The Icarus Project

by Laura Quimby

  “Hey, no wannabes in the shot,” he said.

  What was he talking about? The last thing I wanted was to be on film, but with him constantly shoving that camera in everyone’s face, it was hard not to be caught in one of his precious shots.

  “You’re ruining the close-up. Look, I know it’s fun to be in a movie, but I need this to be real, and a little girl doesn’t add much to the credibility of the dig. Now move it.”

  What a jerk. Who cared about his stupid movie? I shifted closer to Karen, but Jake moved also and sighed, annoyed. “Your big head is in the way.” He reached out and pulled my hat off. I hadn’t had time to braid my hair that morning, and when he pulled my hat off, my white hair exploded in a mass of wild frizz.

  “Wow! Holy Yeti head! Someone has crazy hair,” Jake yelled. “Let me get a shot of that. Weird. Is it real?” Jake reached his free hand out and messed up my hair.

  “Get off me. And, yes, it’s real.” I stepped out of his reach.

  I tried to grab my hat out of his hand, but he pulled back and shoved his camera in my face. I scowled into it. Kyle and Karen looked away and went back to inspecting the maps, trying to ignore Jake. But I felt everyone staring. Randal looked at me for a second and muttered something that sounded like fascinating. Dad grabbed my hat out of Jake’s hand and gave it back to me.

  “Back off,” Dad said to Jake. “Keep your camera out of the way. And don’t go near my daughter again. With or without your camera. Got it?”

  “Hey, I go where my uncle goes. You don’t have any say.” Jake smirked. “I was just joking around with her. Have a sense of humor.”

  My cheeks flushed. I wished a crevasse in the icy floor would open up and swallow Jake and his camera whole. Why did I let a guy like him bother me? I was too embarrassed to stay inside the tent where everyone was planning and joking, so I went outside to hang with the dogs and get some fresh air. I approached the back of the sled and saw an Inuit woman sitting there. “Hi,” I said, sitting down next to her. “I’m Maya.”

  She smiled warmly at me. Justice glanced over at us. “This is my grandmother, Jada,” Justice said. “She likes to come visit the site some days.”

  “I like to see the mountains,” she said. Jada was sitting on a pile of furs on the edge of the sled. A fur-lined hood ringed her face and a fur blanket lay over her lap. She must have been used to the harsh weather, because she didn’t seem to mind being outside.

  “Would you like to warm up in the tent?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “I want some quiet. It’s too loud inside.”

  She stretched her blanket over my legs and then looked off into the distance. She was staring at an icy mountain ridge. It reminded me of a glass castle. I sat in silence and stared out over the landscape, the distance growing outward like a mirage. It was calming. My anger at Jake began to melt away. I must have been breathing heavily, because Jada patted my hand with her fur mitten.

  “This is a place of great spirits. It is important to my people.” Her voice was strong. “Stories are important to us. They give our past meaning. Our ancestors live on through the stories.”

  The dogs barked and jumped. Justice unhooked Cinnamon. He had let her come along since he knew that I liked her, and she bounded over to me.

  “Jada, the dogs say they want to be in a story,” Justice said. His dark eyes glittered in the sun.

  Jada tucked a bit of my hair that had escaped back under my hat. She and Justice must have heard the whole thing.

  “I hate my hair. It’s a joke,” I said. I had never said that to anyone before. It seemed childish, and I didn’t want to act like a baby in front of Dad and Randal. But it was hard being different, especially when everyone could see it so easily.

  “It is you. Part of your story.” Jada rested her furry mitten on my shoulder.

  “My story?” I asked. I didn’t feel like I had much of a story to tell. My life was as blank as a white page. I knew that I wanted to go on expeditions, but I didn’t know what I wanted to study. I just wanted to hurry into the future, when all those questions would be answered. I wanted something to happen that would tell me what I was meant to find. “I don’t know my story,” I said.

  “We all have stories. We just need to tell them,” Jada said.

  “I don’t think I have one yet.”

