it.
“You?” Ivy whispered. “You want him, don’t you?”
Helen didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. The heat creeping up her face said everything. But the heat was nothing—nothing compared to what her daughter proposed next.
“It’s okay, Mom,” Ivy said, steady. “We can both have him. It wouldn’t matter once, if, they ever find our frozen bodies.”
She bit her lip. Glanced at her phone, still recording. Decided it didn’t matter.
“Can I have him first?”
Time, for Ivy, turned slippery. She didn’t notice how the Solstice had been gutted, emptied of meaning. She didn’t see the tents rise, or the antenna, erected in stubborn hope of a generator miracle. She missed the moment the scientists became scientists again, chipping samples from the snow, from the ice, scribbling what little data they could salvage into damp notebooks.
They labeled tubes with dates and depths. Stacked snow like it mattered. But they couldn’t drill. Couldn’t compare.
Helen’s laptop died last.
And then she watched her daughter stumble out of the wreck that had brought them here. The sky had gone pale, a dull wash of silver bleeding through the clouds, and everything else was snow and silence.
She looked beautiful. Bundled in layers—thank god. The temperature had dropped below minus ten. Thirteen, maybe. But the wind had stilled. That mattered.
Helen waved, but Ivy only raised an arm halfway, as if to check her balance. Helen met her halfway. Dared a hug.
“Mom,” Ivy said, muffled by fabric and fatigue, “I reek. What day is it?”
“Two and a half weeks since we left Macquarie,” Helen said, though she wasn’t sure anymore what day that actually meant.
Ivy fished out her phone, squinting at the black streak that bloomed across the cracked screen. It swallowed the date, the icons—everything but its own damage.
“Siri,” she said, flatly. “What date is it?”
Siri answered. Not in her usual chipper tone, but functional. A thin robotic voice that had survived, even here.
Wednesday. June seventeenth.
“Why?” Ivy asked. “Why haven’t we been rescued yet?”
“Honey,” Helen said gently. “We aren’t even missing yet. Not for a few more days. Not until we’re supposed to check in at Macquarie Station.”
Ivy stared into the snow, as if it could offer a better answer.
“And even then—” Helen started.
“I know,” Ivy cut in, voice dull. “Even then, the alarm won’t go off for another week. And they’ll send a ship that’ll take a week to reach the region. And they’ll go searching for an islet that isn’t even on a map.”
Helen didn’t argue. There was no comfort in the truth. Only cold. Only time.
“And again,” Ivy murmured, “we won’t be on that islet at all, will we?”
Helen adjusted her daughter’s balaclava. Brushed snow from her coat.
“Come,” she said. “Let me show you our quarters.”
Elias watched them from his lookout on the hill. The cold bit in all the wrong places—but anything to stay clear of the French woman’s reach. He still fucked her on the flimsy bunks, didn’t care who heard and who didn’t.
None of them would live long enough to tell anyone anyway. Too many mouths. Too little food. And he hadn’t seen a seal since the day they arrived.
Ivy was okay in his mind. Strong when it counted. Willful. And soft, when she let herself be. She’d kissed him like it meant something. He hadn’t kissed like that in a long time.
She had a tight body, too. Maybe his instincts had been wrong. Maybe he should’ve fucked her. Or her mother—equally hot, just older. Steadier. Less panic in the eyes.
Not that it mattered now.
There should be seals. Something edible. June, sure—but there should be seals.
Everything about this island felt slightly off, like a dream remembered wrong. And they hadn’t pushed more than a few hundred yards in either direction.
To say Ivy was impressed with the tent would be a lie. A flagrant one. One big tent, flimsy canvas pretending at walls, and propane burners that barely kept the air just below freezing.
“How do you expect me to masturbate in this?” she asked.
“I don’t,” her mother said. Flat. Factual.
“And we can’t stay on the boat because?”
“It could sink,” Helen said. “She’s anchored to sea and land, but one wrong wave, one wrong storm—she’d be a death trap.”
“But I could masturbate,” Ivy replied. Just as flat. Just as factual.
“Ivy,” Helen said, trying to restart. “It’s not ideal, but it’s shelter. Sturdy enough for a storm, out of the wind. C’mon. Try?”
Ivy sighed. Between dying alone and not? Sure.
She sat on the cot pushed up against the canvas. Her duffel was nestled beside it. Power banks. Batteries. Comics.
Her vibrator.
“I need to change underwear,” she said. “These feel as stale as Pete’s—”
Right. Dead.
“Sorry, Mom. You knew him well?”
“Not really,” Helen said. “First trip with him.”
She sat beside her daughter and took her hand. Ivy didn’t pull away.
“I’m heading out tomorrow. Further inland. Going to take a few samples. By myself. I’ve cleared it with Elias. He’s lending me one of the rifles.” She hesitated. “I just thought… You might want to know.”
Ivy sighed.
“I still need to change my underwear. Do you mind?”
Helen stood, brushing off her knees.
“You’ve never been to an Antarctic field station before, have you?”
“Meaning?”
“No one here gives a damn about your naked ass.”
But Ivy did. And her mother could respect that.
She stripped down, stepped closer to the propane burner, and studied herself. Prickled with cold. Bonier than before. Black hairs creeping up her legs like trespassers. Streaks of stale dirt—sweat, body, wear.
Fur blanketing her cunt.
She thought about burning her underwear—just to spite the cold, to cleanse the staleness of survival—but ended up kicking it into the snow instead. She wondered if it would still stink when they exhumed the camp, looking for their bodies.
