Overview

Hekla Rán wakes in a sub-glacial chamber under Vatnajökull and her edges go soft.

For seven hundred years she existed as one voice in a chorus of three — a merged phoenix consciousness sealed beneath the ice since the year northern Europe burned. The seal was never supposed to fail. Climate change is failing it anyway. She has surfaced alone in a single body for the first time in her existence, and singularity is a state the merged consciousness has no architecture for. Her form is fragmenting. Steam off her skin. Eyes losing focus. A phoenix who does not anchor before the cycle completes does not survive.

Dr. Greta Holm is forty-five minutes south, watching her seismograph report heat that should not exist beneath an Icelandic glacier. She does what she has done with every important finding she has ever made — flags it, tells nobody, goes looking herself. She is not expecting a chamber. She is not expecting a woman who looks at her like she is the only solid surface in a world coming apart.

The bond snaps before either of them has a name for it. Greta is the ground. Without her, Hekla literally cannot hold her own shape.

Then Greta's seismic data goes public, and the Crowbreath Conclave — a centuries-old syndicate that harvests dormant phoenix eggs from melting Arctic glaciers — arrives in Höfn within the week. They have already taken nine sisters from other ice. They will take this one too.

Unless one woman who has spent her whole life refusing to need anyone learns to be needed absolutely.