Thea watched Ham streak over the side of the slope and down away from her. The white patches of his fur flashed a few times in the semi-dark, and then he was gone.
A few moments later, Ham's barking came again, different now, more deliberate. Two barks, then a beat of silence. Two barks, a beat of silence.
A beacon.
“Mattias!” she called.
Two barks, a beat of silence.
She unharnessed Peg and Gru.
Two barks, a beat of silence.
She turned the sleigh toward the sound and pushed it to the edge of the slope. She lay down on it, waited for Ham's next bark, and aimed the sleigh toward it. One push of her legs brought its nose down hard on the icy slope, and she flew down the hill, Gru and Peg running on either side of her.
Ham came into view abruptly, his tail sticking straight out behind him and his face pointed exactly in her direction. The moment she saw him he stopped barking and turned to nose at something on the ice behind him.
It was Mattias. Or rather it was Mattias's head and shoulders. It took Thea a few moments to work out that the rest of him was rooted in the ice somehow. His eyes were closed, his head resting to one side.
“Mattias!” She touched him. He was warm, alive. Ham walked a slow circle around him, while Gru and Peg sat quietly at a distance, as if they knew Ham was at risk in some way they were not. This, more than anything, scared her.
“Wake up, Mattias!” Thea rubbed his shoulders, his cheeks, the back of his neck. Nothing.
“Mattias, I need to talk to you!” She crouched, grasped him under the arms, and pulled uselessly. “Mattias, Mattias,” she chanted. She took off her gloves and felt the ice around him, meeting sharp edges everywhere,nothing like the tame ice she knew. She decided to risk a light.
She groped among the furs heaped on the sleigh, feeling for the lamp. Where was it? She plunged her hands in again and again, desperate. She heard a noise—a sudden heaving sound. Mattias was waking! And then she realized she was hearing her own sobs. The lantern. Where was the lantern?
When she found it, the light didn't show her anything encouraging. There was a long thin crack in the icebed, and Mattias's lower body was jammed into it. She had to wake him. She set the lamp to its brightest and put it down on the ice next to Mattias. Then she slapped his cheeks, pinched his shoulders, and shouted his name into both of his ears until he moved, one jerk of the head, a reflexive action. A few moments later, his eyes opened.
Thea felt her chest expand as if she had just then learned to take in air.
“Mattias. You've fallen. We have to get you out of here. Can you move your legs?”
Mattias shook his head.
“Can you feel your legs, Mattias?” A grim question, but she had to ask.
A moment passed. Mattias nodded.
“Good. That's good.”
But she still had no way to get him out.
Mattias was closing his eyes again.
“No, Mattias!” She took his face in her hands. “You have to fight this. Help me get you out of there. I'm going to try to lift you, but I need your help—push away from the ground, Mattias, with your arms. I'll count to three and we'll both—”
“Can't,” he said simply. And Thea felt his head go heavy in her hands.
“Mattias!” She tried again to rouse him. She did everything she could short of hurting him, and then she did try to hurt him, pinching him hard, but there was no flicker of consciousness.
She forced her arms under his. She would pull him free. If she could just hold him and stand, he would be free of it. This would be over, Mattias would be himself again, and they would be home. She knew that people could sometimes do extraordinary things at extraordinary moments. Moments like this one. She would stand up with him. This was possible.
Her arms and legs strained against the weight of him, against the ice that fought her for him. She felt the energy flowing out of her—her muscles refusing to yield, giving more than they could really afford to. But she couldn't even begin to stand. Her legs trembled and buckled, and then she was on her knees.
She pounded the ice until her bare hands werescratched and bleeding. She screamed at it to let Mattias go. Why did it hold him? What use could it have for a boy? “You don't need him!” she cried. She scraped at the icebed around him, hit it with her bloody fists and cried onto it.
She sat beside him for a long time, time she knew she should be using in other ways. The three dogs had silently wrapped themselves around Mattias's shoulders, Ham signaling home over and over, looking at her hopefully in the gathering light before he fell asleep with his nose touching Peg's.
