The Winter Over(49)

Nothing.

After a moment, she heard Vox’s tinny voice calling over the earpiece. Reluctantly, she lowered the hatch over the tube and crawled back to her shortwave, but kept her flashlight on. She screwed the earpiece back in.

“I’m here.”

“Good. I thought they’d kidnapped you and were performing mind-control experiments.”

“The first one, no,” she said. “The second one, we’re still trying to decide. Anyway, what were you asking?”

“Why would your psychologist ask you those questions if he already knew what was going on?”

Cass pulled the drawstring of her hood tighter. It was cold . “I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t in on the entire plan to begin with and was hoping to learn more? Like I said, when I didn’t give him the answers he wanted, he seemed worried. Or scared.”

“Which leads us back to the big question. Why would your superiors fake a crew member’s death?”

“Right.”

“In my country, when such deceit is used, it is to observe how you would have acted had such an event happened.”

“A test,” Cass said, slowly, thinking aloud.

“Yes. Now, what would they be trying to test? Your loyalty?”

“No. You’re still thinking like the KGB is after you. There’s no cult of personality at a research base. Not one that matters, at least.”

“What, then?”

“Maybe they wanted to rattle everyone, see how they reacted to a terrible event. Like one of their own dying right before the doors close for the winter.”

“Surviving a winter here isn’t enough?”

“Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have wintered over and survived more or less intact,” she said. “A series of short, sharp shocks might send different people around the . . . corner in different ways. Ways you could study or report on.”

“How did the woman Sheryl’s death—or fake death—affect you?”

How did it affect me? Good question. Should I say picking her legs up reminded me of watching the first responders carrying bodies out of a tunnel? Or that I couldn’t see past the ruse of Taylor not allowing me to lift her ski mask because I knew it would bring back all the faces of the people who’d been suffocated after the mooring collapsed?

A particular, caustic burn caught at her throat, a clutching of the muscles there. The imagined feel of Sheryl’s wooden body—to hell if it hadn’t been real, the emotions it dredged up were —mixed with the memories of a subway tunnel, an engineering failure, a knot of people trapped in the urban equivalent of a miners’ cave-in.

“Blaze? Are you there? Cass?”

She cleared her throat. “I’m here.”

“How did Sheryl’s death affect you?”

“Why do you want to know?” It came out as a harsh accusation. She hoped the radio’s white noise took some of the edge off. But she had the wild, unreasoning thought that maybe Vox was involved somehow and was baiting her, asking her to confide in him.

Vox continued, oblivious. “Because their reaction to your reaction might tell us something. Nobody does nothing in a case like this. Is not possible.”

“What do you mean?”

“Most base administrators, even Russian ones, would offer you some kind of support after the death of a colleague, yes? The compassionate ones would offer sympathy, while even the most heartless would want to know when you could get back to work. But saying nothing, doing nothing? Then you are being studied.”

The simple sentence made her mouth go dry. “So what should I do? What’s coming next?”

“You’re an engineer,” he said, the distance and static making his voice robotic and impersonal. “Suppose you have a mysterious substance whose tensile strength is unknown. How do you find out how strong it is?”

“A stress test,” Cass said automatically.

“And what happens if the test doesn’t break the subject?”

A hollow feeling opened up in her chest, like a rock falling down an unplumbed well. “You keep trying until it does.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


Alone, Leroy sat at one of the galley tables facing the outer wall and talked to the wind.

People passed him, trays or cups in hand, sitting or conversing within arm’s reach. No one spoke to him. Had they, he would not have heard them.

But no one did. Behavior thought of as strange back in February was taken for granted in May. Most of Shackleton’s crew had started to fade in and out, victims of the lack of light and mental stimulation. T3. The Antarctic stare. Long-eye. Whatever you called it, people recognized it and appreciated the right of others to indulge.

Hours slipped by. Someone asked Leroy to move slightly so he could wipe the table down. He lifted his arms, then put them back down on the tabletop without blinking or recognizing who had made the request. Gale-force winds on the other side of the wall surged and faded, ripping across the face of the station. They’d long since passed into winter’s full darkness and almost nothing could be seen out of any of the galley’s windows; only rarely did a gust throw snow so violently against the glass that it could be seen.

Leroy’s lips moved as he answered the wind. He did so without a sound except for an occasional whimper. From time to time, a shudder would ripple through him from the skin on the back of his head down to the muscles in the small of his back, but he was otherwise motionless.