Biddi shook her head. “I know the good doctor meant well, but . . . huddle together with everyone else in a single room so we could all die a slow death on some lunatic’s timetable? No thank you.”
Cass shuddered. “You made the right decision. It was . . . terrible.”
“I can’t imagine what seeing that was like. How are you holding up, dear?”
“I don’t know if I am.” Cass put her hands to her face. “It’s hitting me, but the pain is coming from a thousand miles away. I think I’ve suffered as much shock as I can at this point. Something inside me is saying, get out of here first, then deal with the madness.”
“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” Biddi said, then paused. “How do we do that?”
“You don’t have a plan?”
Biddi flapped her arms like a giant stuffed bird. “You’re looking at it. I thought maybe I could set fire to the powdered milk and live off dried jerky until the cavalry came.”
“We’d probably kill ourselves if we tried to set a fire. Assuming whoever did this doesn’t come for us first.”
Biddi hefted the ice axe. “Let him try, dearie. But I get your point. Can you think of anything better?”
Cass paused. “Orlova.”
Biddi looked at her blankly. “What about it?”
“We head for it.”
“On foot?”
“Yes.” Cass explained herself in a rush. “It’s far, but with good gear, the right supplies, and two of us checking for crevasses, we have a chance.”
“A chance is right. You didn’t happen to grab a GPS before you stumbled in here, did you?”
Cass shook her head. “But the SPoT highway passes within a few hundred meters of the Russian base. If we keep an eye on our watches and keep track of the stars, we should come close using dead reckoning. Then we’ll just have to look for Orlova when we think we’re near.”
Biddi stared at her. “Dead reckoning? You want us to re-create Ernie Shackleton’s bloody fucking journey, is that what you’re after?”
“No, he did it in a boat,” Cass said calmly, and with more confidence than she felt. “We’ll be walking.”
“So, you’re saying at least we won’t drown? Fantastic.”
“It’s either that or stay here and freeze to death. Or be killed.”
“My God,” Biddi said in a whisper, looking at the supply racks. After a moment, she said, “I suppose there’s nothing for it. Is there anything of use here?”
“Grab a few MREs to eat, but not too many. More than a couple will weigh us down and if it takes any longer than a few days to reach Orlova, well, more food won’t really make a difference.”
“Well, you’re a cheerful one, aren’t you? Where does it come from?”
“Some deeper inner reservoir of strength,” Cass said. “Also, I’m scared shitless.”
They grabbed rucksacks, threw a few dried meals in each, then shouldered them and headed out of the ECW cage. Biddi turned to face her in the aisle. “How do you want to get outside?”
“I remember the engineering schematic showed an old station tunnel leading east for a hundred meters or so before it exits out a stub-up on the surface. It’s going generally toward Orlova. If we use it, we’ll be out of the wind the whole time.”
“With just over forty-nine and a half kilometers to go.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“No,” she sighed. “Let’s go.”
She and Biddi headed down the central causeway of the warehouse to the door. Just before they passed through, Cass glanced back. The hangar-sized cavern seemed isolated and safe in comparison to the rest of the base. But at sixty below, they would both slowly die of hypothermia and frostbite, no matter how many layers of ECW they put on. Assuming they weren’t murdered in their sleep. As crazy as it sounded, walking overland to a base fifty kilometers away made more sense.
They trudged back down the corridor that connected the arches in silence. The smell of gas began to increase and Cass pressed her scarf closer to her mouth and nose. As they pulled even with the side tunnel to the VMF, Cass asked over her shoulder, “Who set fire to my garage?”
“I wish I knew, dearie,” Biddi said, her voice muffled by her scarf. “It was already like that when I separated myself from the Lifeboat group. No doubt it was the same whacko who dreamt up this nightmare we’re going through, this Observer Hanratty spoke of.”
“Do you have any guesses as to who that is?”
“Personally, I’d nominate Mr. Gerald Keene.”
“It’s not him.”
“Oh? And how can you be so sure?”
“Someone cut his head off and put it in one of the shrines.”
“I see,” Biddi said, pausing briefly to absorb the news. “Only his head?”
“The rest of him was in one of the Jamesway huts.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. How do you know that ? I thought Hanratty had you locked up this whole time.”
Cass hesitated, faced with a strange reluctance to reveal her last secret. But there was little reason to hide anything now. As they walked, Cass explained how she’d discovered the shaft up to the abandoned Jamesway over the summer and made it her sanctuary. Guilt assailed her as she described the little shortwave she’d managed to cobble together.
“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.”
“It was you?” Cass swallowed. “You really killed everyone?”
“Of course not. Not directly. I inserted a catalyst here, removed a social barrier there. Not so very different than what happens in any true crisis, isn’t that so?”
“Why would you do that? What could be worth all those lives?”
“Oh, Cassie.” Biddi sighed in disappointment. “Think of every drought, every natural disaster, every man-made catastrophe you’ve ever heard about. What happens? Social constructs we’ve built up over thousands of years disappear in a flash. People kill one another for a crust of bread or a gallon of gas.”
“What’s that got to do with any of this?”
She lifted an arm, gesturing upward to include all of Shackleton. “The crises I fabricated here are nothing compared to what we’re going to face in the future. If we want to continue as a species, it’s not enough to know who can face up to a crisis and survive , we need to know who’s going to transform . And, more importantly, how.”
