The Winter Over(2)

“What was she doing in the Dark Sector, anyway? I thought she was with the weather gang.”

“No clue. She liked to jog. Maybe she thought she’d go for a long loop. Jennings, you’re a runner. You ever come out this far?”

She shook her head. Was she a runner? Yes. Ten miles a day, every day, for years. Running away from something, running toward something. But never on the ice, where she didn’t trust she would ever come back if she dared venture out.

“On the far side of the skiway?” Taylor pressed, gesturing. “In bunny boots?”

“Hell if I know, Taylor,” Hanratty said, annoyed. “Maybe she spaced out and started chasing sun dogs. Get the body back to the station and we can spend the rest of the winter guessing.”

Back stiff, Taylor nodded once, then hopped onto the Skandic. The snowmobile’s engine caught on the first try and he motored back toward base, nothing more than a blue-gray Lego block at this distance.

Cass turned to Hanratty. “You want me along?”

“You’re not going to walk back, I assume,” he said, swinging a leg over the saddle of the other snowmobile. “And I want to be there. I can trust Taylor not to talk.”

Cass mounted behind Hanratty, but underneath her mask and gaiter, her face burned. Rather than put her arms around his waist for support, she gripped the bottom of the seat instead. More precarious, maybe, but she’d rather fall off the back than give him the satisfaction of holding on to him.

As though reading her mind, he took off with a jolt that snapped her head back. For a long second, she teetered on the edge of pitching backwards off the seat. Hanratty, known for his object lessons, probably would make her walk back to base then. But she regained her balance as he slowed the snowmobile in order to follow Sheryl’s tracks.

Or, rather, where the tracks should’ve been. In the arid, desert-like climate of Antarctica, little snow fell day to day, but tens of thousands of accumulated years of the stuff blew around the continent in curtains. The rest was sculpted into frozen waves of glass-like hardness, what the old ice-heads called sastrugi . A single footprint appeared occasionally, but there was no reliable trail thanks to the crystalline surface. And since bunny boots had been standard Antarctic issue for decades, any footprint they spotted could’ve been Sheryl’s . . . or it could’ve been laid down by any other Polie in the last twenty years. At certain points, there seemed to be a cluster of footprints, but again the temporal element was missing: they could be prints from a group of two or three or those of singular individuals inscribed over years.

Snowmobiling over sastrugi was no picnic, and Cass’s teeth clacked together painfully as the Skandic bucked up and down on the icy fins. Thankfully, Hanratty kept their speed to a crawl so they could look for clues as to why Sheryl had been outside the base, alone and without a radio. None of it made sense. Leaving base without a radio was a violation of policy; doing so during the previous day’s storm was a violation of logic.

As was keeping up a fruitless search while visibility began to fail. Cass tapped Hanratty on the shoulder and leaned forward to be heard over the snowmobile’s whine. “We’re running out of time.”

“I’m aware.” The reply was terse, metallic.

Veering south, they drove farther onto the plain. Shackleton, glimpsed over her shoulder, was nothing more than a dot on the horizon, and when she turned to look front again, wind drove the snow directly into her face. They continued for several minutes, bucking over the troughs of the sastrugi, eyes glued to the ground, trying to spot one man-made anomaly in an ocean of natural deviations.

But there was nothing. Cass rose in her seat to look over Hanratty’s shoulder. The white, featureless expanse expanded in endless iteration and continued—as she knew rationally but had difficulty believing—for eight hundred miles over the Transantarctic Mountains and the Ross Ice Shelf before meeting the sea. Between here and there was literally nothing. Sheryl’s death had not come from that direction.

A gust slapped them with such force that Cass had to snatch at the seat to hold on. The leading edge of the storm was coming at them fast. Despite multiple layers of expedition-rated clothing and the massive gloves they called bear claws, the cold was stupefying, spawning a knot of fundamental, animal fear in her gut. We shouldn’t be out here . I shouldn’t be out here. I came to Antarctica to lose myself, to find myself, not to die.

Hanratty, feeling her anxiety, relented. “All right, Jennings. Take it easy. We’re heading back.”

He hit the gas and they took off from their previous crawl with a jerk. To hell with pride , Cass thought, letting go of the seat and wrapping her arms around the waist of the thin, hard body in front of her. In tactile terms, Hanratty seemed not so different from Sheryl’s corpse.

Within a few seconds they were doing fifty miles an hour, flying across the snow and ice so fast it seemed they were hovering rather than plowing through it, though they still caught several of the sastrugi hard enough to jar the bones in her knees and hips. Hanratty was careful to follow their double-wide tracks back, both as a backup to GPS and to avoid the ever-present danger of falling into a crevasse. At their speed, they wouldn’t have a chance of spotting the slightly darker aqua-blue shade of ice that was the only warning—the two of them would hit bottom before they even knew they’d found a chasm.

For most of the trip, the wind pressed on Cass’s back like an invisible hand, then a gust of swirling, katabatic wind hit them unexpectedly from the side, lifting the right side of the snowmobile off the ground and threatening to dump them onto the ice. Cass instinctively leaned into the tilt, bringing her body weight to the fight to force the snowmobile back down. They landed with a jolt, the whining track bit back into the snow, and Hanratty piloted straight for the hump that was Shackleton base.