She wanted to fall asleep, too. She wanted them all to go away together. But she couldn't sleep. She had to get up and go down the tunnel for help, though she knew Mattias might be dead by the time she got back. There was still a chance, she told herself. There was a chance if she went for help now. But still she didn't move.
The sky lightened slowly until she could see the line of the earth against it.
A horizon. Mattias had tried to explain it to her twenty times, but she had had to see it for herself.
Thea stood, and Gru lifted her head and then got to her feet. Peg and Ham followed her with their eyes but neither made a move to leave Mattias.
“Stay here,” Thea told Gru. “Stay with Mattias.”
But the Chikchu trotted over to her and cast her eyes up the steep hill that was in front of them. Thea feltherself trembling and realized that she could not drag the sleigh to the top by herself.
“Come on then,” she said, hooking Gru's harness to a sleigh trace.
They climbed up the steep slope toward the tunnel entrance, Thea's hands bleeding inside her gloves from the scrapes she'd inflicted while clawing the ice around Mat-tias. His presence pulled at her from below. She could barely see him now. Ham and Peg had wrapped themselves more tightly around him to cover the ground that Gru had left bare, and his head and shoulders were swaddled in a wealth of black and white fur.
She was nearly to the top of the long slope when Gru began to keen—a piercing, thrumming, vibrating sound, a sound one rarely heard in Gracehope. A sound of alarm. Thea's first thought was that Mattias was dead. But if Mattias had died, it would be Peg and Ham keening. She looked to where the dogs below had raised their heads carefully at Gru's call. Mattias couldn't be dead.
Gru stopped her shrieking for a moment, if only to draw breath, and Thea followed the Chikchu's gaze a little way along the rim of the enormous bowl that held Mattias. A slab of ice jutted out from the crusted earth, still gray-blue in the early morning, but with one edge turning a deep orange. The sun would be rising soon. She tried again to hate everything about this place.
Gru started up again, her gaze never wavering from theice slab. The sound she made was almost a physical force, pushing Thea away.
“Come on,” Thea said to the Chikchu, pulling lightly on her harness strap in the direction of the tunnel. But the dog wouldn't move. Gru's body was rigid.
Thea was afraid. One hand on Gru's neck, she looked toward the ice slab again. Something was moving next to it.
There it was: a circle of twisting scarlet strands. Peter pressed a glove to the ice. Fingers spread, he could cover the thing with one hand. He pulled his mother's drawing of mtDNA from his coat pocket and took off his gloves to unfold it, ignoring the immediate throbbing of his hands in the frigid air. He studied the sketch, peering now and again at the red ring under the ice. It couldn't be a coincidence. Was this what she was looking for? Had she put the thing here? Why?
Peter sat down on the sled and put a hand out to pat Sasha absently. She was having trouble settling down.The dog paced a few restless circles and then started darting around making snuffling noises.
What was the matter with her? Peter unclipped her from the sled but kept a tight grip on a harness strap. And then he realized that he was hearing something. A high-pitched sound, like whistling, but with a purer tone. The
wind, maybe. He listened again. It was almost like singing. Or wailing.
It was then that he remembered the polar bear. A shot of fear ricocheted around Peter's body. Did bears wail? Heart thumping, his mind ran through his father's advice: move slowly, stay far away from any cubs, and … and try to look big, something like that. He took his pack from the sled and put it on with some effort: He had stuffed half the contents of the equipment box into it, but he didn't have a single flare. It made him look bigger, anyway.
Sasha strained to run, but he held tight to her harness. Slowly, he let her pull him around one end of the ice wall to the other side, where the ground fell away in front of them into what looked like an empty lakebed, frozen and deep. The keening sound was getting louder. It didn't sound like any bear. More likely a wolf, he thought, calming down a little. Wolves, his father said, would stay away from him unless he got between a mother and her cubs.
