I gasp, flinging my hands up over my mouth. My breath is forced out of my lungs, so sharply that it stings, as if I’m the one who just vanished into the water.

My thoughts lapse into complete nothingness. All I can do is stare, uncomprehending, my mind utterly blank.

By my side, Aiden turns, and runs.

Aiden is unbelievably fast, even when the situation isn’t dire. But there’s something about the way he runs during moments like this, when a life hangs in the balance. I know how scared he is, but he hits this level of focus and - it’s like he flies. Even wearing his Timbs, even on a slippery riverbank, even with panic closing in from every corner, Aiden runs like we can still save this kid.

Something about that gives me hope. Maybe it's possible. Maybe we can.

Instructions finally get from my brain to my body. I spin in the snow and set off after Aiden, racing along the riverside.

I don’t know what we’re going to do. I don’t know if there’s anything we can do. But Aiden isn’t giving up yet, so neither am I.

Out in the middle of the frozen river, the kid suddenly surfaces, gasping and heaving. His glasses are gone from his face, and his oversized backpack, thankfully, is gone from his shoulder.

Relief crashes through me. Every second the kid spends above water is more time for us to potentially save him. We’re so damn far away, and even at the speed Aiden is going, it’s going to take us a minute to get there.

For a moment, the kid just floats there, motionless and disoriented, clearly in cold shock.

And then the full force of the temperature must hit him, because he takes a huge, shuddering breath, and begins to frantically grab at the ice around him.

Without breaking his stride, Aiden waves his arms over his head.

“We’re coming!” he bellows, at the top of his voice. “We see you! Don’t do that, we’re coming!”

“Hold still!” I add, shouting as loudly as I can. “Hold still, don’t-!”

The kid sees us, but apparently we’re too far away for him to understand what we’re saying, because he lunges at the edge of the ice and tries to roll out onto it.

The movement fractures a lot more ice, widening the hole he’s trapped in.

“No!” Aiden shouts, and I can hear the thread of panic in his voice. “Don’t do that, just-!”

The kid once again tries to kick his way out onto the ice. More of it snaps and falls apart, including the piece he was holding onto. He pulls it with him as he slips back into the water. Still gripped in his fingers, the slab of ice flips up onto its side, stands on its thinnest edge for a moment, then - flips over.

I gasp again as the kid disappears beneath the falling piece of ice, vanishing back beneath the water.

“Fuck!” Aiden shouts.

“Just keep going!” I yell back, but Aiden doesn’t need to be told.

He reaches the same piece of riverbank where the kid began his crossing.

He sprints directly for the frozen river.

My heart plummets, and I hear myself scream: “Aiden, no!”

I’m too far behind to grab him, but suddenly I’m running faster than I ever have in my life. I’m vaguely aware that Aiden is shouting something back at me, but I don’t hear a word he says.

Adrenaline hums through my veins. Everything around me seems to slow down. The only piece of information I can hang onto for longer than a second is that Aiden is in danger.

I crash into him and shove him back from the river, my fingers trembling.

“No, Aiden! Why do you think he fell in? There are warm currents beneath the surface, and we don’t know where they are! There could be spots of thin ice all over the river!”

“I have to!” Aiden insists, and I lock my arms around him, clinging tightly to his clothes.

“I won’t fucking let you!”

Aiden’s voice is starting to grow frantic. “Jamie, he’ll drown!”

“You could drown! You’re a mountain, you know that ice can’t support you!”

“Every second we spend arguing about this is another second he’s under there without air!” Aiden twists to stare at the water, his blue eyes filled with fear. “Why hasn’t he come up yet? Oh - look-!”

Without letting Aiden go, I turn to follow his eyeline.

The kid has surfaced again, thank fucking god. His face is slack and stunned, but at least his eyes are open.

The cold is starting to incapacitate him. He’s moving much slower, making clumsier attempts to grab onto the nearest bit of ice he can find.

Aiden moves to step out onto the frozen surface, and I spread my hands on his chest, pushing back, trying to hold him in place.

“Jamie, I have to!” he says desperately, his voice splitting. “I have no choice, it’s my responsibility, I’m a Guardian!”

There’s no fucking way that I can stand here and watch Aiden put his life in danger like that. The mere thought hits me like a knockdown punch, and my whole body starts to shiver violently.

“I can’t let you,” I whisper, half-begging. “I can’t-”

Aiden’s answer sends a second, deeper chill down my spine, ice creeping into my bloodstream.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I love you.”

He pushes a kiss onto my mouth, wrenches his sweater free from my grasp, and strides right past me.