  Jada patted my leg. “You are an old girl. That is your story. You are an ancient spirit living inside a young body. Ready to take her place in the cold, icy wilderness.” Her smile caused a flurry of wrinkles to crease her face. “You are wise and powerful.” She paused for dramatic effect. “You are the protector of the small.”

  Cinnamon lifted her head as if she knew the story had just reached the part about her.

  “But you are strong,” Jada continued. “The wind knows you. The bears and the wolves know you. They know when you are near, the darkness will fall at your feet.”

  Justice glanced over and shook his head. “Jada, no young girl likes to be called old.”

  Jada made a clicking sound with her tongue and patted my leg. “It’s an honor. Old means wise.”

  She was giving me a story to make me feel better. Old girl. Was that me? I didn’t feel like an old girl, but I guessed I didn’t have any choice. My story had picked me.

  In the end Dad won the argument, which was about how to approach the mass under the ice, and we headed back through the narrow opening and to the cave with the equipment. The side of one wall had been sheared away, bringing a dark shadow to the surface. The cave was hardly what I pictured a cave to look like. I expected a large glittery domed interior, but the ceiling of this cave was jagged and slanted. The opening was narrow near the front, and it felt like we were walking down a thin hallway of ice until the cave opened up. The floor was a thick layer of uneven, rocky ice. I had to watch my feet to keep from tripping.

  Someone had set up a bank of solar lights in the cave, and the ice glowed in the darkness. “It’s over here.” Dad motioned toward one of the walls of ice.

  “That has to be it—I can see a form.” Kyle pushed his way to the front. He was even more excited than Dad.

  “We need to go deeper. We need to see what it is.” Randal paced the cave. “I must get a view of it.”

  The scientists worked for hours, tirelessly trying to carve out bits of the facade. Swinging an ax or hammer was not a good idea, since the metal reverberated on the ice. Instead, chisels were used to delicately chip away at the surface. Bit by bit, they worked to free the mysterious mass from the ice. We still didn’t even know what it was. It could have been nothing but a trick of the light. Maybe it was just a shadow frozen in the permafrost, like an ice spirit caught in time and space. But there was always the possibility it could be something more.

  One of Mom’s favorite excavation stories was about a Mongolian princess found buried in the frozen ground. When the princess was dug up, the scientists learned that she was not some delicate fairy-tale princess but the leader of her tribe. She had the image of a deer with smoke spiraling up from his horns tattooed on her skin. A necklace of bone hung around her throat. The princess was a warrior.

  When her body was brought to the surface, it immediately began to decay. With the air eating away at her skin, decomposition occurred at a furious rate. The earth was trying to reclaim her body. Only in the ice was the discovery safe. Once a body was removed from the airtight ground, it was a race against time to learn its secrets.

  After a few hours, we began packing up for the night. I went to see how Dad was doing. The generator hummed from outside the cave, and cords snaked underfoot through the entrance. The hours at the dig had been long, the work grueling. Dad was hunched over, examining the progress. I pushed forward to get a look. The shadow in the ice was starting to take form. I nudged in front of Jake and his camera. I could be pushy, too.

  “Stop,” Dad said, holding up his hand. Everyone froze.

  “Is that … what I think it is?” Ivan said, examining the ice blo
ck. “Could it really be?”

  We all moved closer.

  “Look at the shape,” Dad said. The figure was not large, but it looked taller than it was wide. Not as big as a mammoth. Jake looked at Kyle and then back at the shadowy ice mass.

  “It’s too hard to tell, but it looks like it could be an organic form,” Ivan said.

  “You mean it could be an animal or a person?” I asked. A chill washed over me that had nothing to do with the climate. I couldn’t believe the idea that we could be finding a real person from another era in time. This was a major find.

  “We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves here,” Dad warned, but it was clear that something lifelike—humanlike—was taking form through the ice.

  Jake and his camera stuck to the thing like glue. “Speculate, man. Give us your best scientific guess. What are we looking at, Doctor?” His voice deepened as he shifted into interview mode.

