First Light

by Rebecca Stead

  A group of cousins from the third line turned to face Thea. Then more people. And more. She acknowledged each, her mind spinning.

  Every face in the room was looking up at her.

  When Peter got back to the breeding grounds with Dolan, his mother was asleep on the sands with Norma keeping watch over her. The red notebook was lying open. She was almost to the last page. He hovered over the book, unable to stop himself from looking.

  He read:

  Mai was on the narrow sleigh, her small body wrapped in blankets and furs. Her color was high, which was strange— she'd been so pale lately—and with wisps of hair escaping the fur hood that I had pulled up over her ears, she looked youngand healthy—a bit tired, perhaps, as if she'd spent the afternoon skating.

  Norma and Gru pulled the sleigh. Gru knew the passage well by this time and had taken up her customary pace. Mai fell asleep almost immediately, Lucian's sealant tube still clutched in one hand. Despite her sickness and exhaustion, Mai seemed able to sense the air of the wider world-she always said she could hear it—and she roused just as I was turning the sleigh toward Gregory's camp.

  There was a high wall of ice that marked the way—I loved the way it changed color in the light—rose one morning, blue/gray the next afternoon. It looked like many other ice ridges nearby, and Mai had always marked her way with one of her bracelets, unclasping the braided ring from her arm as she approached the ice wall and driving it into the grainy surface with one hand as she passed, never stopping the dogs. It was her trailmark, to be reclaimed on her way back home. Later, when the land became familiar to her, she had no need of it, but the act had come to feel natural, a clap of greeting on the shoulder of an old friend.

  Now, as we passed the wall, Mai reached out a hand to feel its rough surface, wondering, I imagined, that she had ever had such casual strength.

  “Stop.”

  Although there was a slight wind and Mai's voice was weak, I heard the word clearly—I had been listening for it. Istood with the dogs and watched as Mai unclasped one bracelet and drew her arm back.

  The bracelet hardly broke the first layer of ice crystals that clung to the wall, but for the moment it stayed where Mai had placed it, much to my relief I hoped to move on before the bracelet dropped to the ground, but she opened the tube of sealant and threw the contents of the flask at her bracelet. The ice around it cleared until the bracelet appeared to be suspended in midair.

  The bracelet, woven strands of spun ice dyed the color of blood, seemed to pulse with color in the bright sunlight, as if it had been somehow animated rather than frozen in place for earth's eternity.

  I cried, looking at it, not because I knew that Mai would never again see her trailmark, although I did know that, but because I understood that, however hard I might try, her memory could never be preserved as purely.

  Peter reached out and closed the notebook, realizing as he touched it that he had actually hated the thing. He'd half-believed it was taking his mother away. But it was just an ordinary red notebook, with two words written on the cover now: For Thea.

  He glanced over to where his mother lay next to Norma, and was surprised to find her watching him, her head propped up on one hand.

  She smiled. “So, what happened?”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  An hour later Peter waited in the main house while his mother, Dolan, Lana, and Thea huddled around Cassie's whelping box out on the sands. He resisted the urge to use his sight to spy on them. Instead, he watched Sasha, who had fallen asleep in a corner of her stall. In a little while he would be saying good-bye. He tried to form a permanent picture of her in his mind.

  Dolan came toward him. “Ready?”

  Peter nodded. They walked toward the whelping box, where Thea stood solemnly with one hand on Cassie's head. When Peter stopped in front of her, she gave him a short bow, and then reached down to where Feet sat next to his mother. Thea gathered the pup into her hands.

  “I give you Feet,” she said, holding him out to Peter, “your one companion.”

  Peter took Feet and held him. He gave Thea a little bow, and then he bowed to Cassie, too. “Thank you.”

  Dolan smiled broadly. Peter's mother was crying.

  “Now what?” Peter whispered to Thea.

  Thea grinned. “Now you take care of each other.”

  He wished he could take Feet home today. But Dolan said Feet needed to spend a few more weeks with his mother first.

  The call sounded from the main house, and a few moments later Sela and Mattias were walking out to meet them. Dolan hadn't bothered to bolt the doors.