He scanned the landscape in front of him. In the dimlight he could make out hummocks of ice here and there along the high edge of the slope, like clusters of white sails or giant shark teeth. He glanced from one to another, but the wailing was everywhere at once. Then the sound stopped, and the echoes fell silent.
There were a few moments in which nothing happened, but Sasha was still pulling hard. Peter let her pull him forward, just a step, and then the noise started up again, an arrow of sound that bounced around the frozen bowl in front of him. But this time he had a better sense of where it was coming from. Somewhere close.
Thea's eyes were locked onto the slab of ice. Perhaps it had been a shadow moving, or an animal. She stood rooted to the ground and watched. Gru was mercifully silent. A dog's muzzle appeared, followed by its head and front legs—not Chikchu, but not far off either. And behind the dog was a boy.
He stood within shadow, and Thea had trouble seeing him at first. He was about her height, she thought, with rounded cheeks and curly hair the color of straw. It had never occurred to her that hair might come in different colors.
She looked back to the dog. She trusted animals implicitly, or wanted to, but she knew that dogs had been no friends to her people in the old world. The hunters had used them to root out hiding families, children in trees. She heard Meriwether's voice in her head, the one he used when he wanted to be dramatic. “The ancients hid well. But the hunters quickly discovered that their dogs could find them.” She shivered.
Without warning, Gru started keening again, even louder now. Thea looked at her, followed the Chikchu's gaze to the boy and the huge wedge of ice he leaned against. She wasn't sounding an alarm, she realized. Gru was screaming for this boy. For him to come to them.
Fear drenched her in the moment it took to grasp what was happening. “Quiet!” Thea whispered, jerking Gru's harness roughly. “Stop that!”
Gru didn't spare her a glance. She was intent on the boy, who was looking off in the other direction, scanning the horizon, no doubt, for whatever was making such an awful racket. The sound was everywhere, echoing up to the sky, slipping off the slabs of ice that emerged here and there from the ground.
His dog was straining away from him now, but the boy held the animal by a collar with both hands. Who knew how many others might be near? Gru's wailing intensified so that Thea had to cover her ears with her hands.
Don't shout at her, she told herself, it will only make things worse.
She pulled with all her might on Gru's harness, but the Chikchu had planted her feet and could not be moved. Thea tried pressing hard on the dog's eyes, tried pinching her ears, but Gru would not be distracted. Thea couldn't look at the boy again, he might be turning, seeing them even now. She tore off one glove and raked her fingernails across Gru's sensitive muzzle. She knew from dressing pack-fight wounds that this hurt very much. Gru broke off for a second, let out a long growl of warning, and nipped Thea's hand. Hard. Then she growled again, longer and lower, took a few steps away from Thea, toward the edge of the steep slope, and set up a keening so loud it took Thea's breath away.
She could run for the tunnel. But what if the boy followed her? And what if he didn't? How could she leave Mattias helpless in the face of whatever this boy might do to him? Thea looked toward Mattias below. The sky was brighter now; it was nearly first light. Dawn.
Her hand ached, and she stuffed it quickly back into her glove. She had been fighting with Gru, with her mother's companion. Mattias would soon be lifeless on the ice, she was about to be discovered by the people of the wider world, and she had been clawing at a Chikchu.
Her feet stayed where they were. She turned away from Gru, away from Mattias, away from the slab of ice andthe boy whose eyes would be on her any moment, and looked toward the glow and the warmth that had begun to break free of the horizon. The sun: She could feel it reaching for her, shedding rose and orange light all around her. Soon it would be right in front of her. She closed her eyes. She would not allow herself to look.
The first thing he saw was an old-fashioned-looking sled, heaped with furs. It wasn't hitched to a team, but a gray dog stood nearby it. And holding the harness reins was a girl in a white fur with thick black curls falling almost to her waist. She was looking away from him, up at the sky.
They didn't seem quite real. There was something about the sled's curled runners, the girl's long hair, and the pile of furs that said to Peter, “This is all in your mind.” But then Sasha began to run toward them, and Peter stumbled alongside, still holding on to her collar.
