The Arctic Code

by Matthew J. Kirby

  Their house was small—her mom insisted it was “cozy”—just the two bedrooms upstairs with a bathroom they shared when her mom wasn’t in the Arctic, and the kitchen and living room downstairs. Her mom didn’t exactly have an eye for design or decoration. The bare walls were the same hospital white they’d been when they’d first moved in ten years ago, though Eleanor had hung a changing parade of posters in her bedroom. Right now, she liked old movie banners, a phase her mom described as “Unintentionally Ironic Vintage.”

  Down in the kitchen, Uncle Jack stood at the stove wearing one of her mother’s flowered aprons over his blue coveralls. Eleanor shook her head at the strings straining to reach around him, tied in a small and desperate knot high on his back.

  He turned as she walked in. “Hungry?”

  “It smells delicious.”

  “I can’t make any promises.” Uncle Jack always said that but never needed to. “They’re supposed to be rosemary biscuits.” He pulled on an oven mitt that matched the apron, part of a set. “I had to use the toaster oven to save gas, and the blasted thing won’t go high enough for them to rise properly.” He bent over, peering through the little smoky glass window. A few moments later, he seemed to sense something and pulled the baking sheet from the oven laden with plump, golden mounds.

  “They look wonderful,” Eleanor said. “And I’m sure they’ll taste even better.”

  He frowned. “Get yourself a plate.”

  She grabbed a dish from the cupboard, and he served her up a biscuit.

  “Here,” he said. “I made a béchamel sauce and added a bit of prosciutto I found.” He took her plate, split the biscuit with a fork, and ladled steaming gravy over it from a pot on the stove. Then he handed the plate back. “My own version of biscuits and gravy.”

  Eleanor shook her head. “Uncle Jack, you’re going to get in trouble.”

  He waved her off with the oven mitt. “Don’t worry, Ell Bell. This is all stuff they’d thrown away.” Uncle Jack worked for an electrical company that serviced a lot of the mansions and hotels in Phoenix. Sometimes, his company contracted with the G.E.T., but years ago, he’d wanted to be a chef. That was before the Freeze—the new ice age—had really settled in.

  Eleanor took her first bite, and it tasted so good she had to close her eyes. The biscuit was light and fluffy, in spite of the toaster oven, with just the right hint of rosemary, and the sauce was creamy and smoky. None of the kids she knew got to eat like this. The only people who could were the ones wealthy enough to import fresh produce and goods from South America and Africa, where anything could still be grown.

  “What do you think?” Uncle Jack hadn’t moved since passing her the plate.

  “Amazing. I can’t believe they’d throw this stuff away.” She took another bite.

  “A person’s wealth is measured by what they can afford to throw away.” He tried to reach back and untie the apron, and Eleanor watched him struggle for several moments, his shoulders all scrunched up, eyes on the ceiling, his mouth hanging open.

  She grinned. “Would you like me to help you there?”

  “Would you mind?”

  Eleanor shook her head, still smiling, and went around behind him. He’d pulled the knot so tight, she ended up needing a fork to tease it loose.

  “We need to get you a bigger apron,” she said. “If you’re—”

  The chime cut through every noise in the house. It was a sound to which Eleanor’s ears were constantly tuned. Her Sync.

  Uncle Jack had heard it, too. “Go,” he said. “Hurry.”

  Eleanor rushed up to the desk in her room. Her only connection to her mom was her Sync, a device used by the oil and energy companies so they’d have an instant, reliable method of communication that didn’t require satellites or cell towers. The Sync, an advanced prototype, worked by something called entanglement. Tiny electrons in Eleanor’s device perfectly matched their quantum twins in her mom’s. The Sync couldn’t transmit voice or video over this connection, but it could send text and other data. Over a normal cellular or Wi-Fi connection, it looked and acted like any other smartphone.

  The screen flashed as Eleanor picked up the device.

 

  Eleanor smiled. It had been a long time, almost a week.

  She typed.

 

 

 

 

  <;)>

 

  . . .

  Eleanor actually knew that already. She kept a daily eye on Arctic temperatures.

 

  That temperature was fairly normal for this time of year, but winter had only begun. Temperatures would soon drop well below that.

  . . .

 

 

 

 

  Even through the Sync, Eleanor could tell there was something off.

  . . .

  Eleanor decided to let it go, for now.

 

 

 

  Eleanor smiled.

 

  Eleanor hesitated before typing.

  <?>

 

  <???>

 

  . . .

 

  . . .

 

 

  Poor Uncle Jack.

 

  Eleanor chuckled.

