by James Tabor
Emily stopped, yawned again, rubbed her face. “But right now I need to get some sleep. I am just about out on my feet. Nap time. More later!”
The image faded.
Hallie jumped to an entry from July, seven months into Emily’s stay. Dark circles had developed under her eyes. The freckles, brighter against pale skin, looked like little scabs. Her lips were cracked, and when Hallie hit Play, Emily came to life, but her smile did not.
“Let’s see. It’s July twenty-ninth. About halfway through my stay. What’s the big news? Not much. Unless you count the partying. I’ve never seen so many people walking around drunk and high. Pot, of course, but not just. You wouldn’t believe the booze they stockpile here. I mean, gallons and gallons, all top-shelf—Chivas, Jack D, Stoli, you name it. And they make moonshine! Some of the Beakers built a still. The stuff is clear like vodka, but it’s about 160 proof and tastes like I think jet fuel would if you drank it. They call it Poleshine.
“I’m tired. No, exhausted. Everybody said this is a hard place to be, and it is. The disgusting food, being dirty all the time, annoying people, so much darkness. And getting sick. If you don’t have Polarrhea you have a cold, and vice versa. There are scientists from so many different countries, who knows what kinds of bugs are floating around this place? I’m the only one from North America this year. Pure luck of the draw, the way grants shook out. We just keep swapping germs back and forth.”
She looked into the camera without talking for several moments. “Need to get some sleep,” she said, and the screen went blank.
Hallie jumped ahead again and opened a video from early in the January just past. Emily’s appearance last time had been disturbing. Now it was shocking. Weight loss had sharpened her face to points and edges. Her hair looked dirty and uncombed, and her teeth were yellow, with little wedges of plaque between them. There was a scabbed scratch on one cheek and blue-black circles under her bloodshot eyes. Her lips were chapped and cracked.
Emily stared blankly at the camera for several moments after turning it on. Her eyelids fell and rose slowly. She ran her tongue over her lips, grimaced, and then did something that struck Hallie as odd: she half-turned and looked over her shoulder. Was someone in the room with her who the camera wasn’t showing? Had someone knocked on the door? After a moment, Emily turned back.
“The New Year’s Eve party. Unbelievable.” She rubbed her face, ran fingers through greasy hair. “Ambie got totally fucked up again.” Her eyelids drooped and she nodded forward in a microsleep. Then she came back.
“It’s getting harder to think straight. At first, when I heard people talking about being crisp I thought they were exaggerating to freak out a fungee. They weren’t. I can’t wait to get out of this goddamned fucking place.
“But it’s important to record what’s happened while I’m here and it’s still fresh.”
15
AGAIN EMILY STOPPED TALKING AND STARED, EYES VAGUE AND DISTANT, seeing something Hallie could not imagine, or perhaps seeing nothing at all. She came back, sipped from a dirty white mug, and her hand trembled as she brought the mug down from her mouth.
“Okay. Have to focus. I need to talk about Ambie. We started really hanging out after Thanksgiving. In the world, I don’t know. There’s a saying here: ‘The odds are good, but the goods are odd.’ Ambie’s okay-looking and he can be funny. He has a really amazing mind. He is a little odd, true, but nothing compared to some of what slouches around this place. So, okay, we hooked up.
“He’s great at some things, but holding his liquor isn’t one. He got really totally shit-faced at the New Year’s Eve party. Plus, he mixed Ecstasy with the Stoli and beer. Offered me some, too. I told him, yet again, that I don’t do drugs. I had to almost carry him back to his room. Usually when he gets that drunk, he rambles for a few minutes and passes out. This time was different. He was all jazzed. The Ecstasy.
“He kept babbling about triage, which was odd. I thought he was hallucinating about a disaster or something. I told him nobody was hurt. He said triage was about saving people. He said some other things, just making no sense at all. Then he passed out. We didn’t even have time to make love. Better living through chemistry. Right.
