Soren pressed his lips together, and a muscle in his cheek pulsed. “See that you don’t miss the hut. It’s a small object in the dark and up here, declination plays games with you. Go too far, and you’ll end up in the ocean.”
“Got it, Dad. We’ll be safe.” Edie insisted on calling Soren this even though Sasha was pretty sure he was at least five years younger than she was.
“Oh, I’m not worried about you,” Soren said. “I just want my dog and machine back.” He said this, but Sasha knew he was joking. Soren looked out for all the scientists at the station all the time, which was why in all the seven years that he had been here, there had been no deaths or injuries, unlike the tenure of the previous caretaker, during which the Cullen party of four were lost at sea, the Murdocks were eaten by polar bears, and there was a rash of injuries and incidents of hypothermia.
But caring didn’t stop Soren from dishing out some tough love, although even Sasha had to admit his little signs and checklists all over the place, like the one that read “Do you have your @%^# parka?” that was plastered on the side door from the hatch to the outside, were a little funny.
Soren put on his inner layer and followed Edie and Cal out to the bay, no doubt to issue some more suggestions, check on the snow machine, and make sure that they tied Lupin up properly. Sasha put away the last of the dishes and made her way down the narrow bunker-like corridor that led to the east wing sleeping quarters. Although the kitchen and common room had been cozied up a bit with a couch and some rugs, the station for the most part had the cramped metallic feel of cargo ship. It could really use a woman’s touch. And a hot tub. Of course, given the hijinks that people seemed to get up to up here, a hot tub would probably be a bad idea.
Kyle blinked at the bright light in the hall when he answered her knock.
“I was wondering if you wanted to run the sim model based on the new temperature, density, and coverage numbers,” she asked. She could technically run the model herself, but she didn’t like to exclude Kyle, and the ancient computers in the station were a bit tweaky.
Kyle shook his head. “Not tonight. I have other stuff I have to work on.” A chilly breeze floated out of his room, like he had his heat vent turned off. He looked pale and sweaty, and she got the distinct impression that he had been smoking, even though that was forbidden inside the station.
“You okay?” she asked. She and Soren were the station’s first responders, but as a part-time paramedic when she was not traveling for research, she was the most experienced. Kyle definitely looked sick. Like, kind of really sick.
“I’m fine,” Kyle already had the door half shut as he spoke, and the rush of cool air out into the hall was a bit discomfiting. They were practically on a polar ice cap. It was not like it needed to be any colder. Kyle closed the door the rest of the way, and Sasha made her way back to the common room.
Touchy, temperamental Kyle. Everyone in the Oceanography Department knew about his moods and fits of absurd temper over academic slights. She would be far more likely to sleep with him if he wasn’t so cranky all the time. Earlier in the week, she had asked him about the small black dragon insignia on his binoculars and he had nearly taken her head off. She had assumed it had something to do with tae kwon do and that they could chat about it since she had just completed a course in martial arts. It wasn’t as if they had an abundance of things to talk about while out drilling holes in the ice.
She decided to run the chemical analysis on the seawater that they had collected near some of the thicker pack ice collections. That was another weird thing—the ice was starting to collect in places where it had not historically, suggesting unusual upwellings, changes in ocean currents, or something. She wished university budgets hadn’t been slashed as a result of the economic correction, or “mini-depression” as everyone was calling it, and they could afford a real research team. She wondered if Soren was even getting paid anymore. At least his beer was still getting brought in.
Soren came back into the common room, apparently satisfied that Edie and Cal had prepared sufficiently for their trip. He caught her looking at him and flipped her one of his intense looks punctuated by a wink. She never knew what the winks meant—an invitation, a shared secret, a reflection of his opinion of her as a cute little inconsequential thing, an inoperable eye twitch… She had no idea.
She refocused her attention on the chemical analysis. Ocean ice lost its salinity as it aged and the number of pockets of brine could help tell how fast the ice developed and the degree of melt over the course of the year.
Sasha let herself become absorbed in the tables and the numbers and preparing graphs for each of the floes they sampled.
She was so engrossed that she almost didn’t hear Soren and Robert talking in low voices in the kitchen.
“Look, Amber is really spooked about the bears. We’d like to head out early.”
Soren shrugged. “Earliest flight out is the supply drop in two weeks, and they can only land if the conditions are good. So you’re stuck until then at the earliest, unless you have enough money to charter your own flight.”
“There’s nothing you can do?”
“You mean like what, dog sled you four hundred miles to Grise Ford, where you’ll have to wait for a plane or a boat anyway? Sorry. The Transporter went down last week.”
Sasha suppressed a snort of laughter at Soren’s joke. Robert was a bit of a delicate fuddy-dud, more of a desk scientist than a field one.
Robert moved away from Soren wordlessly and returned to his and Amber’s room. He shut his door tightly. Soren raised his hands palms up at Sasha as if to say he had no idea what to do, and then sat at his own desk, wrote a few notes in his log, and said goodnight.