 

  <:)>

 

  . . .

  Eleanor stared at the screen as the wind picked up outside. It always got windy after dark.

  . . .

 

 

  Already? They’d barely started talking.

 

 

  . . .

  The feeling returned. There was something her mother wasn’t telling her. If her mom was sitting here in person, Eleanor could probably guess what it was, but through the Sync, she had no idea.

 

 

 

 

  Eleanor didn’t believe her, and her mom had never kept stuff from her.

 

 

 

  That did not comfort Eleanor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  And that was it. The connection between them went cold.

  CHAPTER

  3

  IT HAD SNOWED A BIT DURING THE NIGHT, A FIN
E, DRY DUST that looked like someone had shaken a bag of flour over the city. The sunlight fell sharply against it. Eleanor took the walk to school warm inside her inner and outer coats, mittens, and the hat her mother had bought her before she’d left for the Arctic. It was an old-style leather aviator cap, lined with fur, with flaps over her ears. As she walked, Eleanor went back over the texts from last night in her mind. She’d stayed up late worrying about what it was her mom was keeping from her, trying to puzzle it out. Did it have something to do with her mother’s expedition onto the ice sheet? But now, with the clarity of the fresh morning, Eleanor had begun to wonder if she was worrying about nothing.

  She approached the Ice Castles and found Jenna and Claire waiting outside their building for Eleanor like they usually did, bobbing a little in the cold. It was her first time seeing them since they’d all been hauled into the police station, and Eleanor didn’t quite know what to expect. She hadn’t even been sure they’d wait for her.

  “Hey,” Eleanor said when she reached them.

  “Hey,” they said.

  The three of them formed a little circle, huddled around the cloud of their mingled breath.

  “So . . .” Eleanor swept a trail through the snow dust with the side of her boot. “Did you guys get in trouble?”

  “A little,” Jenna said. “But my mom believed me when I told her I got tricked into it.”

  “Me too,” said Claire. “At this point, my parents really don’t like you, Ellie.”

  Eleanor shrugged. “That has already been duly noted. But are you guys still mad at me?”

  “I was,” said Jenna. “But I’m not anymore.”

  “Me neither,” said Claire.

  “Good,” Eleanor said. “Okay.”

  “Okay. Can we get to school now?” Jenna bobbed again. “They rationed the heat in the Ice Castles last night, and I am so cold. I just want to get warm.”

  “Rationed the heat?” Eleanor said. “Why?”

  “Energy shortage, I guess,” Claire said.

  An energy shortage if you’re poor or a refugee. Eleanor huffed. This was exactly why her mother was doing what she was doing up in the Arctic. They needed to find enough oil to keep everyone warm, not just those with money. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  Claire just shook her head. “It’s okay. Can we—? Let’s just go.”

  “Of course,” Eleanor said.

  They set off at a brisk pace. Eleanor felt bad but didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t just what people could afford to throw away, like Uncle Jack had said, that told you how rich they were. It was also what people took for granted. Those who lived in the mansions where Uncle Jack worked took their apples and bananas for granted. Eleanor took her heat for granted. And as bad as the Ice Castles were, refugees who got turned away would probably say that the people who lived there were lucky, too.

  “What do you guys have first period, again?” Jenna asked.

  “Science,” Claire said.

  “I hate science,” Eleanor said, grateful for a change in subject. But her mom paid more attention to her science and math grades than anything else. Eleanor liked English class. She liked the novels, the stories about the earth before the Freeze, a world where people as far north as Canada could go swimming in lakes and rivers that hadn’t frozen over. She liked to read about warmth and could almost feel it emanating from the pages. It was like reading fantasy or science fiction.

  They made their way through the cold streets to the school. The plastic construction sheet still covered the new wing. At the sight of it, Eleanor grinned to herself—devilishly clever—and went inside.

  Science class was in the gym, along with an eighth-grade math class and a seventh-grade social studies class. The classrooms weren’t big enough to hold all the students anymore. It was loud, and a line of neon tape was all that separated one class from another. Eleanor wanted to sit on the back bleachers, but Claire dragged her up to the third row, where they had the best chance of actually hearing the teacher.

  Mr. Fiske wore a skinny black tie today, sleeves rolled up on his white shirt, and jeans. He stood on the floor of the gym next to a projector and a screen, which was a little hard to see without dimming the lights. He held his right hand over his head, and it looked like he might have been snapping his fingers. Eleanor couldn’t tell, and certainly couldn’t hear it.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” he shouted.