  “We are looking at a section of frozen permafrost. There is something inside it, but right now I can’t tell.” For the first time, Dad turned to the camera and suppressed a smile. “It doesn’t look like an animal, and I don’t see a skeleton or fossilized bone.”

  “Come on, Doc,” Jake pressed. “You gotta give me something.”

  “I won’t speculate.” Dad focused back on the form.

  “Is it human?” Jake asked. “‘Cause it looks like it could be a person.”

  Everyone was silent. Jake had stated the obvious. He put his camera down for a second. “You can look at some of the shots I took. Through the lens it looks like a human figure. It’s certainly not a mammoth.”

  We all huddled around Jake as he uploaded a file to his laptop, and we watched the playback of the film. He was right. Seeing the ice wall cropped through the lens, the form looked even more like the shadow and shape of a person. For a second, I was both thrilled and scared.

  “We don’t know what that is,” Ivan said, and he walked to the mouth of the cave to get some air. “It could be anything. We need to get closer.”

  “But it looks like a human. What else could it be?” Jake watched the film over and over.

  “We don’t want to decide what it is until we know for sure,” Dad said. “Yesterday we thought we had a mammoth, and now you’re showing me signs of a humanoid being. I want to be sure. I don’t want to get excited and find it’s another hoax.”

  Jake rolled his eyes. “Uncle Randal just wanted to get you here. Give him a break. This is his dream. And with the nerd patrol breathing down his neck, he really needs to deliver something big.” Jake motioned to Ivan, who was hovering at the edge of the cave, looking pale and jittery.

  “You OK, Ivan?” Dad asked.

  Hunched over, Ivan waved. “Just a little claustrophobic, that’s all.”

  Dad turned back to Jake. “We all have dreams,” he said. “And I’m sorry, but I have little sympathy for your uncle. He asked for this when he faked the tusk. He could have been honest.”

  “OK, Mr. High-and-Mighty, would any of you have come up here if you knew that all Randal had was an image?”

  “Probably not,” Dad said.

  “See? My uncle had to lie. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come. Everyone wants a sure thing these days. No one is willing to take any risks.”

  “Randal didn’t need to lie,” I said. “He could have told the truth, and maybe we would have come.” I looked at Dad. “Right?”

  “Randal could have hired an excavation team to do what we are doing now. He would have found a team eager to get paid to excavate the site,” Dad said.

  “He wanted you. He wanted the credibility of real scientists working on the project, not just a bunch of hired hands to do the work.”

  Dad was quiet. I nudged him with my elbow and smiled.

  “Look, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this,” Jake said, leaning in conspiratorially, “but Randal wants you to be the one to write about the find. He was hoping you would write a paper for the science journals, maybe even write a book.”

  “Why me?” Dad asked.

  “Randal read some of your proposals on mammoths. He said you have passion. That’s important to him.”

  Dad hid a smile. It was true—he did have passion for anything concerning mammoths. So maybe Randal wasn’t that bad after all. At least he was a good judge of character when it came to my dad.

  Did Jake mean it? I wanted to believe that Dad’s work was getting noticed, but it sounded like Jake was trying to manipulate him.

  Karen spoke up. “We just want to be sure before we rush to judgment. That’s all.” She watched the film again.

  “I know what I see, and it isn’t an animal or a skeleton,” Jake said, pointing at the screen. “It has the shape of a person with arms and legs.”

  “Is it really a person?” I asked, looking up at Dad.

  “It might be.” Dad moved closer to the form in the ice. He was quiet, and I wasn’t sure that I liked that. “To know for sure, we need to get deeper into the ice, closer to the form—without breaching the subject.”

  “Awesome.” Jake beamed. “This is better than a woolly mammoth. This could be a real human life captured in the ice.”

  I remembered the doll that Mom had found in the Amazon. It looked human, like a tiny girl, but it wasn’t. This thing in the ice—could it really be a person, or did it just look like one?