Sasha finished up with her graphs and hit save. She wondered if the recent acceleration in the changes in the magnetic North Pole had any influence on ocean currents and could be accounting for the shifts in the locations of the greatest ice cover. What she knew from Edie was that magnetic declination, or the variation between true north and magnetic north, had shifted by a few degrees annually throughout history. The rate of change had been accelerating over the past century and even more so in the past few years. The directionality of change, which was usually consistent for long periods of time, had also started to fluctuate annually, which was considered very unusual. She knew that Edie and Cal thought that the changes in the aurora borealis were related to these fluctuations in the magnetic North Pole. She made a note to ask them about it.
She padded quietly down both sleeping quarter halls, checking to see who was awake. She and Soren were alone in the west wing, while the others occupied the newer east wing. With the tightly-fitting hatch doors it was impossible to tell whether the others had their lights on or not, but all seemed quiet. Satisfied, Sasha made her way back to the main door to the bay. She opened it a crack and peered out. The dogs had retired to their kennels and the air in the bay was a brisk minus fifteen. She picked her way carefully through the plastic huts until she got to Timber’s. She patted his head, and the old dog roused himself and made his way out. He was the oldest of the sled dogs, and at eight was already retired from active duty. Cedar, the pup of the pack, bounced out after Timber. Cedar head-butted her and she gave him a noogie between the ears. His mother, Talia, had been killed by a polar bear just a couple months earlier, and Cedar had adopted Timber as his new mother. Sasha bubbled with laughter every time she saw Cedar leaping all over the infinitely patient and stoic Timber.
“Not you, little one,” she said. “Your owner would have my head.”
Timber followed Sasha back into the station without question or sound. She had been doing this for several nights now—letting him sleep in her quarters. Soren would be apoplectic if he knew, but Timber just seemed too old to be sleeping out in the icy bay, and since he was no longer used for sledding, she didn’t see the harm. That’s how she rationalized it anyway. She always made sure she was the first person up in the morning to escort him back t
o his kennel.
She shooed Timber into her quarters and closed the door. He settled immediately on the small carpet at the end of the bed and let out a satisfied sigh as he extended his long limbs. Sasha knelt to bury her face in his fresh smelling fur. She adored him already. How was she going to leave him behind in six months? She rose, changed in to her flannel pajamas, and climbed into bed.
Chapter 2 – The Event
Sasha awoke with a start from the knocking on her door. It was kind of a cross between a pound and a rap, as if the knocker were somehow a tiny bit uncertain, but determined.
She opened her eyes and heard the jostle of Timber moving position. Crap. Soren had figured out that she had smuggled the dog into her room.
“Sasha, Sasha. Is this your room? Please open your door. There’s a problem. Immediately.” Soren’s voice. His voice was strangled and strange. Why was he asking if this was her room? What was going on? Sasha bolted up in bed, and realized that her eyes were registering a strange sensation of nothingness. The glow of her bedside clock was absent. The power must have gone off. That was probably what the problem was. She could hear the thrash of a violent polar storm outside the station.
But the power must go off all the time. Why would it make Soren so unhinged? Was he in a rage about Timber? Or was he worried Edie and Cal in the storm? That was probably it.
“Sasha, please come.”
“Coming,” she managed to stammer.
Damn. She was totally going to be busted. She groped her way to the door, feeling across the old built in wardrobe, and then along the wall, the brush of warmth from Timber moving out of the way, his claws clicking on the floor.
“Go lie down,” she hissed, and she heard him obey. Maybe she could slip out of the room before Soren noticed he was there.
She flicked on the light as she passed it, but the room remained in complete darkness. That was it then. The power. She hoped Soren had a candle or a flashlight. She couldn’t imagine that Mr. Safety would not be totally prepared. She should have been sleeping with her headlamp on her bedside table.
She opened the door to her room expecting to see the glow of some backup light, but instead she saw nothing. Surely there would be some ambient light from outside, even in a storm. Soren practically fell in on top of her and she extended her arms automatically to catch him. She felt his body heat and the rasp of his stubbled chin on her cheek. But then he righted himself and they separated. He remained closer to her than she expected, though. She could smell his faint scent of wood smoke and sweat.
“I can’t see,” Soren said, his voice forceful, but ragged. Had he been drinking? Was he having a breakdown? Surely he had dealt with a power failure before. Outside her room, the crack of the wind against the small windows in the station common room was almost stunning in its ferocity. Edie and Cal must be in trouble in the hut. She couldn’t believe Soren let them go out with a storm in the forecast.
Be matter-of-fact and empathetic—that was what she had been trained to do as a paramedic. “Well, neither can I. The lights are off. The power must be out. Where are your candles and flashlights?”
Soren’s body lurched at this. “You can’t see either?”
“I’m not a dog.” Dumb, dumb, dumb to have made a dog reference.
“Sasha,” Soren said with a sharpness to his voice that made her jump. “The power isn’t off. The heat circulator is on the same circuit as the lights. It’s still on. And I have a flashlight in my hand right now. I check the batteries every night. It’s on.”
Sasha shook her head a few times trying to process what he was saying and blinked her eyes in all directions expecting to pick up some hint of light from somewhere. But everywhere was this vague suggestion of dark nothingness.
She was blind.
