“Not really,” she says.
My stomach feels as if it has been left somewhere high above. Below us, shapes begin to form through the mist. White shapes. Very large white shapes. Mountains, but very strange, clad in white.
“No no no,” Riley mutters, jerking the stick in the opposite direction.
The saucer tilts sharply. The horizon spins. The ground surges closer.
I brace my feet wide apart, push hard up with one hand, while holding Riley upright with the other.
“Perhaps you should do the opposite of what you are doing!” I suggest.
“I am trying!” she snaps.
The mist tears away, and suddenly we are low over a vast white landscape that glitters in the sunlight.
Then I see something that chills me more than the cold world below. A dark circle racing across the snow. Our shadow.
And it is growing larger very quickly. Which has to mean…
“Riley,” I say calmly, “I think we are still falling.”
“I know!” she cries, yanking the stick again.
The saucer jerks sideways instead of upward. The ground tilts toward us like a wall of white stone.
The impact comes a heartbeat later. The saucer strikes the ice at a steep angle with a thunderous crash. I pull Riley against me as the entire craft slams sideways. The world outside becomes a spinning blur of white and blue.
We’re rolling. The saucer turns onto its edge and begins to spin across the glacier like a giant wheel. The saucer hums peacefully while we tumble across the ground, sliding and crashing into the curved walls.
White shapes flash past the viewscreens again and again.
Then, without warning, the spinning stops. The saucer jerks violently and slams to a halt with a terrible screech that goes through all of me.
For a moment, there is only silence, and the faint creaking of stressed metal.
I slowly open my eyes. I’m lying on the wall of the ship, and the world outside is tilted.
The saucer is standing on its side, wedged deep between two towering walls of translucent blue,
And we are very, very far from the jungle.
For several long moments, none of us speak.
“I think we’re down,” I finally state. “Are you all right?”
Riley moves in my arms. “Yes, thank you.”
It takes us a while to stand up, with the wall as our new floor, and the floor as a new wall.
Riley looks around at the landscape around us. “We’re stuck in… in water.”
“Water?” I repeat. “This isn’t water.”
“Hard water,” she says. “Water get cold, go hard.”
“Ah. Ice,” I remember the word we use. “I’ve heard of that.”
“You never seen ice before?” she asks.