Every meal was rationed. Emilie wanted Elias to have her share.
“You’re too bony as is,” he told her.
They never fucked again. They could have. The world just didn’t want that.
Night fell. Morning broke. And Ivy found herself alone in their corner of the tent. A fresh pair of panties did wonders for clarity. The cold was the same in the boat, but the bunks were real, the walls thicker, and the silence easier to own.
She packed her duffel, sighed, and prepared to fight her mother.
Elias watched Ivy disappear into the capsized ship. A problem for later. He still had Helen in view—barely, but there—on the white horizon.
Everything seemed fine. The camp held. The survivors were accounted for. Even Emilie, bending down to take another sample from the same hole she’d been poking for days.
Except—the feeling in his gut. Something off. Always off on this fucked-up island.
Then, the ground rumbled. Cracked. Shook. The sound alone—
Flares. Helicopters. Grenades. The endless screams!
“Shut up!” he screamed. “Shut up! Shut up!”
His knees gave, just for a second. Not from the quake. From the deserts that never, never stopped screaming.
He snapped back just in time to see the cloud of snow tear loose from the ridge. Not wind-blown. Not drifted. Ripped. Like something had punched the mountain from the inside.
He opened his mouth to yell, but the sound caught behind his teeth.
The earth groaned—long and low, like something dying. Then it buckled.
Cracks raced across the ice. Jagged and fast, like lightning crawling through stone. The slope gave way. The snow dragged everything with it: canvas, barrels, tools, tents, the antenna, propane tanks—
Luckily, he’d insisted on keeping half the gear on the ship.
Just in case.
He watched the camp fold inward. Watched the land beneath it vanish. Not collapse. Not slide.
Vanish.
Emilie. Lin. Anne. Yusuf.
He took one step forward, then stopped. There was no point. The sea opened her arms.
And took it all.
By the time the roar reached him, it was already done.
“Helen,” he said, pressing his binoculars to his eyes—as if it would help. As if pain could bring clarity.
No sign of her. No sign of anything. Just white.
She should have been there. Had she—
“Ivy!” he yelled, already running downhill before he’d even turned.
The boat was still there. A little lower in the water.
“Fuck!”
The snow gave under him. The harder he tried to run, the deeper he sank.
Ivy had just dropped her duffel to the galley floor when the world fucked. It fucked hard, and it fucked everything. It threw her down and shook her without mercy.
It didn’t stop. It just carried—out and through—like it orgasmed under its own weight and didn’t care who listened or watched.
“No!” she yelled.
Like the world cared. Like it listened.
“Fuck you!” she screamed.
She felt the boat sink beneath her. Gulping water. She’d meant to go down to the cabin, but hesitation had struck her—and she was glad. She was glad she hadn’t.
“Mom?” she cried.
Broken. Out of tears. But the earth had stilled.
She dragged herself up, onto her knees. Sat there, breathing ice into the air until she couldn’t sit anymore.
She pushed herself to her feet. Headed outside.
Camp.
Gone.
No, not just gone. Swallowed.
Something floated in the water. A jacket. Lin’s.
Something moved on the hill.
Her mother?
Elias.
Struggling with—
He finally saw her, standing on the tilted deck of the ship. He stopped fighting the snow. Didn’t care about the tears swelling inside—foreign, unwelcome, the kind of feeling he hadn’t been allowed to have in years. He just stood there, knee-deep in white, and found her beautiful.
Not just alive.
Beautiful.
She watched him come. Didn’t speak. Didn’t offer a hand to pull him up.
“Mom?” she asked.
“Gone,” he said, like he was reporting back from a failed mission.
“Them?”
“Gone.”
She shrugged. Looked past him. Nothing moved. Nothing even tried to. Not the wind, not the ship, not her.
“Okay,” she said.
Elias sat back in the captain’s chair. Blood and brains never really washed out.
“Coward,” he muttered—like a stale refrain from a song he was too tired to forget.
He’d fired up a propane heater. Two in the galley. Poor girl.
“At least you carried some fine rum,” he whispered to the captain’s ghost.
A clank down below. A boot on the stairs. Hesitant, like it carried more doubt than belief. Then steadier, until she opened the door and stepped inside.
“I turned off the burners,” she said. “We should conserve.”
“Did you shut the valves?” he asked.
“What are you drinking?”
He dangled the bottle between two fingers.
“Can I have some?” she asked.
“How old are you?” he replied.
“How the fuck does that matter?” Ivy sighed. Just too tired. Too, too tired.
Elias understood tired.
He never understood how eighteen-year-olds could vote but not drink. How they could fuck, get pregnant, raise children. How they were allowed to go to war and blow the guts out of strangers—but not rinse the nightmares with booze.
“Help yourself,” he said. Voice thick with gravel. “Sorry about—”
“Hush,” she said.
She filled a stained coffee mug halfway with rum, smelled it, and regretted it—slightly.
“To life,” she muttered, and threw back half of it.
The bridge was warm. The conversation idle. She shed her coat, then drank some more.
“Who were you? Before?” she finally asked, when the silence begged to be reborn.
He shrugged.
“I can’t remember. Some days—” He paused. But she was too beautiful to ignore. “Some days I feel like I was forged. Melted down and poured into a mold I didn’t choose. I can’t even remember high school. What’s it like?”
“Mom wanted me to go to college,” Ivy said, not quite answering.
“And now?”
It felt right. To Ivy. Like the only honest thing left to say.
“No one’s fucked me.”
She could have told him the sea was dark. Or that the moon looked pale tonight. Or how the snow, somehow, stayed impossibly white.