  Eleanor craned her neck toward him. The guy teaching the math class next to them was also the coach of the football team, and his lesson on exponents carried over everything.

  “Today,” Mr. Fiske said, “we begin our climate unit.”

  A collective groan issued from the bleachers, but Eleanor was pretty sure that sound would have been the same for any subject, and unlike seemingly every other person in the class, including Claire, Eleanor didn’t mind the idea of a climate unit.

  “We’ll begin with the Milankovitch-Skinner Cycles. Does anyone know what they are?”

  No hands went up.

  Mr. Fiske nodded. “Okay, then. In the first half of the twentieth century, Dr. Milankovitch theorized that the shape of the earth’s orbit around the sun, and the tilt and rotation of its axis, affected the climate.” The screen switched to a video of the earth careening around the solar system. “His calculations produced a predictable cycle of glacial ages. But apparently, his calculations were wrong. We weren’t supposed to enter another ice age for fifty thousand years. But in the early part of the twenty-first century, a young graduate student discovered something.” Mr. Fiske switched the screen to the photo of a man everyone on the planet knew: Dr. Skinner, the renowned climatologist, now CEO of the Global Energy Trust, one of the largest oil and energy companies in the world. “Aaron Skinner demonstrated that our climate was changing sooner than expected, and another ice age was upon us.”

  Eleanor had actually met Dr. Skinner at a big oil company conference with her mom. He was just as good-looking in person.

  “At first,” Mr. Fiske said, “his warnings went unheeded by both the government and the scientific community.” The screen changed to newspaper headlines and photos. Shriveled crops ruined by frost in August. Forlorn beachfront houses now sitting a half mile from the ocean. Scores of people killed in freak blizzards. “But soon the world realized that Dr. Skinner had been right. Our whole world was changing.”

  Eleanor had never known a different world. But her mom and Uncle Jack could still remember what it was like before.

  Mr. Fiske had paused in his lesson, probably for some kind of dramatic effect. “Dr. Skinner recalculated Milankovitch’s orbital cycles and proved that we have entered a new ice age, right on schedule. And now, it’s up to all of us to work together to—”

  Eleanor’s bag chimed. She heard it over Mr. Fiske’s lecture, which kept droning on. It cut through the booming voice of the math teacher next door, and through the student chatter all around her. It was her Sync.

  She whipped it out. The screen flashed a text message.

 

  Being told not to worry was almost guaranteed to make Eleanor worry even more. Something still felt off. It wasn’t what her mom was saying. It was what she wasn’t saying. She always told Eleanor everything, even the boring science stuff, details about ice cores and carbon levels and all that.

  Claire was leaning toward her, obviously trying to read the message out of the corner of her eye, so Eleanor just turned the screen toward her and let her see it directly.

  A moment later, Claire looked up from the screen and smiled. Then she whispered in Eleanor’s ear, “That’s good, right?”

  “No, it’s not,” Eleanor whispered back.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It just isn’t.” />
  “Well, it sounds good to me. I wish my mom would send me a text like that, and she’s only a few miles away, waiting for food rations.”

  That shifted Eleanor’s perspective a bit. At least her family didn’t have to wait in those terrible lines. She typed a return message, hoping her mom might get it before she headed out onto the ice sheet.

 

  Claire had read the reply over Eleanor’s shoulder and nodded her approval. The moment after sending it, Eleanor felt a bit better. She sighed as she slipped the Sync into her bag and turned her attention back to the lecture.

  “. . . current glaciation,” Mr. Fiske said. The screen showed a spatchcocked map of the world. “As you can see, the ice sheet has completely covered the northern half of the United States, stretching from Oregon to Washington, DC. In places, the ice reaches a depth of three kilometers—almost two miles.” The screen switched to an image of Europe. “The UK is almost completely covered in ice, as you can see, along with most of northern Europe.”

  A student up at the front raised his hand. “How far south will the ice go?”

  Mr. Fiske inhaled. “That depends on where you are. The ice behaves differently in Asia, for example, where glaciation is not as extensive. Here in the US, the ice sheet is still advancing at a rate of .8 meters per day, or about 2.7 feet. That is a slower pace than has been seen in the last ten years, so scientists are hopeful the advance is slowing.”

  “But . . . ,” the student said, “how far will it go?”

  Eleanor knew what he was really asking. He wanted to know if the ice would one day reach Phoenix. He wanted to know if the ice would ever stop. Or would it keep on clawing and pressing down on them, eventually covering the whole world? It was a question every person on earth asked. It hung in the air like the cold, always there, even when Eleanor tried to ignore it, chilling her thoughts.