Chapter Sixteen

Pan hadn't wanted to know how hypothermia felt. She got to find out anyway. To her surprise, it wasn't that different from heat stroke. She was by turns on a pyre and a glacier, and she shivered uncontrollably no matter which. She wanted nothing more than sleep, only she was sleeping, and she got no rest from it. Whispers echoed everywhere. She couldn't catch any of them. She skipped from one nonsense thought to the other. Mixed into it, a snapshot of grandma Chi-Chi crying on gramps Hercule's chest while her grave parents watched from afar, and she tried to tell them she was fine, even though it was a lie.

Some time later, and she couldn't tell how much, the shaking stopped and Pan had real dreams. Which were just as nonsensical, actually. She dreamed she dug up a giant treasure chest beneath a rainforest ruin and inside found a collection of novelty hats. She'd just started trying on the first, a hat shaped like a dolphin complete with a long nose for a visor and a plush tail sewn on the back, when the scene changed abruptly to the deck of the Para Brothers' ship.

"Guys! I got her!" Sonpara said, running across the bridge on his tiny legs and skidding to a halt beside the computer.

"Don't just stand there! On second thought, you can stand there. Just make sure you keep the connection."

She'd only seen Sonpara, but now Bonpara and Donpara faded into view. They didn't look at her, since she wasn't really "there."

"Pan, what happened?" Bonpara asked.

So many things happened, Pan was confused which one he meant. "When?"

"A few minutes ago."

"Um," Pan said, "I was in a rainforest, digging, and I hit what turned out to be a treasure chest, and inside it were all these hats…"

"Not that. What was killing you, and are you out of danger?"

"Was something killing me?"

Bonpara said, "It wasn't just that I couldn't make a connection. It's the jumbled static your head spewed at me when I tried. I know what a dying brain sounds like, and that's what it sounds like."

Pan pouted, even though he couldn't see it. "I don't believe it. One of the last surviving Saiyan warriors endures four straight nights of brutal combat, dies of exposure the next morning. How pathetic is that?" She tried to wipe her brow and found the dolphin hat still on her dream-head; she was glad Bonpara couldn't see that, either. "He saved my life a third time, kicking me out of the fight early so I could find help."

"Hey, are you still there?" Sonpara asked. "We're losing you again."

Telepathy wasn't an unrestricted flow of thoughts, and the brothers couldn't see anything Pan did not expressly send them any more than they could stroll into her house through her phone. She still found herself battling the impulse to hide from them as if they could. As if they'd caught her doing something wrong. "I did find help. The best help there is, too. If Ember can't patch me up, I can't be patched up. Say, you guys are going to be here today, aren't you?"

Donpara tapped the computer screen. The blue stretch of figures and diagrams cleared to reveal stars… and a dime-sized speck of a dead planet on the horizon. Gleaming beside it, a shimmering moon. "You see that? That's Ketchyn. We're so close, our biggest concern now is figuring out where and how to land. No atmosphere is good for a spaceship, but this one presents such a massive series of issues the computer's been trying to figure out how to get through it since we left."

"And then, once we do get through it, we have to find a secure place to land. Otherwise, remember what happened to you when you landed in 'unauthorized space' on Imecka? Now imagine instead of having your property confiscated by Don Kee and his paid thugs, it's King Sulfuri and his highly-trained army," Sonpara said. "It would be something like that."

"I remember what kind of welcome I got, and I was asking for help with my hands up."

So that blip onscreen was Ketchyn from the outside. The swirling color gave it the appearance of an uncut diamond under a bright light. Pan giggled, realizing she was standing on that world, and therefore was looking at herself on camera, just from very far away.

"I'll be happy to see you, though," she said, surprised how much she meant it. "And Captain Ember and Officer Gelata shouldn't freak out so much this time, since they know you're coming and that you're my friends. I should warn you Ember is a little confrontational, Gelata might ask to dissect you, and they're in love with each other, but he's Sutova and she's a Reizomorph, so you have to pretend you don't notice."