Lin. Anne. Yusuf.
Emilie.
Her mother.
And her only thought? Alone in the world, and still a virgin.
“You don’t want this,” he said finally, as if words ran out at the edge of ice. “It should mean—”
He stopped. Remembered the cadets. The young women he’d trained. The fresh bodies stepping off the planes in Iraq. In Afghanistan. The patriotism. The promises.
“It should mean something.”
“This,” she whispered, waving her arms at the sea, “isn’t just something. This is fucking everything. This is all we have.”
Elias tried to follow her gesture, to see what she saw.
He saw nothing. Just a blank sheet of nothingness.
He had lived too much.
Ivy? Not enough.
“I’m going to undress now,” she said, still a whisper. “It’s all I have left. Please—”
It wasn’t how she’d imagined it. But it wasn’t far, either. The back of Alexander’s van. The bridge of a ship. Both wrecks. Both men unworthy.
“Please don’t make me beg.”
She peeled off wool that clung to her like rot. Each layer heavier than the last, sodden with sweat, salt, fear. The stench grew sharper the more she stripped—soaked into her skin, her hair, her memory. Her bra clung to her ribs like a second carcass. Her socks came off in tatters.
“I’m sorry…” she started. Her voice cracked in the middle, too tired to finish.
Elias didn’t look away. He didn’t leer. He just nodded, once.
“I’ve had worse,” he said.
She stood there, bare. Bone-thin. Bruised by cold. She crossed her arms—then let them fall. There was nothing left to shield.
“No, that’s not true,” he said. “I mean—you’re beautiful.”
His voice was thick. Like whiskey over rubble.
She leaned back. Hoisted herself onto the control panels. Let her foul become want. Let her want become need.
He sipped his rum. Then stood.
Ivy wasn’t Emilie. She was impossible.
He caressed her calf, a gentle tickle of fingers grazing her skin. Still sticky with herself. Salt. Sea. Sweat. Sure, he nudged her further apart. Wider. More open? But nudged—so gentle it felt like watching someone else.
To Elias, she smelled fair. So fair, he felt the world was trying to right all the wrongs it had done to him. And perhaps this was the reward of suffering?
He’d heard the Bible recited. The same with the Quran.
He lifted her leg. Licked her calf.
Sweat. Wool. Wet.
Alive.
Beautiful.
The inside of a thigh that felt so soft and gentle. Pure. He hadn’t remembered what pure tasted.
“Don’t…” she whispered, and he pulled back.
She stared at him.
“No. Fuck no,” she said. “Don’t kiss me like that… I’m foul… but don’t stop.”
Foul? he thought to himself.
She’d survived the ocean, the quake, the silence. She was here, splayed open on rusted steel and begging not to be worshipped. Foul, she’d said—as if the stink of fear and salt and sweat could outstrip the miracle of still being here.
He ran his hand along her hip. Stopped.
She didn’t flinch. Didn’t close her legs.
So he kissed her again, somewhere uglier. Somewhere safe.
“Oh, fuck,” Ivy gasped.
He wasn’t supposed to do that—but if he stopped now? How foul must she have been?
She blushed from the inside out, and that only made everything so much warmer.
“No,” she panted. “You can’t do it like… fuck…”
She held on to the rusted steel. Braced herself against the unbearable pleasure that rose within her.
“Not like you’re making love to me,” she whimpered.
Elias pulled back. He didn’t want to stop. Didn’t want her taste to fade.
“Just fuck me, okay?”
He unzipped. His cock felt heavier in his hand than he remembered. Too fat. Too close. Throbbing with a need that bordered on ache.
“Oh, fuck, no,” she gasped when she saw him. “That thing is… fuck. Just be gentle. Please?”
Elias tried to remember gentle. Something the army had ground out of him. Something the desert had polished down to survival. The ice had taken what was left.
He rubbed against her. She burned hot on his skin—hotter than she had any right to be, hotter than anything left in the world. Her cunt licked at him like it was trying too hard. Or maybe not hard enough. She was wet like the insides of his boots—drenched, half-frozen, too familiar.
Ivy thought she was going to split.
“Oh, fuck,” she whimpered—and still only the tip pressed against her.
She tried to remember what breathing felt like.
“Oh, shit… slow… slow.”
Her hand flattened against his stomach, not to push him back, just to brace. To hold something. She watched herself fold around him, felt her body bulge from the inside out.
“Fuck, it stings,” she panted.
He stopped. Looked down at her. Caught between want and care, between instinct and restraint.
“Don’t fucking stop,” she yelled. “It stings! I didn’t say it was bad!”
Helen jarred back with a snap. Woken by her own gasp.
Everything was dark, but not pitch black like—
Why did she hear water below? She’d been beyond the peak when—
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
She reached for her flashlight. The one in her belt. Right hand. Broken, but numb from the cold.
She sicked. Puked. Turned the nothingness in her gut into acidic burn.
Left hand. Awkward, but mobile. She pushed the button.
Steep rock above her. Water, two feet below.
“You’re not dead yet, Helen,” she said. It could be a curse. It could be a promise to a daughter she didn’t know was dead or alive.
She managed to sit upright. Left ankle bruised, but not broken.
“Schrödinger’s daughter,” she laughed, wondering if she could crack her skull open against the rock.
She screamed. So hard it hurt.
She weighed her options. Down and drown. Freeze to death. Up, fall, fracture her skull, then drown and freeze to death.
Meanwhile, Ivy was trying her best to cum. Stretched a little too wide for pleasure, breathing a little too ragged for release. She should cum. She should.
