CHAPTER 126: WARM HANDS

Arashi discovered speed again on his fifth attempt, which went better. Then he flailed, twisted, and landed on both feet somehow, arms flung wide, eyes wide open. He held the pose for a second too long.

Toma clapped. "That was... Uh... something."

"It was art" Arashi panted.

Obi decided to narrate his own descent like a sportscaster. "And he’s off - clean line - oh no - oh yes - oh absolutely not! He’s down - ladies and gentlemen that concludes our broadcast - " He lay in the snow and made angel wings out of spite.

Esen waited until they all were distracted and then used a ring pulse to sling himself down twice as fast as a good idea, whooping. He veered, panicked, corrected by accident, and ended in a spray that coated Hikari in snow.

She blinked through it. "Cheating" she said calmly.

"It’s not cheating if I’m having fun" Esen argued, beaming.

"Not really" Lynea said.

They would have kept "learning" until someone needed a new bandage, but the sun found the strength to bruise the clouds and the light turned everything soft orange. That’s when Obi, with the instincts of a child in a kitchen and a soldier in a ceasefire... Come on, we’re talking about Obi here...

Initiated a snowball war.

He hit Raizen square in the shoulder with the first one. It was a good, honest ball, well-packed, well-aimed, deeply deserved.

Raizen blinked. Slowly bent down. Scooped.

"You don’t want this" Obi warned.

Raizen hit him behind the ear, right where hat meets hair. Obi screamed like a kettle and fell backward by principle.

War.

Ichiro built a fortress in thirty seconds out of drift and whatever stones he could find and lift, without ruining the landscape too much. Lynea took the high ground and began lobbing with uncanny accuracy from behind a sapling. "I am not cheating" she said as a fragment hovered near her palm like a halo. "I’m... Uh... Optimizing trajectory."

"You’re absolutely cheating" Esen said admiringly, then wound a ring and detonated a snowball above her head like festive artillery.

"We’re supposed to be relaxing" Raizen shouted through a grin he didn’t know he was wearing.

"I am relaxed" Esen said, firing again.

Feris, midair and haughty, took a hit to the hip and spun in a slow, wounded pirouette, rope twisting like ribbon. "Come on... I know I love spinning, but this is too much!" she announced.

Hikari switched teams twice to adjust the balance of power and refused to be ashamed about it. Her throws weren’t the hardest, but they landed exactly where they needed to land. Obi called her a sniper. She pretended she hadn’t heard him and hit him in the mouth.

Toma stayed on the edge of the fray with two miners, laughing like he’d invented winter. "You’re all terrible" he told them, delighted.

"Professionals" Arashi said from inside his own, small, collapsing wall. "Do not try this at home."

It ended not because anyone won but because they all fell over at once, the way people do when laughter short-circuits combat. They lay there, winded and ridiculous, breathing steam and watching nothing in particular.

"We needed this" Raizen said to the sky, which was a kind of gray that pretends to be neutral and fails.

Hikari rolled onto an elbow. Snow had frosted the end of her scarf. "It’s nice" she said, "when the world doesn’t try to kill us for an hour."

"Speak for yourself" Feris muttered from upside down, still gently rotating. "I almost died of dignity loss."

Lynea pressed Toma’s handkerchief against a fresh, harmless scratch and watched the red mark the fabric like a map. "Worth it" she said softly.

Toma waved from the lower slope and cupped his hands around his mouth. "Told you it’s fun!"

Arashi threw a snowball at him from the ground. It landed twelve meters short. "Range is an illusion. Not with my guns, though" he said solemnly.

They made one more run, because leaving right after laughter would have looked bad. Then they shouldered the broom poles, unstrapped the crate lids, and trudged back toward camp, trailing melted snow and a day that had decided, kindly, to be a normal day.

...

Alteea met them halfway. Not in person - she was welded to the command module by profession and temperament - but in the small warmth of her voice.

"You sound alive" she said, and if anyone accused her of listening for the laughter over the general channel, she would deny it until court-martial. "How was controlled falling?"

"Scientific" Hikari said.

"Humiliating" Feris said.

"Awesome" Obi said.

"No anomalies?" Raizen asked, because it was his job to ask the cloud if it intended to rain.

"No new signatures" Alteea said. "The mountain is either napping or pretending to. Both acceptable."

Kori grunted over a different loop. "Reminder: Stand down early. Eat. No "evening patrols". I’ll make you run laps around a heater."

"My heart is closed to geography" Obi said, solemn. "But I might elope with cocoa."

They drifted into the perimeter. Heaters glowed a soft orange. Someone had hung a line of mismatched gloves to dry. Hikari shook powder out of her hair and smiled at nothing. Lynea, to everyone’s surprise, accepted hot tea without insulting it first.

Dinner was a stew that tried to be better and, after Lynea added a pinch of something and insulted it by name, succeeded. Stories tried to happen and, surprisingly, succeeded. The miners traded lies with the Gravers and the lies all sounded true enough to keep. Toma proved he could whistle through his teeth and failed to teach Obi.

Night came. Not the bad kind. The kind that lays over a place like a blanket you didn’t realize you wanted. The perimeter lamps hummed at a pitch that sounded like machines and not like ideas. The generator yawned. The wind forgot to be cruel. For a while, nothing tried to be strange.

Alteea pinged one last time, soft as a hand on a shoulder. "Perimeter alright. If the generator complains, tell it jokes. Or keep Obi doing it. The rest of you aren’t allowed to whine. Team Three... good work doing nothing."

"Copy" Raizen said, and Obi echoed: "We are experts."

They turned down the lights. The gold circle on snow tucked itself smaller. People drifted toward cots wearing the particular exhaustion of laughter. Raizen lingered at the edge of the ring because leaving right away would have looked like fear and staying too long would have looked like the same thing.

The air felt clean. He could have believed, if he wanted, that the mountain had decided to forgive them everything for one evening.

A snowflake drifted across the boundary of light. It paused for the length of a heartbeat - tiny constellation hanging between here and there - then remembered to fall.

The other workers went in their tents, and around the small bonfire (That Ichiro so skillfully made), remained only the eight. Laughter still alive. Jokes everywhere. Feris... Leave her levitate in peace.