  “I found them!” Sela called. With one hand, she waved a pair of skates.

  “Mattias outgrew them a year ago,” she said breathlessly. “And is this your little man?” She peered at Feet. “Pretty one, he is. The legend pup—still hard to believe.”

  Peter rubbed the pup's head, and Feet batted at his hand with one paw. “Or maybe he's just a dog.” He put Feet in the whelping box. “You watch out for him, okay, Cassie? Don't let anyone squish him.”

  Thea laughed. “He'll be fine. And soon he'll be all yours.”

  The skates fit perfectly. Peter took a few practice runs on the pass in front of the breeding grounds. Then he gave Sasha a long hug.

  Thea, Mattias, and Peter set out for the Mainway together. It was nearly suppertime now, and lightglobes burned a deep green outside the doors they passed. The Mainway was busy, and Peter knew that people were noticing him. Most of them skated alone, or in twos. There were some boys carrying giant bags of bread, and one with an orange sash who skated by so fast Peter's knees went weak for a moment.

  “Messenger,” Thea said to him. “They're a bit showy.”

  He caught someone's eye, a woman's, and smiled at her. She smiled back. But for the most part, he concentrated on making the turns without knocking anyone over. The path split a few times, wound to the left, thento the right, then left again. Thea and Mattias led the way, leaning into their strides without seeming to think about it. For every step they took, it felt like he took four. But he was elated.

  And then the lake came into view. The water was still, reflecting the low light and the branches of the trees around it. Thea and Mattias stopped at the lake path and bent down to their skates. He leaned over and flipped his blades up to the sides of his boots the way Sela had shown him.

  They waited for the others. No one talked—it was one of those times when you felt like you had to say something really important or nothing at all. He would have to have Miles make up a word for that.

  “Here they come,” Thea said.

  A minute later, Dolan and Sela pulled up on a sleigh, with Lana and Peter's mom right behind them on the sled Peter had taken from camp two days before. His mom held her red notebook under one arm. She got out, untied the team of dogs, and pulled the sled onto the lake path. They all trooped down the path toward the tunnel, not talking.

  Dexna and Lucian were waiting there. The entrance to the passage was much wider than before—a person could walk through it standing up now. And there were a couple of lightglobes resting on the ground on either side of it. It looked almost like a door.

  Dexna walked up to Peter. “We have an appointment, then?”

  “A week from today. And I'll remember to practice.”

  Sela pulled a stiff folder from a bag at her feet. “There was hardly any time for it, but I wanted you to have this now.” She took a single sheet of paper from the folder. It was a drawing of Sasha.

  Peter nodded, his throat tight.

  “And this is for you, Thea.” His mom pressed her red notebook into Thea's hands.

  “Thank you,” Thea looked at the cover and fingered the metal spiral. “But what is it?”

  His mom looked like she was going to cry. “It's everything I wish I had been able to tell you, about your mother.”

  Thea smiled and hugged the book to her.

  Sela put one arm around Mattias and the other around Thea.
“Losh, it's only a sevennight,” she said. “Be off with you!”

  And then Peter and his mother were walking up the passage together, pulling the sled behind them.

  They emerged blinking into the brightness of the late afternoon sun. Peter looked toward camp, allowing himself to draw the sight closer. The geebee geebee stood there, and Jonas's igloo, and the dogs' shelter, and the research tent. Nothing had changed.

  When Peter and his mom trudged up the slope to the camp, Peter's father was just coming out of the research tent with an armful of equipment. He began to run: If Peter had looked closely enough, he would have seen tiny pins flying in every direction, drill parts dropped, a heavy battery disappearing into the snow with no sound at all. Arms open, Dr. Solemn launched himself at Peter and his mother.

  And then they were all falling.

  “Ouch! Goodness, Gregory!”

  They had landed in one of Jonas's snow pits.

  The next day, Dr. Solemn assigned Jonas a long day of pit-digging. Peter and his parents sat in the geebee geebee and talked.

  “How much longer will they be safe down there?” Peter asked. “Before the ice melts, or cracks?”