He groaned. Thrust hard—so hard she thought this was how death might feel—then pulsed. Once. Twice. Sharp and broken.
“Fuck,” Elias said. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “This is okay. It’s…”
“It’s what?” he asked.
“It’s the gateway to next time.”
He stayed inside her. For a little while. Long enough that she felt it mattered.
It felt strange when he pulled out. The flow of it. The hollow. He breathed heavy.
“You’re on the pill, right?”
She closed her legs. To trap whatever was left of him inside.
“Somehow,” she said, “I don’t think that matters.”
She dressed. But she didn’t feel any different. Just sore, stretched, and wet inside.
He sat in the captain’s chair. She lay on the floor. He wrapped a blanket around her, and she remembered her dad for the first time in forever.
“Good night,” she whispered.
He didn’t hear her. He just stared into the blank canvas and slumbered.
Elias Ward never slept quietly. There was always some dream chasing him down—usually the same one. Ambushed, alone, an entire troop gone. Good men, the best. Sergeant Auld. Privates Bushill, Stones, Andrews, Cooper.
Lin. Yusuf. Anne. Emilie.
A captain’s dead son and his friend.
A dead captain. A dead chef.
He always woke the same way: a brutal inhale, like his lungs had forgotten how to breathe—or refused to.
The sea was a blue glare over grey ice and darker snow. It could’ve been early. It could’ve been late. Ivy still breathed. He’d kept his one client alive for nearly a full day. He toasted himself with the captain’s rum.
Then something moved—there, on top of the broken ridge. A seal?
God, he hoped it was a seal. But why there? Why not down by the water?
He picked up the rifle, found the shape through the crosshairs.
And blinked.
“Ivy!” he yelled. “Ivy, wake up!”
She was dreaming—California sun, a van, a mattress, and a cock that finally fit. Heat on her face. Ocean outside.
California dreamin’.
“I’m cumming,” she gasped. “I’m coming. What’s the rush?”
“Get dressed,” he ordered.
She liked him ordering her around.
They slid down the stairs, pulled on their gear, and stepped out onto the tilted deck—still slick, still listing toward the rocks.
He didn’t see her at first. Not against the haze, not with the snowdrifts flattening distance and detail.
“Come with me,” he shouted.
And she followed.
Helen knew if she could just reach the top, the camp would be there—just beyond the ridge. It still felt like night. Her fingers barely worked. Her arm hung crooked, useless. Her ankle throbbed with each shift of weight. But pride was stronger than pain. She’d climbed that wall. Nearly slipped twice. Almost died once. But she hadn’t. She’d beaten the rock. Beaten the sea that had no business being where it was. And she’d done it alone.
God, she was proud of herself.
Ten more steps. Then the dip, the sea, the tents. The heat. The people. Elias, maybe, fuckable or not. She didn’t care.
Five more steps.
She wanted a shower. She wanted her skin back.
Two more.
Her lungs were ice, her balaclava crusted with breath turned brittle. But it didn’t matter. Let her die after. Just let her see it again.
One.
But there was no camp. No antenna. No canvas rippling in the wind. Just a gouge. A wound where the world had split and bled its heat into the ocean. The ship still clung to the rocks below like a carcass, but everything else was gone. Not scattered—gone.
She blinked, waiting for it to unvanish.
Nothing returned.
She dropped to her knees. She didn’t feel the pain. Or maybe she did, but it wasn’t loud enough to matter anymore.
She wasn’t angry. Not yet. She just wanted to drift.
And drifting, she thought, might be the kindest way to go.
Ivy saw her—just a shape, a dark speck against the blue glow of snow. She didn’t move. Not even when Ivy yelled for her.
“Mom!”
It sounded small against the island. Like the word didn’t belong here.
Elias kept two steps ahead, all torque and focus. So rugged. Maybe—just maybe—it was better that it had been him and not Alexander. That it had been someone real. And perhaps, now, it didn’t matter that they were all going to die—all three of them. Everyone else was already gone.
She’d fuck him again. She’d survive the day. He would, then the night—
Oh, God. Ivy. Pull it together.
Once again, Elias was faced with hypothermia.
He couldn’t even tell if Helen was already dead. But something moved behind her eyes—faint, slow. Enough.
He leaned in to lift her.
“I want to die,” she whispered.
Which meant she still felt pain. Still wanted something. That made her salvageable. It’s not too late until you’re numb enough not to care.
“Help me,” he growled at the teenager frozen in her boots.
But Ivy wasn’t useless. She was lost.
She looked at her mother and saw her father—not the man himself, but the stillness. The way the lips turned blue. The way the face stopped belonging to a person and became a mask.
Her mother’s mouth—so much like her own—was already crusted with frost.
“Push under her arm,” Elias barked. “Lift her to your shoulder. Use your legs.”
The arm was limp. Twisted at the wrong angle.
“I think it’s broken!” Ivy shouted.
“It’s already broken,” Elias shot back. “It’s not going to break worse.”
Helen didn’t scream. She didn’t feel the pain they shouted about. The only pain that mattered was being forced to stay alive.
She had—
No.
Yes.
She’d estranged her daughter from her father. She’d fucked around and gotten caught. And he left—too heartbroken to keep trying with a daughter who looked too much like her mother.
And then he died.
And Helen? She blamed him for leaving. And she blamed Ivy for being too much like him. Because if Ivy could hate her father the way she’d come to hate her mother, then maybe Helen could feel justified. Maybe she wouldn’t have to carry it all alone.
