Arka moved to stand beside Pome. “I don’t know if Zeen can be got back, but I do know you can’t do it by yourself.” She set her hand to Yaz’s breastbone as she tried to advance. “I remember the Ictha being famed for making the best of bad situations . . . like everything north of the Three Seas.” She allowed herself a smile. “So let’s see some of that alleged common sense.”

Yaz ground her teeth but the sting of the rebuke managed to reach through both her anger and her resolve. She had let her clan down in a dozen ways since the sun rose. Every act she had taken unwrote the Ictha code. She bowed her head. Her recklessness and sacrifice had been as foolish as she had always been taught they were. She would do it right this time. Wait, plan, gather resources, and strike only when reason dictated. The Ictha way. Slowly she turned back and went to stand with the others who had fallen today.

Yaz joined the new arrivals. The gerants she passed to reach them made her feel as though she were a child again despite it being the day she was given her adulthood. She went to stand at the back of the group. The girl just ahead of her turned to see, teeth chattering. She looked to be just a little older than Zeen, of slight build with long brown hair and curious brown eyes. It was the different eyes that would take the longest to get used to.

“S-so you’re the special one.” The girl’s voice shook with cold. Yaz hardly noticed her own damp clothing. The cavern was warmer than her mother’s tent in winter. “Th-the one they’re excited about.”

Yaz frowned. “Me?”

“Th-the boy said he saved you from a hetta. I don’t know what that is but he made it sound bad.”

“It was pretty bad.” An image of Jaysin’s dangling head flashed across Yaz’s vision again. She hadn’t considered why they would risk themselves to help her. They hadn’t helped little Jaysin. She shook the thought away. “Why would they care about me? I’m not special—” She bit the word off. They were all special down here, she guessed. Just not in a good way. Broken. Unfit for the ice. “Why? I’m not worth saving.”

“You don’t see it?” The girl hugged herself, hands to her shoulders. “I guess maybe you wouldn’t . . . I saw it as soon as you came in.”

“Saw what?”

“The stars,” the girl said. “They burn brighter when you’re near.”

5

   YOU STAND BEFORE us still wet from the drop. Your tribe and your clan have thrown you aside and not one of them raised their voice to save you. They called you flawed, wrong, unworthy, and you were cast into darkness to die.” The man who addressed them was neither tall nor old. Yaz had thought one of the gerant would lead, for who could stand against them? Or failing that, the eldest would hold sway with the wisdom of years. But the man who paced back and forth before the crowd seemed unremarkable save for the darkness of his skin, which gleamed blacker than the rock itself, something Yaz had never seen even among the many tribes of the gathering. Even his head gleamed, lacking any hair. “We are your family now and we have all fallen here. We are the unwanted, the things of such little use that they are thrown away. We are what is beyond repair. We are the Broken.”

“The Broken!” The name rang in dozens of mouths.

“I am Tarko. I command here by the will of the Broken. You have questions. We have answers. You are wet, and the cold will kill you long before you starve. We have heat and food. You were given no choice at the mouth of the pit. I give you a choice. A hard choice.” He shrugged and pressed his lips together in apology. “A hard choice, but still a choice. You may join us or . . .” He raised a hand toward the tunnel they had entered by. “Or make your own way.”

Tarko watched them, the handful of shivering southerners, and Yaz. She glared back at him, boiling with her fury at . . . everything . . . and as angry at having nothing and no one to blame as she was at the rest of it. A short silence reigned. Yaz felt the pressure of many eyes upon her, and still Tarko held his arm toward the dark tunnel.

“No?” His arm fell. “Then welcome, brothers and sisters.” Tarko turned his gaze on the rest of Yaz’s new tribe. “Five . . . it is not what we hoped for. A single drop-leader will be sufficient—”

Pome stepped forward, raising his light-stick. “I was first to be selected! Arka and—”

“Arka will be drop-leader for this group.” Tarko singled out the woman who had brought Yaz in.

“This is nonsense.” Pome wasn’t done. A gerant moved to stand at his shoulder, glowering at Tarko, one eye filled with malice, the other milky white. This one looked as if he could crush ice in his fist, the muscles of his arm mounding beneath his furs. “We should have taken the centre pool back. We can’t survive on . . .” He gave Yaz and the others a withering look. “Five.”

“The Tainted are too many—”

“And how many of us will there be in ten years if we gain five each gathering?”

Tarko sighed. “More than if we fight the Tainted for the centre pool each time.” He looked away. “Drop-Leader Arka, dry these wets off and let’s see if they were worth the price we paid.”

* * *

“COME ON, I know where it’s warm.” Arka strode past them and the children hurried after her. Yaz paused, gazing back at the dark entrance that had been the other choice Tarko offered. She watched the Broken, crowding around their leader and around Pome, who had spoken against him, most of them trying to make themselves heard. Some were angry, some stern, but most just looked worried. It seemed that the ripples spreading from the arrival of Yaz and the others had not stopped at the edges of the pools into which they had fallen.

“You, Ictha girl!” Arka called from the rear of the cavern. “Come on!”

Yaz frowned then hurried after the group.

She caught up with the last of them. The girl glanced back and offered a nervous grin. “I’m M-M-Maya.” She stuttered the name past her shivering. Maya, who had said that thing about the stars shining brighter. Beyond the girl a boy more than a head taller than Yaz and broad with it, owning a man’s size but a child’s face, then another also tall but slender.

The cavern narrowed, then widened, then spread to join a maze of other wide, low-roofed caverns. It appeared that the warmth, which eventually found its way out through the Pit of the Missing, created an air gap above the bedrock of between one and five yards, leaving an ice sky above them supported here and there by still-frozen areas. Seams of the dust-like stars mottled the glacial ice above them, providing a faint illumination, brighter here, darker there, and in some places a larger star, like the one Pome carried in his stick, seemed to have been deliberately sunk into a wall to provide better light.