  I stretched out on my bunk inside the dome where Kyle, Karen, and I were spending the night. Cinnamon was curled at the end of my sleeping bag, keeping my feet warm with her furry body. Today had been a good day, minus the Jake incident. The mood had lifted dramatically, and the expedition had gone from a complete academic loss and professional embarrassment to stratospheric potential. Simply put, we had found something buried in the ice, something potentially different, new, and exciting, something that could be evidence of an ancient human being. It was no longer a scrambled-looking blob on a computer screen. It was real. This was the kind of feeling Mom must love, the feeling that all the hard work and traveling away from friends and family was worth it.

  The dome was amazing. I thought it would be like sleeping in an igloo, but it was almost like a little cabin. It consisted of one big room that had been divided into sections with our personal gear and equipment, and we each had an area in which to sleep and store our stuff. The floor of the dome was insulated, making it warm enough to take off our boots and coats. Karen had brought a thermos of hot chocolate and poured it into two metal cups. Kyle and I sipped the hot chocolate while our socks dried on the small space heater. Hot-chocolate brown was the color of comfort and sweet yummyness that warmed me from the inside out.

  Kyle had piles of comic books poking out of his backpack. His mom had made him leave his computer game back at the station. I really hoped we weren’t going to play cards. The only games I knew were Go Fish and gin rummy, and both were embarrassing. The first game because it was for kids and the second because retirees played it. My grandpa taught me how to play, which on the upside meant I was pretty good at it. Luckily, Karen was prepared with the night’s entertainment.

  “Hey, Maya, come sit on my bed. I thought the three of us could hang out and do some storytelling. We can make up stories about the specimen found in the ice.” Karen patted her blue neoprene sleeping bag. She had a big goofy grin on her face. I had seen the look many times when my parents wanted to have fun with an activity that was secretly educational.

  Kyle fell back into his pillow. “Aw, Mom. Do we have to?”

  “Yes, it will be fun. We have the whole night, and in case you hadn’t realized, there is no television and no computer. We’ll actually have to talk to one another. Back in the olden days, people told stories for entertainment.”

  Karen waved the thermos at me, luring me over with more hot chocolate. Then she pulled a bag of mini candy bars out of her backpack. Bribery with chocolate always worked.

  “OK, but what if in my story the person isn’t a real person?” Kyle asked. “I like fantasy.
I don’t do history or real life.”

  “Whatever story you want to tell is fine. Whatever is real to you will be real to us. You get to make it up. You get to decide every detail.” Karen beamed. She knew she had him.

  “Sounds like fun,” I said, plopping down on her bed.

  “I’ll start while you two think up your stories.” She cleared her throat and turned off one of the lights, leaving only the single glow of a lantern to illuminate the dome. She lowered her voice and began. “We have discovered the remains of an Inuit father from thousands of years ago. He was on his way home from a day of hunting, three downy geese hung from his back, their lifeless necks dangling. His heart was filled with pride. He had food for the next week. His wife would be happy. And then out of nowhere a wind rose up, blinding him. He dug a ditch in the snow to protect himself, but he became trapped in the man-made snow cave. The temperature plummeted. Chilled to the bone, he grew tired and weak. A fever gripped him, showering him with a cold sweat. He drifted off and fell asleep forever, dreaming of his wife and children and the life he left behind.”

  “That’s really good,” I said, and I meant it.

  “Your turn,” Karen said.

  I hesitated. “Maybe she was a warrior or a hunter,” I said. “She was tracking a herd of caribou and she broke through an ice forge. The water swallowed her up and froze around her.”

  “She?” Kyle said.

  “It could be a she,” I said.

  “It looked like a dude. I don’t think it was a girl.”

  “It’s her story, Kyle,” Karen said. “Maya can tell it however she wants.”

  I continued. “She’s from a tribe of hunters, and … um … she was frozen in the ice capsule, cursed forever by a witch. She was cursed to be alone until another hunter came to set her free. The hunter was a man who prowled the night shaped as a wolf.”