And now, a bred killer and her own daughter were carrying her. Down the slope, past the fresh scar in the mountain, past the water-filled ravine where their camp used to be.
“Lin?” she whispered.
Ivy heard her. Didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Her mother had to learn to love her as her only daughter. For however long they had left to try.
“Gone,” Elias growled. “And before you ask—yes. Everything. Everyone. Gone.” He looked at her, not cruelly, not kindly. Just certain. “This is it, Professor Murrow.”
Helen didn’t feel a thing. Yes—the pain was everywhere—but emotion? Lin? Gone? Ann? Maybe she’d already understood that, waking between water and rock. Maybe she’d grieved as she climbed. Or maybe it just didn’t matter anymore.
Perhaps if she just closed her eyes—
Elias felt it. The shift. The way Helen passed out. She went from heavy and limp to something worse: dead weight.
He looked at the girl; she was still determined. Eyes on the ground, legs braced, carrying her mother like it mattered. She hadn’t noticed the shift—not death, not yet—but that unmistakable sag. The brink. Elias had seen it before. Minutes mattered.
So he adjusted. Took more of the weight without telling her. Let Ivy believe it was still shared. Let her keep hoping there was time. Because hope, he’d seen, meant everything. Once hope was gone—
He remembered how alive she’d felt the night before. And how that had made him, somehow, alive again. He’d worked so hard to bury everything. So he buried that too.
He didn’t care if he survived the island. He’d been dead a decade.
But the two women?
Somehow, they managed. They got Helen inside the broken hull. Ivy helped Elias peel away the frozen layers, careful not to jostle her. Cold limbs were fragile. Breakable.
“Too much swelling to brace it properly,” he muttered, eyes on her arm. “Get the burners going. One at her core, not the limbs.”
They stripped her with the care reserved for brittle glass. It didn’t feel strange. It felt necessary. Wet clothes off. Dry blankets on. Heat at her chest, never the hands or feet—never shock the edges first. Warm the center. Let the rest catch up.
“The rest,” he said, “comes down to care. And time.”
He looked at Ivy.
“And maybe the kind of love a daughter has to find.”
Ivy didn’t want him to leave. Not just because she felt safer when he was near. What if her mother decided to die? Wouldn’t it be better if she died with him? He’d dealt with death longer than she’d been alive. Longer than she’d ever live.
She watched him step out of the galley—their bedroom, their makeshift emergency room, the last warm place left aboard the Solstice. Everything below was gone. Flooded.
And now she felt the kind of tired that owned more than just her skin and muscles. It settled into her blood. It soaked into her bones like the captain’s rum had.
Before he—
No. Before she. Before she.
She missed her phone. The camera. The lens to tell her story.
Before she undressed in front of a man too old for her, who felt too right for her. Who’d left her on the brink of feeling something too dangerous. And only the soreness remained to remind her.
That’s the story her viewership deserved. How to become—without regret, without drama, without pretending it was some romantic, important turning point. Not the marrying-kind-of-pink swell KatyAnn_Kitty with the pastel bio and ring-filter cried about.
“I’ll stop hating you if you don’t die,” she whispered.
She missed her phone—not for signal, not for followers, but because she wanted to film the moment her mother stopped being a ghost.
Elias sat back down in the captain’s chair. He poured his rum and toasted the man he never cared to know by name—still, a coward. He laughed at the thought. A captain on a broken ship is about as useful as a tick on your ass. One more soul to feed. That thought alone made him reach for the mental checklist: how much had gone down with the camp?
Emilie. She’d been a different flavor, seasoned, and knew how she liked it. Took it with grace. He toasted her, as well.
Ivy, on the other hand.
Her taste lingered. Even now, through the burn of the rum.
The bridge wasn’t much. Narrow. Naked. Stark. A cabinet crouched in the back, barely wide enough to matter. He dragged his fingers along the top, slow, as if thinking. Didn’t want to pry into a dead man’s secrets.
Opened it anyway.
Logbooks. Charts. More rum.
A rifle that had seen more neglect than a harp seal’s pup. The kind of neglect that made a death—what do they call it?—poetic.
But at the very bottom—
A wetsuit. Still in the original packaging.
Helen didn’t moan, barely breathed, but seemed less pale.
Ivy wondered if she was supposed just to sit there and watch. Should she talk? Like they did in Netflix dramas? Did people really do that?
She looked at her hands—broken nails, crusted in blood—and tucked them under her ass. Leaned forward, just slightly. Just enough to make the ache in her back sting differently.
“So,” she started, “how was your day, Mom?”
It felt awkward.
“I watched the world fall. Yesterday. Is this what you’ve been trying to figure out, Mom? All those hours away from home?”
She sighed.
“I’ve been a good girl, Mom. Never did drugs. Never drank… Never hooked up with boys who knew I was alone all those nights.”
It felt bitter, leaving her mouth.
“It’s not like there weren’t offers, Mom. I could have fucked.”
Something stung, between her ribs and her gut.
“I miss Dad. I’ve missed him half my life. And I love him. I hate that you blame me for that. I want you to stop. At least live long enough to stop.”
She almost reached for her mother’s hand, then remembered Elias’ warning—about trauma, about limbs gone cold.
“Yes, Mom. I watched the world fall yesterday. And do you want to know what I did with that?”
Just a slight pause, to see if it felt real.
“I drank. Rum, I think. I got naked. With him. I don’t know if it was sex, or if he just fucked me, or if it was nothing at all.”
She took her mother’s hand, regardless.