Donpara snorted. "Wow, really?"

"What?" Pan pulled off her dolphin hat and sat it in her lap. Her dream-hair was sticking up. "There's nothing wrong with it."

"No, I wasn't saying there was. I'm just surprised, is all. There's a lot of bad blood there. It isn't like sneaking out your window to meet the boy with the frosted tips your mom doesn't like because he smokes and rides a motorcycle."

"No," Pan said. "It'd be more like sneaking out to meet Frieza."

"Yes! Exactly!" Donpara thumped his fist into his palm. "It's the sort of thing you hear and think, 'like that would ever work.' Continuing your astute if somewhat disturbing comparison, could you ever look at Frieza and not be thinking 'this is the guy who punched a hole through my home planet?' Could you ever trust Frieza to look at you and not be thinking, 'filthy third-class ape?' That's what they have to be going through."

Pan sighed heavily. "When you put it that way, it sounds pretty hopeless."

"I wouldn't say it's hopeless. It's more like an amount of hope that statistically rounds down to zero, is all."

"But forgiveness is supposed to have all this power, right? How powerful is it if you only get to use it on little unintentional 'offenses' like when Uncle Goten finishes my juice without asking me first? If someone realizes they wronged you, and they've paid their debt several times over, isn't forgiveness strong enough to set you back on equal footing?"

"Theoretically, yes, but I wouldn't bet on those odds."

"And if that happens, if the field really is even, wouldn't you be free to build anything you wanted on it? Even love?"

"Theoretically, yes, but I wouldn't bet on those odds."

"And couldn't there be a perfectly logical reason to keep a spike pit under your bed?"

"Theoretically… what?"

Bonpara answered with, "Sure, I can think of several. Dispose of assassins, guard prisoners prone to escape, heat them up for a flashy way to toast marshmallows. Look, Donpara, these are friends of Pan's, so you're gonna shut up and be nice to them, okay?"

"I wasn't going to say anything to them about it," Donpara said. "I was just telling Pan…"

"Well, don't. You're upsetting her. I can tell if you can't."

"I wouldn't say I'm upset," Pan said. She was upset. She just wouldn't say so. Mostly because she'd have to explain why.

"Aw, geeze, I'm sorry, Pan," Donpara said. "You'd think with feet as big as mine, I'd notice I was sticking them in my mouth. Since we're talking about it and all, can you ever forgive me?"

"Of course I do," she said.

"And with that," Bonpara said, "Computer's found some options for us. Let's go over them, and we'll contact you with some coordinates when we have them."

"That works for me."

Bonpara faded away first, then Donpara, and finally the bridge and Sonpara with it. Pan was again alone in a rainforest with a treasure chest and a dolphin hat in her lap, wrangling with her own insides.

She stuffed the end of the shovel back in the dirt. She hoped she woke up soon so she'd have the noisy real world moving all around her and wouldn't have to knock around her own head with thoughts and feelings she was trying to ignore and hoped would just fade. They had to fade, didn't they? She spoke of forgiveness when Frieza had shown no concrete remorse. True, when she demanded he tell her those deaths hadn't hurt him, he hadn't been able to, but for all she knew that was because he was trying to think of a scathing insult instead. Pan wasn't the sort of girl who got snake-charmed by bad boys. Besides, wherever Frieza went when he wasn't properly in the land of the living, she was sure he wasn't carrying on like this.

ooo

"No, no, no! I won't allow it! It's not to be tolerated! I, the mighty Frieza, cannot be in love! And if I were going to be in love, I couldn't be in love with a Saiyan! And if I were going to be in love with a Saiyan, I couldn't be in love with that Saiyan!"

The crypt had now accumulated so many pits, cracks, and piles of rubble, it was a wonder it hadn't imploded. It could have been mistaken for a natural cavern, almost, now that the Emperor had ripped away every fixture or trapping of design, leaving nothing but uneven pockmarks. Ginyu sat atop a fallen pillar. He was not alone this time. There were four more shadows perched behind him.