“The next day we were here in my room. He had a horrible hangover. I felt fine. I said, ‘What was all that stuff about triage last night?’ Incredible. He turned white as the ice sheet. For a second I thought he was going to faint. He looked terrified! I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and he snapped at me, like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ So I explained about the night before, the things he kept saying. He just freaked. ‘What else did I say? What else?’ He actually grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to shake me. I told him to get his hands off me and shoved him away, but it scared me. I’d never seen him like that. Then I thought he might cry. Totally bizarre. He went, ‘Please tell me what else I said.’ I actually felt sorry for him then, so I really tried to remember and got some of it back. I told him, “You said triage is coming. Then I said nobody was hurt, why would there be triage? And you said, No, no, you don’t understand, nobody is going to die, because it won’t kill them and they won’t even know they have it.’
“It took me a long time to convince him that this was all I remembered. I said that he had been stumbling drunk and high on Ecstasy, and that you can’t hold somebody responsible for stuff they say when they’re so messed up. I don’t think he even heard that. He sat down and squeezed my hands and made me promise not to tell anyone else. I said, ‘Okay, I won’t tell anybody. It didn’t make any sense anyway. You were drunk out of your mind and all drugged up. Why would I?’ ”
Emily rubbed her face, and when she looked up again, tears filled her hollow eyes. The monitor screen went dark.
She made her next video entry on January 26: “I’m not sure what’s happening. After that last talk with Ambie, I didn’t say anything to anyone. Didn’t mention it to him again, either. He left it alone, too. A week went by. But it was just too weird. I couldn’t get his reaction out of my mind. I thought, Okay, I promised not to tell, but it would be okay to ask, wouldn’t it? So over the next ten days I did—Agnes Merritt, Doc, two or three others. Not all at once. Everybody said basically the same thing: triage is an emergency medical protocol they use in war and disasters.
“Ambie has changed. Before, he couldn’t get enough sex, at least when he was sober. Now he could care less. But even without sex, it’s been like he doesn’t want to let me out of his sight. Even weirder, right? So I told him to back off, leave me alone. He wasn’t happy, but it got me my space.”
She paused, closed her eyes, and some time passed before she opened them again. “I feel like I’m being watched. That sounds weird and paranoid, I know. But I can’t shake the feeling. It’s like that old thing where you’re walking by yourself on a dark sidewalk and think somebody’s following you, but when you look over your shoulder, there’s no one. I haven’t said anything about that, even to Fida. But I’m thinking maybe I should.
“One thing’s for sure. On Friday I am going to Thing Night. Alone. No Ambie. Wore out his welcome. I just want to drink a beer and dance a little. Have fun. If I can remember how.”
The video stopped. It was the last one.
Hallie stared at her laptop’s screen. What to do next? First thing, secure the card. She put it back where she had found it. If the thing had stayed there undiscovered this long, it was as good a place as any.
She could not get the afterimage of Emily’s ravaged face out of her mind. She wasn’t sure she ever would. It took her back to a time when they had both looked like that, after the climb on Denali.
The Cassin Ridge stuck out of Denali’s south face like the dorsal fin of a shark and was one of the world’s great big-mountain ascents. Before dawn they started up the route on the sixty-degree Japanese Couloir, about 1,000 vertical feet of ice, a long, shining blue mirror. Placing the tool picks and crampon points was like trying to drive nails into slabs of glass. Chunks o
f ice called “dinner plates” kept breaking off and shattering when they hit the ice lower down. It was some of the most delicate climbing Hallie had ever done. They would have moved to the couloir’s rock walls, but those were even worse, encased in a half-inch of clear, brittle ice called verglas.
With the chute finally climbed, they stopped on the Cassin Ledge, a rock shelf at 13,400 feet just big enough for two tents. They drank tea and slurped energy gel. The air was clear, a light wind blowing up the face. To the south they could see the Kahiltna Glacier curling around like a vast, white snake and, beyond that, the shining peaks of Mounts Hunter and Huntington, giants in their own right but dwarfed by Denali, the highest mountain in North America and the largest massif on earth.