“I need you to live, Mom. Not just so I can tell you I had him first. I—I’m not ready to be an orphan. Okay?”
Elias watched Ivy mutter to her mother in the dark. Helen looked salvageable, like color had returned. He’d have to take a look at that arm. Soon.
He looked down the stairs; even in the wetsuit, it looked cold—unbearable. But there would be pockets of air down there. He just needed to find them. Something had to have survived down there. A can of peaches meant they’d live two more days. There should be fresh water down there, but not a necessity. Enough snow to melt. Inland, away from the sea spray. Anything else down there and not soaked through would do. Because it’d look like hope.
Hope came in two crates of tinned fruit, two flare guns, and dry ammunition. It also came with a silver necklace found in the mother and daughter’s room. Two full tanks of propane. A fire extinguisher. Eight wool blankets, still in their original wrapping.
He managed to get it all safely up. Didn’t ask Ivy—they’d named her so right—for help. He stood there, watching her, dripping what felt like ice onto the floor.
“She’s sleeping easier,” he said. “And so should you.”
Ivy heard his voice, but stayed inside her head. Just a little longer.
She waited for the tears to dry enough to meet his.
“Sleep?” she said. “How? Where?”
He shrugged. Left her. Headed for the bridge.
Ivy returned to her silence. She had run out of words to offer her mother. Just her presence. It should be enough.
Sleep? Oh, it felt like a religious promise. And just as unbelievable. What if she woke up with her dead mother? What if she woke up and found herself dead? She’d not reach 100k followers being dead. Or perhaps that’s exactly what she needed to reach that milestone?
Elias returned. Rummaged with pots and pans. Racket and noise, and out of the wetsuit that had framed his body so right. What if she was like those girls? Who liked older men?
Hope, Elias thought, also came in the form of a chocolate bar—even melted with too much water and powdered milk. The extra shot of rum would fill the gaps.
He poured two large mugs. Not because it was his kind of drink, but maybe it was hers. He turned towards her.
“Here,” he said, handing her the mug.
She drank. And it felt like heaven in a rusted cup. She’d let love fade, her mother’s, her father’s. Alexander wasn’t a fade. It was a gut punch. But chocolate? She loved chocolate.
“Spiked cocoa?” she asked. “Don’t get any ideas.”
He sat down, looked at Helen’s arm.
“The swelling’s gone down. Not enough. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Did it mean anything to you?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. Kept staring at her mother’s arm. Until—
“You were right,” he said. “About this. This is all we have, all that’s left. I found two flares. Too soon to use them. Enough ammo to hunt seals into forever. If there were any.”
He looked at her. Fiddled with the silver necklace in his pocket.
“It takes a while to get used to seal. I suggest you get used to the idea.
Did it mean anything?
Enough to die trying to get your mother and you off this island.”
Yes, Ivy had let love fade. But if love felt like this—quiet, steady, spoken in his words—had she wasted it?
But the hot chocolate worked. It let her surrender to what her body had been pleading her for. And when Elias handed her two wool blankets that didn’t smell of salt, sweat, and wet, anything could work as a bed.
She was too tired to worry about dressing down in front of him. He didn’t even stare. He drank his mug of melted chocolate, water, and illusion of milk. He watched her, but he never stared.
She put the blankets down on the floor and tucked herself between them.
“Good night,” she whispered.
He waited until her breath had found a steady rhythm, then headed back up onto the bridge.
Helen didn’t exactly feel her body; she felt the gaps in the pain. Even opening her eyes was painful.
She wasn’t dead in the snow.
Also, she felt warm. It made her feel like a stranger in her body—a visitor. Elias stood above her, looking at her right arm.
“How does it feel?” he asked.
“Broken,” she said.
“Can you move your fingers?”
She tried. Left hand first. The other one? It didn’t feel like answering.
But to Elias, the small movement of her fingertips was all the evidence he needed.
She felt naked, so she asked.
“You removed my clothes?”
He nodded, eyes still on her arm.
“Mostly Ivy.”
Helen froze.
Felt pregnant again.
“Ivy?” she breathed. “She’s alive?”
He nodded to the floor behind him.
“Not just alive,” he said. “I think she saved us. Both of us.”
Finally, he looked at her.
“You should be proud of her.”
Time became desolation, but the three of them found rhythm enough to make it survivable.
Ivy was good with a rifle, even by Elias’ standards. Helen’s arm healed well enough for her to relearn writing with her left hand.
The seals returned.
Helen watched Ivy curled on the floor and loved every breath she took. Elias counted stock.
“I think I’ll take Ivy seal hunting tomorrow,” he said.
There was something about the way he said her daughter’s name.
“You’ve got any more of that rum?” she asked.
“Two and a half bottles,” he answered.
“All we need is something to celebrate,” she said.
He looked at her. Something in her voice had turned softer. Warmer. Less the woman who checked his punch card, more a woman who just existed.
“You don’t need an occasion to drink,” he said. Not as flat as he wanted.
“How about…” she started. “It’s almost mid-July. Six years since—”
Ivy was asleep. It wasn’t like there was anything on TV.
“Since someone fucked me,” she whispered.
“I don’t need rum for that,” he admitted.
No, Helen thought. But maybe I do.
But not there, not in front of Ivy.
The bridge.
She stood in the doorway, nodded up, and he followed.
It didn’t need to be pretty; she didn’t beg for gentleness. Just quiet enough not to wake Ivy.
He didn’t offer either.
Especially not the quietness. But that was mostly her.
She’d always orgasmed easily. Especially when spread wide and taken, not as much on a bed, loved. Perhaps that was Ivy’s father’s biggest fault? Loving her too much? And claiming her too little.