"So she's pretty and funny and amiable and relatable and so endearingly eccentric. What of it? I'm not the sort of man who needs an eccentric pixie to make everything better for me, and if I were, there are plenty of pixies in the universe who aren't Son Goku's granddaughter."

Full as the crypt was, as far as crypts went, nobody dared answer, though the small round silhouette did approach and try to comfort Frieza with half a quilt, two pinecones, and a liver with a bite out of it. Frieza, preoccupied, set the gifts aside.

"She's not just his granddaughter. She's Bardock's great-granddaughter and Son Gohan's daughter. She's every bit the willful mutineer Bardock was, she's got that same gentle spirit I found so infuriating in Gohan, and when it comes to combat potential, she's certainly playing in Goku's ballpark. She's even a Super Saiyan. What part of 'horrific amalgamation of everyone who ever defied me' is my brain translating into 'irresistible siren?'"

The mirror's facade clouded in censure.

"Did I ask you, you officious busybody?"

The glow faded, and the mirror sheepishly buckled.

Frieza punched the glass. It undulated before forming an image. Pan lay tucked into a pile of blankets. Not even the mirror could spoil her beauty, caught in the shadow of her eyelashes on her cheeks, the gentle curve of her neck and shoulders. She was so still. So pale. Her short hair clung to her face, at least until her Reizomorph companion brushed it away. They wouldn't be tending her if she were dead, would they? No, Pan's chest rose, fell once more. She survived. He'd expected no less, but he'd sent her away so weak, he could not deny nursing a sliver of doubt she would make it… or that, seeing now that his fears had been unfounded, he was relieved.

"This is the worst I've ever felt, and I've been bisected. What do I do about it?" he whispered.

It was a rhetorical question. He hadn't intended anyone to answer it. He hadn't even meant anyone to hear it.

So naturally, Captain Ginyu chimed right in with his suggestion:

"Ask her out?"

Stone combusted to particles. Debris rained down from above. The room quaked and seemed to even tilt as Frieza fired shot after shot. He didn't stop when his minions jumped from their platforms to avoid being caught in the crossfire, or when the small round one began to applaud and laugh hysterically at the destruction. He didn't stop when he breached a wall and brown earth poured through. He didn't stop until he was too exhausted to continue, and even then, he did not lower his hand; he continued to stare and point at the last crater he'd left as if it were a personal enemy.

The din faded, leaving silence strange even to a grave. Only then did Frieza lower his hand.

"This is a weakness. Nobody can know about it, least of all Pan."

He strode with purpose to the one place in the crypt there wasn't a hint of damage: the small corner that held the bookshelf and its notes. He untied the leather and opened it.

"Here you are still. Here you were before I was coughed into this pit. You have all the answers when it comes to perpetual cycles of pain and death and condemnation, and I commended you for it, as those have always been the answers I sought. Yet here I stand now, locked in memories of time spent in the underground reliving the stars, or beside a fireplace in my childhood home weathering a storm, and for the first time in my life I know what it feels like to be warm. I want that. I want that to go away. Can you give me no help with either? Why are you silent? Has your well of knowledge run dry?"

If he'd left himself enough energy, things might have been different.

If he'd left himself enough energy, he might have set the notes ablaze on the spot.

"What good are you, then?"

He returned to the mirror and collapsed before it, brushing its surface clean, missing mortality and the release of unconsciousness.

ooo

Pan woke up with a problem, and even though Gelata was in the next room, she got to hear about it immediately.

"Gelata! I need your help!"

"What is it?" Gelata asked, running into the storage room so hard she skidded on its floor. "Are you hurt? Are you under attack?"

Tugging the corners of her blanket-cocoon even tighter around her shoulders, Pan jerked her head to the wall and whispered. "I need you to cover that mirror."