  “I wish I knew,” his dad said. “Twenty years? Maybe more.”

  “But maybe less?”

  “It's possible.”

  “Where will they go?”

  “There's plenty of time to talk about that,” Peter's mother said. “To England, perhaps. We'll have to see what we can do.” She glanced at Peter's dad. “An international effort.”

  He nodded, then smiled at her. “We won't be able to sneak them out under a blanket in a Cessna, that's for sure. That worked for you, but—”

  “No.” Peter's mom shook her head. “No more hiding.”

  Jonas hadn't asked questions when Peter and his mother returned to camp, not even about Sasha. He'd just asked if Peter felt like experimenting with the cookie mix. “I'm getting tired of the same ones over and over. I was thinking we could whip up some oatmeal-chip brownies or something.”

  A few days later, Peter and Jonas were lying in the igloo eating their most recent experiment: banana-butterscotch bars.

  “So,” Jonas said. “I guess your parents found whatever it was they were looking for.”

  Peter watched clouds pass overhead through the hole in the roof. “I was looking for it, too,” he said. “I just didn't know.”

  Jonas laughed. “Happens to me all the time.”

  Their last weeks in Greenland continued in a happier version of what had gone on before. Peter's headaches were gone. His mom sat on her bed and began to write her book on mitochondrial DNA. She'd decided to include a short history of a family that fled Englandcenturies ago. She couldn't help Thea get Gracehope ready for the world, she said, but she could help the world get ready for Gracehope.

  Peter's dad had sent away for some radio-building kits, and he and Peter drove the dogsled to the post office in Qaanaaq to pick them up, along with a bunch of up-to-date world maps and history books.

  There was also a letter from Miles:

  Peter kept his first appointment with Dexna, going down the tunnel with an armful of maps and books to find her waiting at the bottom. And then there were other appointments. On days that Jonas and Dr. Solemn spent in the field, Peter and his mother slipped away. And each time Peter approached the ring in the ice wall, his longing for Gracehope nearly overcame him. Herealized that he had grown to be like his mother after all: From now on, his heart would live in two places. Or maybe three.

  Then it was their last week in Greenland: The days that once stretched out before him were all but gone. Jonas went south to his grandparents' village, where he would spend the summer. He peeled his name from the back of his chair and slid it carefully into his backpack. “I can't remember how many kitchen chairs they have,” he explained. “I want to be prepared.” He also took all the pancake and brownie mix. That afternoon, Peter and his mother brought Feet back to camp.

  It was cloudy the day the Air National Guard plane came back for them. Peter tucked Feet inside his parka.

  The pilot waved his paper cup of cold coffee at the geebee geebee. “If it weren't for that blue monster, I wouldn't have been able to land. Can't tell the ice from the clouds today,” he said. “You leaving it there?”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Solemn. “We'll be needing it again.”

  EIGHT MONTHS LATER

  Holidays were observed quietly in Gracehope. “Imagine every line trying to put a feast like this on their greatroom table on the same night,” Sela said to Thea, eyeing the platters. “The lake would be empty and the plants stripped down to nothing.” But births were rare enough to be celebrated with abandon.

  Mattias crammed another sweetroll into his mouth.

  “Those aren't all for you, Mattias!” Sela called. “At least wait until the guests begin to arrive. And you might bring one or two rolls to Lana. She's in with the baby.”

  Thea was not the last bearing daughter of the first line after all. Lana had a daughter, Iris.

  “I'll take them to her,” Thea said. She put a few rolls on a plate along with some sliced fruit.

  “Oh, thank heavens!” I haven't had a chance to eat all morning!” Lana popped a sweetroll into her mouth. She looked beautiful, as always, though since the baby there was often something disheveled about her—a missed button or a falling-out hair comb. Today her sash was coming undone. Thea retied it while Lana ate.

  Iris was lying on Lana's bed, gurgling happily under a fur blanket and waving her arms over her head. Beside her was a little pile of baby clothes.

  “I was trying to dress her,” Lana said with her mouth full. “But she won't stop moving.”