“You’re telling me this year’s winter-over was a dry run for the apocalypse?”
Her face was obscured, but Biddi’s smile came through her voice. “A wee bit melodramatic, perhaps, but yes. And you needn’t be so negative, dearie. We’re on the cusp of colonizing other planets, creating habitations in the Sahara and at the bottom of the sea, aren’t we? Extraordinary achievements that might be accomplished by exceptional individuals . . . but what happens when ordinary people are asked to do the same?”
“Did you learn what you needed to? Was it worth it?”
“On the whole, no. Our tests are already sophisticated enough to weed out the weak and the infirm. My models predicted nearly everything that happened—from Jun’s suicide to the final riot—on the basis of the psych surveys all of you took a year ago. But TransAnt’s little team of pinheads decided there was nothing like a field test to confirm the theory.”
“And did it?”
“Yes. The prognosis is not good. We started with forty adventurous, intelligent, resourceful subjects. Two of you seemed to show signs of crisis growth. You and Ayres had faced enormous personal, professional, and emotional setbacks only to come out stronger and better than when you went in. Both of you thought of yourselves as failures. Psychological messes. Dangerously fragile. But the truth is, you’re just the kind of people the world needs if we’re going to survive.”
“But you killed Ayres. And all the people he was trying to save.”
“He allowed too many people into the Lifeboat—ten might’ve survived over the long term, but not thirty. He knew that and brought them in anyway. Our future can’t be left in the hands of someone so sentimental.”
“So you locked them in and shut off the heat.”
“Yes. And to the station as a whole, of course. That was a nice feature installed on the power plant last summer.” She shrugged. “The TransAnt folks will be mortified, but they’ll come around when they see that I took the experiment to its logical conclusion. Haven’t we always benefited from pushing science through its moral hedgerow and finding out what lies on the other side? It takes someone with true courage to keep the greater good in mind.”
“But why kill everyone? You had your . . . results.”
“Forty-odd legal inquiries would taint the value of my conclusions, I’m afraid. Better to purge the subject pool and deal with the fallout later, don’t you think? Dead men tell no tales, as those rascals the buccaneers used to say.”
“Biddi,” Cass said, grasping for words. “You’re insane.”
“It’s just big-picture thinking, my girl. You’re disappointing me, by the way. I was ready to rank you as the highest performer. But now I’m not so sure.”
“Does that mean I’m to be purged, too?”
“Cass, the ugly reality is that, in any experiment, even the rat who finds the cheese is killed at the end.”
Biddi’s ice axe was an overhand blur, the spiked head aiming for the top of Cass’s skull. But at the first sound of the change in Biddi’s voice, Cass had begun leaning away, and as Biddi moved toward her, swinging the axe like a lumberjack, Cass threw herself backwards, backpedaling and scrambling to get away.
Hampered by the awkward cold weather gear, Biddi’s swings were clumsy and poorly placed, throwing her off balance. Cass turned and ran down the darkened tunnel. She’d thought briefly about standing to fight, but couldn’t imagine trading blows with the person she’d called her friend, no matter what madness she’d just confessed to.
Her breath came in gasps and spasms as she shrugged off the rucksack as she ran, trying to shed weight. The ice axe, she kept.
Behind her, Biddi crooned her name, calling for her to stop. Cass pelted down the tunnel, the light from her headlamp bobbing in time with her panicky strides. She struggled to pull in clean, steady breaths; she felt the bite of that axe in her spine, and the fear caused her breathing to stagger and choke in her mouth.
; Calm down. Breathe. In through your nose, out through your mouth .
She raced for the oldest ice tunnels of the original station, the area where she’d first discovered the sewage leak. The only sound was the scrabbling sound of her boots and her heaving gasps, broken only by Biddi’s occasional yell for her to stop.
Put your foot down, bring that boot up . She is slow. You are fast .
Then why do I feel like I’m dragging the world behind me? I don’t think I can feel my legs. I’m swimming in mud.
You were kept sedated and imprisoned for a week , the voice reminded her. You’re fatigued and rusty. That’s all. Keep moving.
Cass ripped the scarf away, feeling like she was being asphyxiated. The icy air hit her lungs like a dagger stabbing her through the mouth and chest, but the shock of the coldest temperatures on the planet jolted her into greater effort—for a moment, her stride lengthened to its normal spread, her arms swinging like she had hit her runner’s high in her best marathon.
But then she hit an uneven patch of ice and her ankle, the bad one, wobbled and buckled. A twinge ran up the side of her leg and she gasped at the old, yet familiar, pain. Please, no . Her runner’s pace evaporated, the ache sending her limping and stumbling forward into an intersection of the tunnel. She would never be able to outrun Biddi like this. She would have to fight.
As she came even with the cross-section, however, a figure lurched at her out of the side tunnel. Cass had a brief flash of a gaunt, terrifying face—black nose, cauliflowered ears, frostbitten gray cheeks—before he clubbed her in the head with a soft, heavy arm, sending her sprawling. She lay on the ground, stunned, as the figure shambled around to face Biddi.
A hoarse shout of rage and recognition emerged from the man. Biddi yelped and swung the axe, but it was a clumsy attempt, and it only raked harmlessly down Leroy’s arm. His clawed hands reached for Biddi, but the woman windmilled the axe desperately, keeping him at bay. A sustained, high-pitched shriek emanated from him as he batted Biddi’s swings aside.
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