They moved out, and an hour of moderate rock climbing brought them to a nightmarish obstacle called the Cowboy Traverse, a knife-edged ridge, very exposed, with both flanks dropping away at sixty-degree angles.
They were climbing unroped—simul-soloing—for speed. Hallie went first, straddling the ridge like a horse, crunching through crust over loose sugar snow. She knew that there had to be another hard, slick layer somewhere underneath. An avalanche could start when the weight of new snow—or a wrong step by some climber—sent the whole thing sliding like sand down a tilted mirror. But if you wanted the Cassin, this was how you went.
Seventy-five feet out, Hallie took that wrong step. A crack one hundred feet long opened across the slope, and a slab avalanche two feet thick let go. At first, it felt slow and gentle, unreal as a dream. Three seconds later it was like being spun in a giant dryer full of bricks.
The friction-melted snow froze as solid as concrete seconds after stopping. Upside down, she could move her tongue and one eyelid. She had created a small air space by cupping her hands in front of her face as the avalanche slowed. It was the first time in her life she had known absolutely that she was going to die.
She closed the working eye and said the Lord’s Prayer several times. Brought up images of her mother and father, brothers, and Barnard. Moved away from tears. Every trip had a verdict. She’d known that going in. No blame for a mountain.
She was hypoxic and semiconscious when something struck her boot sole a hard blow. Three shovel strokes later, she felt Emily shake the boot and yell at her to keep fucking breathing, goddamnit.
Later, off the ridge and looking back, she saw. Emily had traversed diagonally down and across 150 feet of intact but unstable slope to reach her. That whole section could have slid at any second. Should have, really.
“We both ought to be dead right now,” Hallie said, still shaking from cold and fear. “You know that.”
“What would you have done?” Emily handed her another cup of hot, sweet tea.
She thought about living another fifty or sixty years knowing she had done nothing. “The same.”
“See? No choice.” And then they both cried.
She wasn’t sure how long that reverie lasted, but now she had to think carefully about what she had seen. Who was Ambie? A pet name, obviously. But short for what? There weren’t a lot of men’s names that began with those letters. Ambrose, Ames, Amal, Amadeus … What she needed was a roster of station personnel.
Merritt, overseeing only the scientists, wasn’t likely to have that.
But Graeter, captain of the ship, was.
If she could find a man with that name, she might find Emily’s killer.
16
HALLIE THOUGHT GRAETER MIGHT SAY HELLO. INSTEAD, HE POINTED at his wrist.
“You’re late. Doctor. Leland.”
“Actually, I’m not.” Having taken his measure yesterday, Hallie had made a point of being precisely on time this morning. She held up her wristwatch as proof. “Twelve noon.”
Graeter held up both hands. He wore two watches, one on each wrist. “My time is Pole time,” he said. “I have you two minutes late. You might want to synchronize your watch with mine.”
“Pole time,” she said. “Sounds like a beer commercial.” She didn’t touch her watch. He was a never-good-enough man, but he would get no bowing or scraping from her. Might mean butting heads, but she would rather butt than bow any day.
“Sleep well?” Graeter asked.
“Is that a joke?”
“It’ll pass. Or maybe not. Some never adjust.”
“I know altitude. But my mouth feels like I gargled with acid. Do people get sick that quickly here?”
“You’re probably not sick. Yet. It’s frostbite. When you stepped out of the plane, you went from sixty above to about seventy below. Sucked in air. Involuntary, like what happens if you jump into freezing water. It heals in a few days. Usually.”
“Comforting.”
“Have you—”
“Did you find out anything more about the women who died?” she asked.
“I thought we covered this yesterday.”
“We didn’t cover the possibility that some pathogen might have killed them. If that’s the case, it could happen to others.”
“That wasn’t it,” he said, much too casually for her mood just then.
“How could you know that? Just about everybody I’ve talked to so far has been sick with one thing or another.”
“Doc called. He said Lanahan had some kind of operation on her throat. Montalban had surgery, too—a C-section.”
