Chapter Text
Acmetropolis had been sweating itself into a heat-wave stupor when the glacier arrived like a verdict. One hour the streets shimmered; the next, frost climbed the towers in white veins and the Space Vikings planted their freeze-axes in the civic heart as if the city were a haunch of meat. Zadavia's summons found the six of them already moving. That was the first season's grammar: disaster, then the elevator, then Ace's voice cutting the static.
Rev had brought pizza. He always brought pizza when the waiting stretched, because waiting made his legs itch and a delivery run was the only itch he knew how to scratch without putting a crater in the floor. The box steamed against the sudden cold and then did not steam at all. Tech lifted a slice. The cheese had gone to glass.
“Now that,” Tech said, in the register he reserved for phenomena that offended him on principle, “is cold.” He took a bite anyway, because a coyote who had once been a student at Acme Tech University did not waste calories, even frozen ones. “Where'd ya get it? Iceland.”
Rev's mouth opened the way a gate opens when someone has forgotten the latch. “Actually, no, I just picked it up at a pizza joint in downtown which I must say isn't really cold this time of year but if you really like the pizza in Iceland I could go get some and be back in four-point-two seconds but of course that's just an estimation because you really don't know about traffic and also there's a glacier now so the traffic would be more like a skating rink with horns—”
Tech's gloved fingers found a second slice and placed it, with the precision of a man seating a crystal in a housing, directly into Rev's talking. Rev's eyes crossed. The words died against mozzarella. Tech's expression did not change except at the very corner of the left eye, where a warmth that had nothing to do with the heat-wave collected and then hid itself.
“That,” Tech said, “would be one of those questions that didn't require an answer.”
They went out into the white. The iceberg that the Vikings had hauled from whatever frozen pocket of space they called home sat in the harbor like a cathedral built by spite. Rev flew up beside Tech after the coyote's first pass nearly kissed the ice the wrong way, wings buzzing, talk already restarting.
“Would you look at that thing it's gotta be the biggest iceberg I've ever seen I've seen some before did you think we should have put some more juice in the blasters not like I doubt your expertness but that is one giant—”
“Rev,” Ace called from the lower approach, ears flat against the wind, “watch where you're talking.”
The Retro Fire Master Blaster did what Tech had promised and then did a little less, because ice of that scale drinks heat the way a desert drinks a cup. Slam's magma tornado would be the answer; Ace already knew it, the way Ace always knew the shape of a solution two beats before the rest of them finished naming the problem. Between that knowing and the doing, the Vikings fired.
The freeze-beam caught Rev mid-sentence. Frost raced up the red of his suit like a rumor. His wings seized. For a fraction of a second that Tech's mind, which counted fractions as a priest counts beads, filed under unacceptable, Rev hung in the air as a statue of himself.
Tech's magnetism answered before his mouth did. Iron in the Viking ship, iron in the blaster housings, iron in the pins of Rev's own gear—he gathered it all into a bowl of force and folded Rev out of the beam the way a man folds a letter he is not ready to send. They hit the lee of a shattered kiosk together. Rev's breath came in little white knives. Tech's field hummed between their chests, a green-gold pressure that made the hair along Rev's throat lift.
“You—okay—you—okay—you okay Tech I can't feel my left wing but I can feel the other one and also I think my beak is stuck in the smile position which is not the worst place for a beak to be stuck if you think about it—”
“Rev.” Tech's voice had dropped the lecture and kept only the grain. His gloved hand found the roadrunner's shoulder, thumb resting in the seam where red fabric met the rapid bird-heat of him. “Breathe at a velocity the atmosphere can accommodate.”
Rev breathed. The smile unstuck by degrees. Up close, Tech could see the gold ring around Rev's pupil, the small nick in the orange beak from some old delivery that had gone through a door instead of around it. The field still held. It had no reason to hold. The Vikings were regrouping fifty meters off. Slam was already spinning up the heat that would save the city. There was no tactical argument for the two of them remaining inside a private weather.
Rev's talk slowed, which was how you knew the fear had changed species. “You pulled me out.”
“A simple application of ferromagnetic—”
“You pulled me out.”
Tech's ears, which he kept neat because neatness was a kind of armor, angled forward despite him. Rev leaned the last two inches the field would allow. The hum rose. Cold air made a third party of itself between muzzle and beak, and for a long, unscientific second Tech thought about the ancestral joke—the coyote who never caught the bird—and about how catching was the wrong verb entirely.
Ace's laser cut the kiosk's remaining sign in half. “Tech! Rev! Slam's got the melt—move!”
The field dropped as if ashamed. Rev bounced back onto his toes, talk flooding the vacancy, already listing the thermal coefficients of glacial ice for anyone who would listen. Tech stood a half-second longer in the shape of the field that was no longer there, then followed, green coat snapping, the slice of almost already filing itself under experiments that lacked a control group.