For a few excruciating seconds, I stand there, paralyzed, thinking about risks that have to be taken. His, and mine.

I lurch into movement and race after Aiden.

He doesn’t hear me coming. The noise in his head must be too loud, by now. I catch up to him, out of breath, and grab his arm. He startles, twisting to face me.

“If you’re going, I’m going with you!”

Aiden stops still.

“No. Jamie, no-”

There’s no time to waste, so I let go of Aiden and take another step towards the water.

Aiden seizes my arm, spins me around, and drags me to him, his blue eyes wide and frightened. The terror on his face knocks the breath out of me.

“No, Jamie, I love you too fucking much to let you-”

“Aiden, how do you think I fucking feel?” I don’t know when it started, but I realize I’m shouting at the top of my lungs. “We’re going together, or we’re not going at all!”

“You’re not going out there!”

“Then you aren’t, either!” I answer, stabbing at his chest with my finger. “Now can you shut up, so we can make a plan?”

Aiden has no choice but to give in. He knows that if he goes, I’ll follow. He presses his palms over his eyes, blows out a frustrated breath.

“Every second is crucial, Jamie, do we really have time for a fucking plan?”

I shove back my sleeve and check my watch, mentally noting down the time.

“Okay, we’ve got at least ten minutes before he’ll be hypothermic and pass out, but probably only three minutes before he’s too cold to swim, and if the current pulls him under - about thirty seconds before he runs out of air.”

“What?” Aiden blinks in surprise. “Are you sure? How do you know that?”

“Um, hello, my mom was a nurse, you think she didn’t drill this kind of thing into my head? This same river passes like, ten minutes from my parent’s house!”

Aiden lets out a groan of distress.

“So you’re saying that we have anywhere between thirty seconds and ten minutes to get him out?”

“Basically, yeah!”

Aiden grabs two fistfuls of his hair, then swivels back to the water, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“Hey!” he roars, his deep voice thundering through the air. “Hold still, kid! We’re coming! What’s your name?”

The kid shouts back to us. The wind picks up his voice and scatters it, but Aiden must hear him better than I do, because he yells:

“Okay, stop moving your arms so much, Matt! Just move your legs, keep your head above water!”

Either Aiden’s words are lost on the wind, or Matt is too panicked to do as he says. He keeps desperately trying to grab onto what little ice remains around him.

I’m busy fumbling my phone out of my pocket, to check if I have service. My head spins when I get the verdict: no bars, and I have to assume that the same is true of Aiden’s phone.

I tuck my phone away again, cringing as I break the news. “We can’t call anyone.”

Aiden’s shoulders sag. “Okay, I have to go out there, there’s no other-”

“Aiden, no!” I grab his sweater with both hands, rigid with fear. “I won’t fucking let you kill yourself doing this!”

“There’s no other way!”

“There’s got to be-”

I break off as Aiden winces and throws his hands over his ears. I have the immediate, horrible feeling that the sound in his head just soared in volume. He swings around to face Matt again, and I do, too, and - he’s not there.

The hole in the ice is empty, nothing but dark water.

For a second or two, Aiden and I stand with our breaths held, waiting for him to resurface.

He does not. The current must have dragged him under.

“Oh-” I press my hands over my mouth, dangerously close to tears. “No, no-”

“He’s still alive,” Aiden stammers. “I hear him, he’s still… he’s still alive.”

I stare at Aiden, stopped on the very edge of a complete meltdown.