Against the wall, there stood a dresser, and atop it was a round mirror, like most other things in Cold Manor very much an antique. Pan's clothes had been dried and folded atop it, and it hadn't taken Pan long to figure out that meant she wasn't wearing them.

"Why?"

"Because I'd like to think I can defeat Frieza without borrowing techniques from Ran Fan. Look, it's a long story, and I'll tell it when I'm dressed, but until that mirror's been blocked off, these blankets aren't going anywhere."

"You didn't strike me as the superstitious sort," Gelata said. She yanked a sheet from an old divan and smacked the dust from it. "But perhaps I shouldn't have been so dismissive. It's looking more and more like 'the superstitious sort' were right all along. Ember and I made some startling discoveries while you recuperated. I have much to tell you, as well. We'll speak over your breakfast."

"Aren't you having any?"

"You've been asleep half the day. The yellow wave is nearly over. Since you didn't have a destination in mind after this one, and you needed the rest so badly, we didn't wake you."

Pan fell back on the cot, staring at the ceiling. "Where do we go from here? We didn't find anything that'll tell us who resurrected Frieza or why."

"On the contrary," Gelata said. "We've narrowed down our suspects considerably."

Gelata threw the sheet over the mirror and left.

A few minutes later, Pan left, too, pulling on her jacket. She yawned.

The small storage room led to a large storage room, this one with some artwork and the remnants of a dining set inside. There was food on the table, mostly dried and preserved rations Ember and Gelata had brought… and so grisly was the artwork that Pan initially ignored it. Her eyes were riveted to a painting as tall as she was, flanked by two more beheaded statues.

She could tell the subject was a Reizomorph. She could tell he was stout. She could even tell from his old-fashioned sallow clothes that he must have lived in some distant past. It was impossible to identify him, though, and not just because she wasn't up on Ketchyn historical figures; no, in this case it was because his face had been burned right off the canvas. Not his folded hands. Not his curved horns. Just his face. Right between his neck and the bottom of his auburn helmet was a scorched hole she could see the wall through. She poked it. There was no way the damage had been an accident.

"Who did this?"

"He did," Gelata said. She invited herself in and sat at the table, near the paintings. "After Kuriza's murder, he had every image of himself defaced… and I mean that literally. De-faced. Paradoxically, that's how I know whose portrait this is. It's Chilled, King of Cocytus."

"Creepy," Pan said. It was, too, like a trick portrait with eyeholes cut out for eavesdropping; except it was worse, because it felt that way in spite of not having eyes to cut holes from or a face to hide behind. She glanced over her shoulder, worried. "Where's Ember?"

"He's fine," Gelata said. "As fine as can be expected. We found Char's missing team. They were in much the same state as those Planet Trade mercenaries you found on the outskirts of the Bludwald. Ember is burying them. Treacherous or not, they were his colleagues, and they didn't deserve to be put on display like that."

"What were they even doing here? I still don't understand that," Pan said, ripping open a bag of seeds.

Gelata turned to the faceless portrait. She tapped her foot. Whatever she was struggling to get out, it was making her nervous.

Finally she asked, "How much do you remember of that story I told you in Colander?"

Pan followed Gelata's eyes back to the portrait. "About Chilled? I remember you said his grandson was murdered by King Flare, and that he got mean after it happened."

"Do you remember why?"

"He started doing dangerous experiments with the Vile Wave and couldn't handle it, right?"

"Indeed, and that isn't up for debate. At that blurry border where history becomes legend, though… there were tales that though he destroyed himself in all but body in the process, he succeeded in mastering the Vile Wave. And you'd think I'd have suspected there might be some truth to it, because while the things they claimed he did were fanciful, the way they claimed he did them, in theory… did you ever burn paper focusing sunlight through a magnifying glass?"

Pan shuffled and stuffed as many seeds in her mouth as she could.

"I take it that wasn't your favorite school project."