Words spilled out over her realization. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Is it a chemical? Did something in the lab spill?” She heard the distant non-paramedic-like panic in her voice, and her knees felt loose and unreliable. She felt her way to the small sink in her room and splashed water in her eyes madly.
Soren spoke above the water. “I can’t smell anything and my eyes aren’t burning. I rinsed my eyes already. Then I stepped outside the emergency exit for a second to see if it would clear. I still couldn’t see anything.”
“We need to wake the others and get the eyewash. Have you called for an emergency evacuation?” She and Soren needed to get to a hospital immediately; the water was having no effect and her mind had already propelled her down the dark corridors of the possibility of a lifetime of night.
“The storm’s going to prevent an evacuation until morning at least. And there’s another problem. Edie and Cal haven’t checked in. They were supposed to radio me as soon as they got to the warming hut. I set my alarm so I would wake up at 1:00 a.m. to radio them if they hadn’t called me.”
The wind took on a particularly furious bent and the station windows rattled. Edie and Cal would be in significant trouble in this storm whether they had made it to the hut or not. Sasha opened her mouth to ask if Soren had known the storm was coming, but thought better of it.
“Have you radioed them?”
“I tried once, but then realized that I couldn’t see a thing, and I panicked and knocked the radio off my bedside table and it flew across the floor somewhere. Now I can’t find it. They didn’t respond anyway. I need to get to the main radio panel and try again, and then send a distress signal to Retort.”
Retort was the closest air force base on the mainland, and their point for emergency contact if something went wrong. It was also 2452 miles away.
She felt Soren’s hand on her arm. “Let’s go get the eyewash. Then you go wake the others while I get on the radio.”
“Okay.” Sasha dried her face on her towel and tried to run the layout of the station through her mind, and all of the barriers and invisible hazards that lay between her and the first aid station and the sleeping wing.
“You ready?”
She nodded, and then realized that at this point, nodding was as good as useless. “What if the radio antenna is down?”
“That thing was built to withstand a hurricane. Let’s hope it’s not down.”
Soren took her elbow, and together they groped their way down the hallway in the direction of the kitchen. At one point, Sasha wondered if someone was following them, if Timber had left her room, but decided it was just her mind playing tricks on her. The main rooms swirled with the chill air of the storm as the gale force winds took advantage of all sorts of tiny fissures in the station walls.
They descended the short flight of stairs into the kitchen, but then Sasha bumped her hip on one of the kitchen stools, and Soren tripped over one of the packs that had been left on the floor, letting out a stream of expletives.
The first aid station was just off the kitchen. It was a small pantry-like closet equipped with a defibrillator, antibiotics, stacks of gauze, antiseptic, cylinders of oxygen and Entonox, all manner of slings and crutches, and most importantly, emergency eyewash. Soren threw open the door and the thunk and thwap of items falling off the shelves followed.
“They’re on the left. Third shelf,” she said.
“I know,” Soren grunted.
A bottle of eyewash was thrust into her hand and with shaking fingers she twisted it open and pressed the cup against first one eye and then the other again and again. Nothing. She still saw nothing. She could hear Soren swearing next to her. They had to get to a hospital. Maybe there was some operation, some procedure they could have to restore their sight. She grasped on to this small fragment of hope like a piece of floating debris in the frigid Arctic Ocean.
“Any use?” he said.
Her voice was thick. “No.”
“Me either.”
She tried to quell the trembling of her hands. “Let’s get the others up.”
They continued their slow advance through the kitchen, navigating by fingertips and memory. A palpable sense of terror hung between them, in
the stiffness of their bodies and the edginess of their words, that this—this fumbling through nothingness, this strange and sightless world, could be their new reality.
When Sasha placed her hand on the knob of the open door that led to the other sleeping wing, they stopped. Soren let go of her arm to feel across the opening and grasp the wall on the other side, so he could make his way down to the lab where the main radio was housed.
“You okay from here?” he asked. She had imagined hearing his deep resonant voice in the dark before, but not like this. Never like this.
“Yup,” she said. “I’ll get them to guide me back to you.” She heard Soren start to inch his way down the next set of stairs to the lab, and she turned and started to move down the hall, one arm outstretched, the other tracing the contours of the wall. A gust of icy air swept down the corridor, and her body jolted in sudden shivers. It was too cold. She should call Soren. She opened her mouth to say his name when screams filled the small passageway. Amber.
The sounds of Soren tripping and falling over stuff in the lab followed, and one of the doors in the sleeping quarters was flung open. Something rushed past Sasha, heading down the sleeping quarter hall, and growls joined the screams. Soren arrived at her side, touching her arm to verify that it was not her screaming, just as she heard Kyle’s voice.
“What’s going on? Where are the goddamn lights?” he bellowed.
“The power might have just gone out,” she called, trying to make herself heard over Amber’s screams, and straining to hear the heat circulator. Surely Kyle was not blind as well.
“Don’t you have any emergency lights in this bucket of bolts?” Kyle said, his voice closer now.
“Even if the power is out, this whole hall should be lit up like a Christmas tree,” Soren said, “but none of us seem to be able to see.”
Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1) Page 2