Fuck, Elias was big.
“Did you…” she gasped. “Did you fuck her with that thing?”
Elias pretended the question hadn’t landed. Didn’t want to hear it.
Ivy?
Ivy was something else. Something that had mattered. Something that had changed. Helen was different. Need. Need given and taken. Also, Helen had cum. Twice.
Elias knew it was only his ego that fed from that, but perhaps his ego needed feeding. He’d lost almost all of the crew. His only job was to keep them alive.
Helen felt alive.
“Yes,” he said.
“Harder,” she whimpered.
Harder would make him cum.
And end what they shared.
“Would you do it again?” she asked, almost breathless.
Her? Or Ivy? It didn’t matter. Didn’t change the answer.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Fffffuck,” she moaned.
Elias was trained to operate on command. Mission-based. Task-driven. If she said fuck me, he fucked. If she said on my face, he came on her face. No questions. No hesitation. No improvisation.
When there were no orders, he completed the objective.
It was her duty—always her duty—to issue the correct mission strategy. He followed her directives the way he once followed field coordinates: without question, with full force.
So when she gave no command—just clutched his shoulders and pulled him deeper—her cunt did the rest. Wet and clenching, like a command she hadn’t spoken, not in words.
He came inside her. Hard. With a grunt. Nothing more. More indulgence than he’d expected.
Completion.
Ivy heard it all. Or most of it. Helen’s part of it, not so much him.
That’s why she found herself on her stomach, hips grinding against her palm, split too open on herself, mouth full of wool.
She’d followed channels that talked about taboo. Thought she understood the language. But hearing it—her—like that? And knowing she’d made herself part of it?
Especially one—Adam and Eve’s Dark Side of Becoming, her favorite—talked too much about daughter’s envy. It used to feel distant. Now, it felt like her pulse. Episode sixteen. Not the father. The partner.
The envy.
She lifted her ass, pressed her face deeper into the blanket. Her fingers did the rest.
Fucked her. Too hard for her rhythm.
She landed, not in shame. Not yet. Just an orgasm she didn’t understand. Wool stuck to her mouth. Her breath caught in the fabric.
The shame came a few beats later.
There were duties on board. A schedule to keep, all written down by Elias. She was supposed to count what little supplies they had, turn the fire extinguisher upside down every seven days, sweep the bridge and galley twice daily, and take inventory of the chocolate bar—yes, the one. Just to make sure it hadn’t disappeared.
Clean her rifle. Log the flare guns. Keep a logbook, even when the entries said nothing new.
Status meetings in the morning, whenever morning happened, and again before curfew.
The madness to avoid it.
None of it said anything about her aching cunt, her slick fingers, or how to get wool out of her mouth.
She still tasted wool when they returned. She’d made her bed, her mother’s bed. His bed. She’d made breakfast. Three cans of tuna. Melted snow to water and put the second last jar of instant coffee on the table.
We’re hunting today,” he said. “Time to test your skills.”
“Seals?”
“East ridge. Looks like they’ve landed on the beach.”
Ivy looked at her mother, flushed, arm still in a brace. She nodded.
Helen watched them from the bridge—two specks against the snow. Elias and her daughter, dragging shovels and the field burner on a makeshift sled—an old bunk, a coil of rope.
Ivy had a gun.
The weather looked calm, but calm out there meant nothing.
She logged the temperature.
Minus four. Minus twenty-point-five, in scientific terms. Military.
Her daughter was bright. She’d packed a vibrator.
Ivy felt the temperature drop. Or maybe it was just the wind picking up.
Didn’t matter. Out there, across the long plains of white nothingness, cold only came in two forms:
Painful. And lethal.
Elias walked in front. The sled packed down his footsteps, made hers a little less hard-fought.
But now he stopped, turned toward her, and yelled something she couldn’t catch through the wind and snow drift.
He took the shovel, gestured for her to grab the other, then started digging. She caught on and followed his lead—first down, then in. When the trench felt deep enough, he pulled the sled tight against the opening. Poked two holes into the outer wall. Got the field burner off the sled and lit it.
Ivy grabbed the two blankets they’d packed and folded them tight for something to sit on.
“You did good,” he said. “Where’s your rifle?”
She’d thrown it inside—she remembered that—and found it half-buried in the snow. His was still slung over his shoulder.
“Clean it,” he said.
Helen noted the change in the weather. Logged it. The wind. The temperature drop. Minus twenty-six. Forgot the conversion. Didn’t matter anymore.
Ivy’s fingers were blue. But the rifle was clean. Frozen, but clear—no snow jammed in the places it shouldn’t be.
“What now?” she asked, setting it against the wall.
“We wait.”
The burner worked. The trench felt livable.
“Are we going to die waiting?”
“No. But the seals might be gone.”
She stared at the snow beneath her boots.
It wasn’t staying alive that worried her anymore. It was slipping out of life so slowly she wouldn’t notice when it happened.
She sighed.
“I asked you if it mattered,” she said. “You told me it gave you a reason to save us.”
He grunted. That was all.
Elias didn’t need words. Or feelings. He needed a mission, a strategy, and a plan.
He had the mission. He had the strategy.
He didn’t have a plan.
There was no way off the island. Not in mid-winter. The alert about their disappearance might not even have gone out yet. And even if it had—best case? September.
They’d be dead by then if the seals were gone.
He reached into his pocket. Held up the necklace.
“Yours?”
She touched her collarbone. Clutched her chest. She hadn’t even noticed it was missing.
