With some bizarre mixture of crying and yelling, I held on to them and kicked toward the surface. Going up was much easier than going down, the Shield almost pushing me up. We surfaced just a few feet away from the long icy landing that led back to the ship. The invisible cup of my protection kind of rolled along under my feet as I half carried, half drug Miyoko and Dad to the ice platform I had created earlier. Miyoko regained enough of her strength to help, or it would have been impossible.

Dad wasn't showing any signs of life. We lifted him up and onto the ice, then climbed onto it ourselves. The ocean water held back by my Shield sloshed against the ice as the force of my Gift left it. The most amazing thing about the whole ordeal was that it was no longer amazing. The Shield had truly become a part of me.

“Here, help me roll him over,” Miyoko said.

We did so with a grunt, and his arm flopped over and slapped the ice as he settled onto his back. His skin was pale and wet, his hair matted to his head like seaweed. I realized I was sobbing, trying to tell myself that he couldn't be dead.

Miyoko looked at me, her eyes back to normal again.

“Jimmy,” she said, putting her hand on my arm. “He is not dead.” She pointed at his chest. “Look.”

I blinked the tears away and followed her gaze.

Dad was breathing.

I could never explain the feeling that came over me at that moment. Dad meant more to me than any words in any language could ever begin to describe. He was my father, my hero, my friend, my everything. For a full minute, as we had struggled to get out of the ocean and onto the ice, my brain told me that he was dead. To see that proven false, to see his chest rising and falling in a regular pattern, was like the universe itself exploding within me, life and love and happiness washing over me like dawn finally breaking on a thousand years of darkness.

The strength of angels and soldiers filled me, and I stood up.

“Come on,” I said, bending over and reaching out my hand. “Let's get rid of those dang Shadow Ka.”

We grabbed my dad and lifted, each putting a shoulder under one of his arms, and headed down the ice, back to our ship. Dad's dragging feet left shallow trenches in the frosty path.

The flat iceberg was a lot longer than I remembered. My family could've filled a book with all the jokes we'd come up with over the years about my dad's ever increasing pant size, but right then it didn't seem so funny. It felt like he weighed a ton, and the occasional grunt that escaped his lips now and then only made it worse, like he was having a hoot seeing us struggle to carry and drag him. I promised myself to buy him a treadmill with Joseph's new money when all this was over.

Halfway there, we took a small break, dropping Dad like a sack of potatoes.

It was then that I realized the sky had grown considerably lighter. Miyoko's eye-lights had long been extinguished, yet we could see pretty well. I looked up and saw that the clouds were dissipating a bit, and the full moon shone through a break in the sky, although a strange haze seemed to filter it, like a thick screen on a window. There was something odd about it, but I was too tired to sort it out. I pushed the thought aside, and looked toward our destination.

The yacht waited for us, the dark shapes of the Shadow Ka still scattered all over it, still standing at their posts, wings folded. A few still flew around the ship, but most were on the boat itself, chains tied to something, waiting. There had to be at least fifty of them. I saw no sign of my family, the Alliance, or the crew, and hoped against hope that they were safe, locked inside.

I motioned to Miyoko and we picked Dad up and headed once again down the iceberg.

“What exactly are we going to do when we get back up there?” she asked. “We're heavily outnumbered, and all I can do is blind a few of them.”

Panting from the effort of dragging my dad's gargantuan body, I looked over at her and tried to smile.

“I fully intend on ice-blasting me some Shadow Ka tonight.”

Her half-hearted laugh cut short when her gaze shifted back to the waiting ship. The look on her face stopped my heart, and I turned to look as well. We stood and watched as a sound filled the air like a thousand bed sheets, hung to dry on a clothesline, flapping in the wind.

The yacht was lifting out of the water. Our ship, our boat, was taking flight.

The Shadow Ka were flying away, taking the yacht, and everyone on board, with them.