The Winter Over(65)

“Cass?”

She turned. Pete, wearing his white cook’s apron, had appeared at her elbow looking harried and carrying an insulated cooler with a thick handle. He was a small man, perpetually hunched over as though carrying the combined weight of the one hundred meals he had to prepare every day. A few strands of dark, stringy hair had escaped his hairnet and were plastered against his forehead.

“What’s up, Pete?”

“I hate, really hate, to ask you this, but I need a favor.”

Her heart sank down to the depths of her stomach. “As long as it doesn’t mean missing dinner.”

“No, not quite,” he said, then hurried on when he saw the look on her face. He gestured with the cooler. “Almost everyone on base is here for the dinner, but there are a few people who can’t make it. It doesn’t seem right that they have to miss the big blowout.”

She groaned. “You want me to deliver it to them?”

He nodded. “I would do it, but it’s going to take everything I’ve got just to get the real meal on the table for everyone.”

Cass tried to ignore the flip-flops her stomach was doing. “What are you offering?”

“The eternal goodwill of your fellow crew members?”

“I can’t eat goodwill,” Cass said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Anne grin. “Try again.”

“I can promise you an extra dessert.”

“Two. Plus a bottle of wine.”

“Good Lord,” he said. “Not a chance. Two desserts and an extra glass of wine.”

“Got any candy bars hidden back there?”

He looked at her slantwise. “Maybe.”

“Two desserts, an extra glass of wine, and a couple of candy bars.”

“Done.” They shook and he handed her the cooler. She frowned, thinking of something. “Wait, why the cooler? Whose meal am I delivering?”

“Jun’s.”

She glowered at Pete. “You are not going to tell me he’s out at COBRA.”

He grinned and started moving back toward the kitchen. “Afraid so.”

“Jesus Christ. It’s going to take me an hour.”

“No take-backsies, Cass.”

“You son of a bitch! I want three desserts,” she called, but he’d already disappeared through the swinging door with a wave.

Anne, Colin, and the others around her shot her a sympathetic look, but no one offered to take her place, she noticed. The way the food was smelling, ten desserts wouldn’t be a good enough trade.

“If you follow the flag line, it’s not too bad,” Anne offered with a pained smile.

Grumbling, Cass broke out of line and carried the cooler down the hall to her room, where she went through the laborious process of suiting up in full gear, including three under-layers, a parka, bunny boots, and the two-tiered glove system—a neoprene layer under bear claws—needed for the cold. She kept the hood down and the balaclava off until she reached the airlock for Destination Zulu, the ground-level exit, but before long it was time to put both on and cinch them down tight.

Gritting her teeth, Cass turned on her headlamp and opened the outer door. The initial paralyzing cold was held at bay by her layers of clothing, but the brute physical force of the wind pushed against her as though she were a sail, and she had to lean into the first step just to get through the door. She exited the base, stepping into the night, and slammed the door shut behind her.

Fat flakes of snow pelted her face and Cass blinked in reaction even though her ski mask protected her face. Pausing for a moment to adjust, she tromped down the steps to the ground level, then turned her headlamp back toward the base of the stairs, illuminating a metal pole that had been planted to the right of the door. Welded to the pole was a group of lanyards. Lashed to each lanyard was a colored polystyrene rope, different than its neighbor, and tied to each line was a small nylon tag with a handwritten word on it. Fighting the wind, Cass fumbled with the rope until she found a red one marked “COBRA.” She glanced down its length. Every fifteen feet, held up by a small pole, a scrap of red nylon was tied to the line, though only the first two flags were visible in the dark. Cass shook the line and the rope bounced, sending the flags dancing frantically in the wind.

She stared for a long, long moment into the looping continuation of white snow and black night. The vision made almost no sense, as though she were staring into the sea, trying and failing to find a measurable length of space. There was no way to bind it, no way to put a limit on the endless. Though seemingly only an arm’s length away, the end of the rope was tied to the infinite.

Cass cursed and shook herself. Thinking like that would get her killed. Life wasn’t measured in the limitless. You paced it off, one step at a time.

She adjusted her grip on the cooler with her right hand, tightened her left on the flag line, and plunged into the darkness.





CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE


Despite reading the diaries of expired explorers, and listening to all the warnings, and enduring TransAnt training sessions with titles like “How to Survive the First Hour,” Cass had never actually believed she might die in Antarctica. Too many people had come before her, too many safeguards were in place, life was too modern for her to die from something as mundane as the weather. Pulling Sheryl’s body—or what she’d thought was Sheryl’s body—onto the sled had shaken that confidence badly, but as time had passed, she’d gradually returned to the belief that life in Antarctica was, at its core, safe, that it was almost impossible that she could die from simply being at the South Pole.