Then I press a few buttons on my watch, setting a timer for thirty seconds.

~~~~

I click the button to start the timer, and the seconds begin to tick down.

Aiden sees what I’m doing. He lets out a ragged breath, putting his fingertips to his mouth.

“What can I do?” he whispers, staring out at the water. “Tell me - tell me what to do…”

Sometimes, I think, Aiden speaks to his Guardian Tree. But the Tree never answers.

The Guardian Tree stirs a thought in my mind. Yes, there’s no way to rescue this kid by regular, human means, but Aiden is a Guardian. He’s a Heliomancer. This is exactly why he has his powers. They're for moments like this, when only Fate can intervene.

I gather Aiden’s face into my hands, taking him by the jaw.

“Heliomancer,” I say, looking into his frantic blue eyes. “Melt the ice.”

My watch ticks down to twenty seconds as I speak, and Aiden’s gaze darts to it, but I force him to keep looking at me, only my face.

“What-?” He blinks down at me, breathless from pure panic. “Jamie, I’m so fucking stressed out that even with the connection, my control is barely-”

“You don’t need to control it!” I don’t let go of his face, even as I hear my watch tick down. “Ariana said that you’re going to do great things, Aiden, and she was right! Just fucking trust yourself, don’t try to control it!”

Aiden stares at me, and I know exactly what he’s thinking about.

The last time he did magic with no connection, no circle of stones to help him control it, he nearly flattened the Ghost Office. Even with the help of the connection, he exploded hundreds of glass bottles in one split second, trying to make the glasses work. And then he did it again completely by accident, when I whispered in his ear that I wanted him.

His power, untethered, is no small thing.

My watch beeps with a ten-second warning. My heart hammering, I stand on my toes to press a kiss onto Aiden’s mouth. I try to channel all the love I have for him into it, try to give him all the calm and resolve that I can.

I let him go and step back.

“You won’t hurt anyone,” I murmur, my hand still on his cheek. “You can do this.”

Aiden stares down at me, his expression unreadable.

Slowly, he turns to face the water.

Something hardens behind his eyes. He tosses his hair out of his face, drops to his knees, and sinks both of his huge hands into the snow on the river’s frozen surface.

He closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them again, they’re swimming with blue fire, brighter and wilder than I’ve ever seen them, two oceans of flame. A soft blue glow falls over his nose, his cheeks.

My hands fly up over my mouth as Aiden’s entire body starts to shine with golden-white light. He drops his head, and closes his eyes again.

My watch counts down the last handful of seconds. Three… two… one.

Aiden lets out a breath, and sinks his weight into his hands.

A pulse of light bursts outwards from him in one, sweeping movement. Spreading in every direction at the speed of a lightning strike, too fast for my eyes to follow.

There’s a silence, and then the entire river explodes.

Up and down its length, the frozen surface shatters and cracks. Showers of snow and chunks of ice are punched up into the air as if someone lit a thousand sticks of dynamite below the river’s surface.

The sunlight glitters on the seconds-long snowstorm, and I’m distantly aware that this shimmering, iridescent moment is oddly beautiful.

The noise it makes is colossal, almighty, deafening.

Simultaneously, there comes a blast of heat, powerful enough to send me staggering a few steps back. I almost fall, and barely catch myself on the branch of an old pine tree. The air sizzling hot, ready to start on fire. Snow dissolves beneath my feet and from the branches of the nearby trees, turning to steam and rising on the wind.

I slip quietly into numb shock, my mouth slightly open, my eyes as round as they can go, my hands shaking. I’m sure that there’s still a whole lot of noise going on around me, but all I can hear is my own breath.

I lost Aiden in the chaos. As the tossed snow starts to evaporate on the heat of the air, I catch sight of him. He hasn’t moved an inch, but now he lifts his head, turns to look at me over his shoulder.

He gazes at me, then nods once, to himself, like he’s satisfied that I’m okay. Then he slumps over, and collapses.

Gasping, I let go of the tree and race for my Companion Plant. I catch him just before he can tumble into the water. Hook my hands under his arms and drag him away from the edge of the river. When we’re at a safe distance, I carefully ease him down onto his back.

I know that he just spent an unthinkable amount of magical energy, that he’s probably just exhausted. But knowing this does very little to ease my panic.

I drop to my knees by his side and take his face in my hands.

“Aiden! Oh my god, talk to me, say something, please please please, come on-”

His blue eyes flutter open, and I could burst into tears from sheer relief.

“Go - get - him,” he mumbles, his every word slurring. “Get - Matt.”

I kiss Aiden's forehead, then spring back to my feet, scanning the churning water, hoping and praying that Matt didn’t get hit with a falling piece of ice, or tossed around too badly by the explosion, or-

“Hey!” someone screams, and I whip around, squinting in the sunshine.

For the second time in as many seconds, my relief threatens to overwhelm me.

Without the ice blocking him, Matt has fought his way back to the surface - or maybe he’s been thrown there by something Aiden did. I don’t know.

What I do know is that he’s clinging to a remaining block of ice to stay afloat, and it’s dissolving beneath his hands as I watch.

I rip off my jacket, throw it aside, and dive headfirst into the water.

I expect the frigid temperature to pierce me right to my core, but the shock doesn’t come. I’m met with gentle warmth, summer waters.

Thank you, Heliomancer.

The river’s current is picking up, buoyed by the sudden ice melt. I fight against it, striking out for Matt, who probably has barely any feeling left in his limbs by now. Even with the spike in the water temperature, he’s shivering, his teeth chattering.

His glasses are at the bottom of the river, but he can see well enough to spot me coming for him, and he lets out a strangled sob.

I reach for him, and he reaches for me.