Pan swallowed. "One of the dragons we fought could focus sunlight through distorted air. It melted anything it touched. That's not one of my best memories."

Gelata overturned a bowl. "It has to do with the shape of the glass. Light hits it evenly here," she waved over the whole bowl, "But the convexity of the surface forces all of that light to travel and focus to this one spot, here." She drew her finger down the side of the bowl to the very center. "It controls and concentrates all the photons to that one pinpoint."

She tossed the bowl back on the table.

"And I know that can be done with Prismatic energy because those staves the Sutova queens use in their ceremonies do it. All Chilled had to do was find a way to focus the whole Vile Wave like that. He used glass, not a lens, but…"

"…mirrors," Pan said.

"How did you know?"

"Remember, I asked you to cover the mirror before? Frieza told me when we were fighting he can spy on us through mirrors. That's what I wanted to tell you. We have to be careful what we say or do in front of them. He could be watching. I knew he couldn't be making it up because he repeated the conversation we had at the gates almost verbatim, but I wondered how he did it. That's how? It's also how he uses the Vile Wave? Through mirrors?"

"Through a mirror," Gelata said. "Chilled's Mirror. The bastard really did it."

"Did what?" Pan asked. "What does the legend say?"

"After Kuriza's death, Chilled was so consumed with grief, he forgot Flare was his enemy and decided all of Ketchyn, and perhaps even all the universes, needed to understand his suffering," Gelata said. "By experiencing it themselves. He focused the Vile Wave through one very powerful and very evil artifact: a cursed mirror made from his own flesh stretched over his grandson's charred bones. Not only did it give him control over the Vile Wave, its surface reflected everything at its worst, so that to anyone who gazed into its depths, the world would be distorted… and the longer they looked, the longer the image would remain in their eyes after they turned away. Stare too long into Chilled's mirror, it's said, and you'll never find splendor or hope in anything again. You'll be stuck forever seeing the world just like Chilled did at the end of his life."

Against the wall, Chilled's portrait leaned faceless, flanked by its headless statues. It made an eerie sort of sense he'd done that, Pan thought, if that mirror had become the only reflection the King of Cocytus thought he could trust.

"Wait," Pan said, almost spitting out her food. "Are you saying this mirror is real and it's here?"

Gelata pulled out her chair and asked Pan to follow her.

Pan did, but she wondered if Gelata knew where she was going. The tunnels coiled around each other, and they walked for forever, or at least long enough for Pan to finish off two more bags of seeds, some jerky, and dried fruit. Condensation dripped on her head. The temperature grew so dishwater tepid Pan longed to return to the blizzard. When they did finally arrive somewhere, which had to be somewhere near Ketchyn's core if they'd gone as far down as it felt like they had, it was a dead end.

"I wouldn't have been able to find it if you hadn't taught me that 'pickle pot' trick," Gelata said. "The barrier here is so subtle and small, you can barely detect it."

She whispered the tongue twister, fired the blast, and the wall opened like lips.

Pan walked onto a vast cavern, hung with dead shackles and long-abandoned cobwebs. Rows of tables gave it the appearance of a classroom, or maybe an alchemy lab. Stairs led up to another blank wall of a dead end.

On second glance, it wasn't blank. There was spot on the wall, unmarred by dust or time, where something large and squarish, like a jagged painting, had once been.

"I'm saying the mirror is real," Gelata said, brushing the wall, "And it was here. It hung right there. Someone stole it. Someone who had the authority to order Sutova guardsmen to kill those researchers for fear they'd find this place and trace the theft back to them. Ember was right. There are only two people with that kind of authority: King Sulfuri and Princess Incendria."

"Incendria," Pan said. She slammed her fist on the table with so much force it blew the dust away.

"That's what Ember thinks, too," Gelata said. "I, for one, require proof, and I know where we're most likely to find it. It's a good thing you've got that Instant Transmission, because it's late, and it's a long way home."

"You're right," Pan said. "We have to go back to Asphodel."