  Thea untied the red ribbon that held her locket. “I-ris,” she sang. “I-ris. Time to get dressed for your party.” She swung the locket gently over the baby's head. Iris immediately dropped her arms and tried to focus on it, her eyes nearly crossed with the effort. Lana had her dressed in a minute.

  “What am I going to do without you, Thea?”

  “I'm not going anywhere for months!” Thea laughed. “And then I'll be gone for only a fortnight!”

  Lana hoisted Iris to her shoulder. “It will be impossible to bear.”

  The surface expeditions would be starting in the spring. Thea was to go with the Chikchu teams as Dolan's apprentice. She had already begun to make the dogs special coats so they wouldn't freeze the way Ham and Peg had. In time, she would breed Sasha's thick-coated pups into a line of dogs better-suited for the cold world.

  In a few months, Peter and Aurora would be back, and they would all start to plan. Not many people in Grace-hope knew that the cold world was warming: Chief Berling did, of course, and a few others. One step at a time, Dexna said. First, let people enjoy the sunlight. Aurora said that Peter's father would teach Berling and a few apprentices how to recognize signs that the ice was breaking up; Mattias had asked to be one of them.

  Back in the greatroom, Thea helped Lana at the counter while Mattias hovered protectively over the tray of sweetrolls. Lucian appeared in the doorway. He had started to visit occasionally, usually with something he thought Thea might like to read. Often the books were hopelessly boring—an old treatise on botany or geology. But she liked seeing him.

  “Thea!” Sela called from a gift-covered table. “I need this cleared for more food, if you can comprehend it. Can you take these things to your chamber?”

  It seemed that every family in Gracehope had sent something over, no matter how chipped or tattered. Theadumped everything on her bed. A few things slipped to the floor, including a toy ricewater pot. It had no top, and there were two stones wedged in the bottom of it. Thea sat down with the pot in her hands. She had no memory of the thing, but she believed what Lana told her, that she had loved it once.

  She put two fingers into it, feeling the smooth, unmov-ing stones, and looked at the picture that hung above her trunk. It showed her mother and Aurora, in the sunlight. A photogra
ph, Peter had called it. Aurora had sent it down the tunnel with the Chikchu after Mai died, and Sela had kept it hidden all these years.

  Lana appeared in the doorway. “Dexna's arrived. Are you through here?”

  Dexna had been elected Chief of Council shortly after Launch. It was difficult for Thea to remember her as a quiet person, let alone a silent one.

  Thea held out the pot in her hands. “Look what I found.”

  Lana laughed. “Goodness! Are the stones still there?”

  “Yes.” Thea showed her. “Lana, do you remember what Dexna said about me at Launch? How I had the courage to reach out where I had been taught to be afraid?”

  Her aunt came and sat on the bed next to her. “Of course I do.”

  “It's not true. Mattias was hopelessly wedged in the ice, and I saw Peter and Sasha. But I didn't call out to them.”

  “You must have,” Lana said.

  “No, I didn't,” Thea said. “It was Gru who called them. I just closed my eyes and hoped they would be gone when I looked again. If Gru hadn't started shrieking, Mattias would have died, and nothing … nothing would have changed.”

  Lana stood. “It was natural to be afraid. Gru was able to push you past your fear. The Chikchu have been our guides for a long time, Thea. Mai liked to say that's why we name them for the stars.” She held out a hand. “We're going to have a toast to your little sister. Ready?”

  “Is Rowen here?” Thea had only glimpsed her grandmother a few times since Launch. Dexna said she rarely left her chamber.

  Lana shook her head. “No, she hasn't come. I didn't expect her to—she's as stubborn as the stones in that pot.”

  “Then why did you invite her?”

  Lana smiled. “Because she's my mother. And I suppose I'll keep inviting her for the same reason.”

  Thea rose, set the ricewater pot on her bed, and followed Lana to where the others waited.

  “It's real tea,” Mattias said as they took their cups from a tray. He stood grinning with Dexna, Sela, Ezra, and Dolan. Thea noticed that he had two more sweetrolls in his free hand. Sela held Iris, who was asleep. Lucianhovered outside the family circle, looking down into his glass.