The Winter Over(91)

“You had outside radio contact this whole time ?”

Cass frowned at Biddi’s tone. “I was locked up and sedated, remember? By the time it could’ve helped anyone, I was being kept in a trance.”

“And you didn’t reach your Russian friend just before you got here?” Biddi asked, her voice anxious.

Cass shook her head. “Someone found the radio. It was destroyed.”

“Positive?”

“Yes, Biddi, I’m positive,” Cass snapped. “What’s the matter with you?”

Biddi’s voice was tart. “Pardon me. I thought for a minute there might be a way out of this madhouse aside from walking fifty bloody kilometers in the dark.”

Cass clamped down on her anger. They desperately needed each other if they were going to have even a remote chance to survive the trek to the Russian base. “So, if Keene wasn’t the Observer, who else is there?”

“Well, seeing as how Taylor shot his own boss in cold blood, then ran off, he seems like a good runner-up. Unless you found his head in a niche?”

“I didn’t. But Taylor wasn’t smart enough to do something this sophisticated.”

“You might be right about that. Chief Taylor had a fine body, but never struck me as the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

They continued in silence, the rusk, rusk of their boots and Cass’s own harsh breathing the only sounds for long minutes. At the conduit intersection, Cass moved right, opened the plywood door to the entrance to the old base, then stopped cold.

Biddi tried to look around her, her voice high-pitched. “What? What is it?”

Scattered just inside the door, as though they’d tumbled off a grocery cart, were a random collection of food items—two or three candy bars, a can, some pieces of fruit that were now frozen into icy glass sculptures. One of the pieces of fruit, however, had been smashed underfoot and frozen in place, preserving the front crescent of a large boot print.

Cass moved aside so her friend could see what she’d discovered, then put her own foot beside the print. It was large, even compared to her oversized winter boot. The tread pattern was different, as well, more of the alligator-skin markings of a work boot than the light ridges of a bunny boot.

“Taylor?” Biddi whispered.

“I don’t know,” Cass said in the same low voice, but inside she was thinking something else. Taylor isn’t that big . She squeezed the handle of the ice axe. “Let’s keep going.”

“Are you kidding? That fucking gowk has a gun.”

Cass turned to face her friend. “What choice do we have?”

That ended the conversation, and they continued down the rough-hewn passage, their combined flashlights bobbing and swaying back and forth.

Minutes later, Biddi whispered, “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Stay so calm.”

“I’m not calm. I’m terrified.”

“You’d never know it by looking at you,” Biddi persisted. “I wish I could bottle you up and sell you.”

“Why, are crippling neuroses and self-recrimination in this season?”

Biddi snorted. “You’re too hard on yourself, Cassie. You’ve come through this with flying colors.”

“We’re not through it yet.”

“True, but anyone who knew you before could’ve seen it.”

“Knew me before?”

“Before the accident. The tunnel. It was never your fault.”

Cass said nothing and continued down the frozen tunnel. Divots of ice that had been carved out by hand decades before gleamed like the facets of fist-sized diamonds embedded in the walls. The scritching noises of the hyper-frozen snow underfoot—the sound of walking in a world of Styrofoam—were loud in the small tunnel, creating the illusion that the walls were drawing inward and the ceiling shrinking until she was sure her head was brushing the roof above.

Her back felt wooden, as though a plank had been slid under the skin along her spine. Her hands and feet began to tremble, and she stumbled slightly, sending the light of her headlamp wobbling uncertainly. Tears began to well up and she shuddered with a barely contained sob.

“Cassie.”

She turned. Biddi had stopped in the middle of the tunnel. Covered in cold weather gear from head to toe, no part of her face was visible.

“You never told me about the accident, did you?”

Not trusting herself to speak, Cass shook her head.

“Ah, that was foolish of me, wasn’t it?” A pregnant pause followed, broken only by their breathing. “You know, my money was always on you.”

Cass rocked back on her boots, but didn’t move. “Why?”

“I handpicked every one of the subjects. Ferns, we called you. Do you know why? Because you were ‘plants.’ Some idiot at TransAnt came up with the name. But it fit better than they knew. Some of you stagnated, most died. But only one flourished.”

“Biddi, start making sense,” Cass said, her voice a whisper.

“You were part of a grand experiment, love. You guessed as much, as did the feckless Mr. Hanratty, who believed in his own delusion of control. But his scope, much like his heart, wasn’t big enough. Only the bombastic Mr. Keene guessed the truth. You were all part of the experiment. Even me. I might have been in charge of conducting the test, observing the results, but of course I’d been shipped along with all the other rats, hadn’t I? Dumped into the same maze, despite having never agreed with the psych team’s petty goals. Such small minds, such limited ambition. And yet, here I was, right in the mix. I was angry at first, of course. Then, I thought, what better opportunity to put my own theories to the test while simultaneously thumbing my nose at those little shites back in the lab? So I simply . . . accelerated the study.”