And it would be the last thing she saw. Above them, the airship blotted out the entire sky. It was not receding as quickly as it should have been, either—Odd, the things you notice when you’re going to die—and she wondered if it was losing altitude too.

Her ears were full of the twittering and shrieking of Dr. Rat’s family. She knew that at least one furry body had been hauled off by the wind, but what did it matter? Dead alone or dead all in a heap was still dead.

Dr. Khan’s fingers were painfully tight in her hair. Lee had Mal’s hand, clenched in hers. Clinging precariously to the last in a chain of desperate ratlings, she saw the translator, agent of their misfortune. Perhaps this was its revenge for a lifetime of slavery and invasive surgery.

She didn’t notice the shift in temperature. The wind whipping past them was already chilling her to the bone. She didn’t even notice that the looming airship wasn’t there any more. But the dim lamps of the rat city were abruptly replaced by a great radiance from below, a vast plain of ice shining back at the moon.

Goggling downwards, she caught her breath, seeing the frozen Earth beneath. There were depths to that ice. There were structures buried within, like icebound leviathans awaiting the end of the world. Except the end had come and gone, and here they still were.

And one was coming for them. She let out a sound that was neither scream nor whoop, just some mad animal noise. Something shifted deep within the glacial depths as a leviathan arose indeed. A colossal fish-like shape gathered itself from the substance of the plain and leapt up to meet them with gaping jaws.

Khan swore, and the shrilling of the rats reached a new peak.

The monstrous ice-fish was rising for them, vast enough to swallow a house and grounds. Lee tried to brace, but she had nothing to brace against. She heard Mal yell in what sounded suspiciously like exaltation.

The horizon of her world became the rim of the ice-fish’s colossal maw, and there was a tongue of frost below her. Then the fish fell back towards the solid plain with them, still falling, in its open jaws. The ice of its substance was falling away, sliding off in great sheets and bergs that whirled off into infinity. Its clutch of fugitives felt their momentum slowing, the speed of their descent bleeding away as they clung to one another. Frost crackled over the rats’ fur and Lee’s hair.