"That's impossible," Kaylee said flatly. "No one wraps a coffin in ice and drops it out of the sky."
"I don't think that's what happened," Bella replied softly. "Someone was buried in space, ice collected on the outside of the coffin, and somehow it got into a decaying orbit until it crashed." She shook her head. "I swear to God, though, this coffin looks like something straight out of Battlestar Galactica."
Rolling her blue eyes, Kaylee put her hands on her hips. "You and your sci-fi obsession. Of course it does, silly. They modeled their props after real-world objects."
"Just help me get the lid off," Bella grated.
Tentatively, Kaylee stuck one flip-flopped foot into the icy slurry. "Jesus, it's cold." Then she plunged in, urged on by Bella's impatient gesture. Kaylee moved to the foot end of the casket and gripped the edge of the lid, just as Bella was doing at the head end.
"On the count of three," Bella said. "One. Two. Three!"
Bella and Kaylee simultaneously put all their strength behind prying the lid upward. Nothing happened at first. Then nails screeched against wood, and the lid popped open. Kaylee and Bella nearly fell across the open top of the coffin.
"Argh!" Bella pushed herself upward and dropped to her knees beside the casket.
Shouting with surprise, Kaylee tripped and fell on her rump into a lake of ice water. Muttering something that might have been a curse word, Kaylee joined her roommate beside the open coffin.
Steeling herself, Bella took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and looked down into the casket.
And found herself staring into an inert but very familiar brown face.
Bella's blood froze, and tears sprang to her eyes. The sensation was of falling down a tunnel as the rest of the world disappeared. All that existed at the bottom of this tunnel was Bella and the perfectly, miraculously preserved body in the coffin.
"Oh, my God," she heard herself whisper, as if from very far away. "It's Felix Gaeta!"