The dog dragged him right up to the girl. She was very real. Up close, she looked upset, with wet eyes and red blotches on her pale cheeks. He couldn't see much more of her, because she was covered from neck to foot in a somewhat dirty fur jumpsuit.
Sasha looked up at the girl. The wailing sound, which had been getting steadily louder, stopped abruptly as the big gray dog beside her swung its head to look at them.
The girl looked at Peter, at the same time extending a gloved hand for Sasha's inspection. She had definitely been crying.
“I am Thea,” she said, her voice coarse. “I need your help.”
“Peter,” he stammered. To find anyone out here was unlikely enough, but a girl his age wrapped in fur?
“Peter,” the girl repeated. Except that she said “Pita,” like his mother.
“Are you from England?” Peter asked. “I thought we were the only people around here. Where is your camp?”
“No time for that,” Thea said. “My friend is trapped.” She pointed down the slope.
Peter followed her finger to where he could make out figures on the lakebed below them. Dogs. And a person. Without another word, the girl stepped on the back of her sled and flew down the steep slope, her dog running at her side.
His pack bouncing hard against his back, Peter ran back to his sled and pointed it down the slope just as the girl had. But then he lost his nerve and walked down, lowering the sled in front of him and scooting on his backside where the incline was too steep to walk. Sasha tried to stay with him, skidding frequently, as Peter kept his eyes on the girl and tried not to think about how he would get up to the top again.
When he caught up with her—Thea, she had said her name was—Peter gasped. The boy at their feet had been half-swallowed by the ice.
“His name is Mattias,” Thea said, barely composed. “I'm afraid he's near death.”
Peter nodded. The boy was unmoving and very pale, his eyes closed, his lips and eyelids blue. Was he alive?
The boy's torso emerged from a narrow crack in the ice. A white dog was stretched out alongside him, supporting his upper back and shoulders, and another, mostly black, had arranged itself against his chest so that his head seemed to emerge from a ring of black and white fur. The dogs were trying to warm him.
The girl said, “We won't be able to lift him without help. What have you brought?” She motioned to the knapsack on Peter's back. He'd forgotten he was wearing it.
He slipped the knapsack off and the two of them fell on it.
�
��What is this?” Thea asked frequently, holding up one object and then another. She didn't recognize an ordinary flashlight?
“Wait a minute!” Peter cried, seeing his hard-weather pod in the bottom of the bag. They could erect it around the boy's head and shoulders, but they would have to cut a hole in the bottom of the thing first. He looked back to the boy. Mattias.
“It won't get him out of there,” he told Thea, “but it's worth the time. It has a heating element.”
Tears streamed down Thea's cheeks. She nodded.
Peter tore the pod from its small sack, allowing it to spring open to its full size. Thea leaned away from it for a moment, as if she feared something might be about to leap out of the tiny tent.
Flipping the pod over, Peter felt for his knife in the front of his sack. He had never used it before.
“Hold it just like that,” he said to Thea, stretching the underside of the pod with his hands until it was taut and smooth. She grasped the slick material and pulled it tight with a strength that surprised him. She looked about to fall apart.
With a gesture that suggested a good deal more confidence than he felt, Peter slashed a sizable “X” across the bottom of the pod. Then, taking a moment to fold the knife and toss it back into his sack, he felt along the pod's seams until he found the all the heaters: sealedpackets of liquid chemical, divided by what felt like plastic Popsicle sticks. Peter used two hands to break the thin pieces of plastic. He could feel the heat through his gloves as the fluids washed together inside the pod's lining.
At a signal from Thea, the dogs moved away from Mattias and Peter covered him with the tiny tent, screwing the plastic anchors into the ice around him.
Thea was rooting through everything in Peter's sled now, opening the little bags strapped to the either side of the running board.
“What are these?” She held up the hand warmers he kept stashed there.
“Chemical warmers,” he answered. “Like the ones heating the pod.”
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