The same things Merritt had said.
Should I tell him?
Merritt could not have been the killer; the one piece of real information Hallie had—thanks to Emily’s video—was that the killer was a man. Graeter—more likely than Merritt, obviously. She would tell him nothing.
He glanced at the watch on his left wrist again. “Let’s go. I have a station to run here.”
He brushed past her and was out the door before she could protest.
A few minutes later, they were walking along the main corridor when Rockie Bacon approached. She wore bunny boots and black insulated Carhartt coveralls over a red plaid shirt. She held a smartphone in one palm and was texting as she walked, oblivious to Hallie and Graeter.
“Good afternoon, Bacon,” Graeter said.
“Good afternoon to you, Mr. Graeter,” she said, no great pleasure in her voice. To Hallie: “We just can’t stop bumping into each other, can we?”
“Are you headed for the early grading?” Graeter asked.
“That’s right.”
“How’s the cold?”
“Can’t seem to shake it.”
“I could get Landis or Richards to handle it this morning.”
“Thanks, but it takes more than that to keep me off my Cat.”
After Bacon walked away, Hallie said, “I thought it was too cold for planes to land now.”
“It is.”
“So why send her out there, sick as she is, to grade the runway?”
“Not runway. Iceway.”
“To grade the iceway.”
“SORs say it gets graded twice a day. So we grade it twice a day.”
They walked on. As Graeter led them to the first level, Hallie asked, “Why are all the stairs yellow?”
“Human factors experts said fewer people would fall down them.”
“Did they do the decorating, too?” She was referring to the irregular polygons in clashing colors—deep blue, fire orange, blood-red, sharp purple—that covered the corridors’ walls and ceilings.
“Sort of. They also claimed that asymmetrical patterning warded off depression. In a place that goes dark for eight months, it’s a serious problem.”
“Reminds me of a badly lit elementary school decorated with paintings by disturbed children. Does it work?”
“Not hardly.”
They moved in their pool of light down dark corridors, past a grimy gym and weight room, offices, storage chambers. Descended stairs at one end of the station, came to an air-lock door with a sign:
ATTENTION! LABORATORY ZONE
AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY
DO NOT ENTER UNLESS YOU WANT TO G
ET BURNED BLOWN UP
OR INFEKTED
“Beaker humor. Merritt can take you in there,” Graeter said.
Minutes later, they stood beneath the station in a rectangular tunnel, eight feet wide and twelve feet high. The floor and walls were smooth, white ice. Icicles and frost formations dangled from the ceiling. Round metal tubes, two feet in diameter, hung from one wall.
“Welcome to the Underground,” Graeter said. “A labyrinth carved out over the years. This main tunnel runs under the length of the station. Other tunnels branch off, and still others branch off them. Imagine a Scrabble board late in the game.”
“What is that smell?”
“Sewage and diesel fuel.”
They walked on. Graeter turned right down one secondary corridor, right again into another, and kept turning into new corridors for several minutes. “Know where you are?”
“Do you mean could I find my way back to the stairs? Maybe.”
“Maybe isn’t good enough at Pole,” Graeter said.
“Why did I know you were going to say that?” Hallie asked.
“That’s what you need to know about the Underground. Let’s go back.”
“What else is down here?” Hallie asked as they walked.
“Bulk food storage. Generators, primary and backups. Fuel reservoirs. NCS holdings more than anything else.”
“NCS?”
“Non–cold sensitive. Everything from old furniture to files.”
They passed a chamber whose entrance was blocked by a sheet of heavy black canvas. The other “rooms” she’d seen were open.
“What’s in there?” she asked.
“That’s the morgue. Lanahan and Montalban are in there, until we get them on a flight out.”
She stopped. “Is that where Emily stayed?”
“Yes.”
He looked at the black sheet, then back at her. Turned and kept going. She lingered for a few moments, feeling tears start to well up, pushed them back down. Rage came, hot and red. Then grief, and then, last of all, horror.