“Last thing Dad ever gave me,” she said.
He stretched, offered it to her.
She shook her head.
“No. Now it’s the first thing I ever gave you.”
He looked at it. A faded silver ivy leaf.
Fidelity. Eternal life. Evergreen.
“We could sit here,” she said, “and be quiet. Pretend. Or, we could give you another reason to save us?”
He looked at her.
“What? Here? Now?”
She was done pretending.
“We only have here and now, Elias.”
Survival gear bunched at her ankles, stiff with cold and still stamped with her name. Coat just pulled up over her ass. Face pushed into wool, discovering kink by accident.
His hands on her hips, pulling—then pushing.
Then her hand, cold against her warm clit. It felt like she was burning. Perhaps she was.
Her thighs trembled. She didn’t know what to do with the feeling. She’d never orgasmed by anything but her toys or hands.
Never had it pushed out of her. Not like this.
Ivy didn’t even know if she wanted to cum, or if she had a choice. It felt too much, like she had lost control of herself. Perhaps that’s what it was supposed to feel like. Like almost pissing yourself, then reaching the bowl just in time. Like she was breathing through her skin.
Screaming felt wrong, but she had no choice.
“Cum inside me!” felt absurd.
To him, it felt like a mission statement.
No. A chance. At redemption. If he got them off this island, maybe life would let him try again. Not for himself.
Through her. Them.
The wind stilled. The seals were still there.
To Elias, it was a lifeline. He passed it on to Ivy.
Meat. He even tried curing it—with the absurd abundance of salt they had.
Skin, not just for warmth, but to patch worn-out boots, to seal the wind out of every cracked windowpane.
Blubber for heat. For light. Bones for tools. Even tendons—when the rope finally ran out.
He fucked them both. And it felt right. Better, somehow.
One night, he woke to find Ivy already straddling him, taking him before he’d even opened his eyes. She’d turned the fear of dying untouched into something else. Choice. Control.
July turned to August. August bled into September. It had to be September.
He fired the first flare.
They made it a ceremony. It felt special.
They drank the rest of the rum.
Ivy gagged at the smell of seal, but she needed it. They all did.
She rubbed her belly. Something had stuck. She could feel it—somehow.
Three more weeks.
Helen watched her daughter. The wool stretched tighter across her frame. She should have lost weight. They both should have.
Every morning, Ivy slipped out early. “Taking temperatures,” she’d say. But Helen knew. Knew the lean over the railing. Knew that look—morning sick, just like she’d been once, with Ivy.
They fired the second flare.
It felt more like a burial ritual—the last hope. The last thread of a life once had, and acceptance of what was.
But rescue did come.
A Chilean science ship out of Punta Arenas, weather-blown and radio-blind, tracking ice drift patterns and old seismic buoys. They spotted the flare by accident. Maybe fate. Maybe timing. Maybe just light against too much white.
A rib-boat. Three men, none of whom spoke English—but of course Elias spoke Spanish too.
But Ivy wept.
She had come to accept the island as home. The trauma, once unbearable, had become something shared—something lived. The frozen remains of the Solstice were her house.
It felt wrong to cling to her duffle and just say goodbye to it all.
She dropped it into the snow, then ran back inside. Somewhere, buried beneath the layers of nothingness, she found her cracked phone.
Elias wanted to retreat—go inland, disappear. But there would be another expedition. Maybe military. They’d dig out the Solstice, sift through the remnants of the camp, try to piece together what had happened on the island.
He’d be found.
Helen was the only one who wept for the right reason. Rescue. A life continued. A life salvaged.
Yes, she was pregnant. Forty-one and pregnant. If it were a boy, he’d be Elias. Ellie, if it were a girl.
She just didn’t show. Yet.
Ivy was the miracle girl. The pregnant girl rescued off the island, the one on every news channel.
Only. She didn’t feel like one.
Not in the shower. Not even with the water turned hot, or the soap worked deep into her skin. She still smelled it all—sea, salt, sweat, and wool.
And a belly that was undeniably filling with life.
She did become an internet phenomenon. Not the hundred thousand followers she’d expected—no, it exploded into something she hadn’t wanted. The grainy winter footage, the cracked, frozen voice. People watched. They watched everything.
They sat on the couch, just after Christmas dinner. Ivy dreamt of seal.
“What happened to him?” Ivy asked her mother.
“He slipped off the ship when we landed,” Helen said. “He didn’t say goodbye. I saw him go and didn’t want to stop him. I made sure his money was wired, though. As written in his contract.”
“Did you love him?” Ivy asked.
“Did you?” her mom said. “Or did you need him?”
Ivy didn’t answer. She just rubbed her belly.
“How will I ever be loved after him?” she asked.
Helen didn’t answer. Wasn’t sure if the question was about love or even sex.
She stretched her right arm—something she did more of compulsion than anything.
“How’s the hand, Mom?”
“I can lift a coffee cup. Open a door. Good thing I wasn’t a surgeon.”
Silence wasn’t their enemy anymore. It felt earned. Warm.
“I’m due late March,” Ivy reminded her.
A boy. To be named Elias.
Helen grinned.
“Yes,” she said. “You had him first. I was in a coma, remember?”
Helen was due in April. A girl. Ellie.
“I’ll raise them both,” she whispered.
It sounded like the last word was missing.
“If?” Ivy asked.
“If you’ll enroll in college this fall.”
It felt like a bitter reminder of what they’d been. Before.
“So I can become what you were?”
“No,” Helen said quietly. “So you can become what your father was.”
