The Arctic Code

by Matthew J. Kirby

  They trudged ahead for what felt like hours, pausing periodically to check the Sync and make sure they were on course. Without it, they would have been lost almost instantly. In the harsh and terrifying emptiness of the storm, there was no landmark, no horizon, no world beyond their short range of sight. Even with Finn and Julian at her side, Eleanor had never felt so cut off. From everyone and everything. They were alone at the top of the world, swallowed up, and she didn’t know if they could escape the belly of this beast.

  More time passed.

  When next they paused to look at the Sync, Finn asked, “How far have we gone?”

  Eleanor checked. Then rechecked. “Six miles,” she said.

  Storm silence followed.

  “That’s it?” Julian asked. “Only six?”

  At this pace, the power in their suits would fail about three quarters of the way to the coordinates. The possibility of turning back crossed Eleanor’s mind once again, and once again the image of Boar waiting there for her drove that thought away. Going forward was their only hope, as desperate as it seemed.

  A few miles later, the air took a turn, growing sharper and colder. It was afternoon, and afternoon would soon lead to night. That thought shot a terror through Eleanor that set her hands shaking. They had no tent or shelter, and nothing could survive an Arctic night in the open.

  Nothing but the shadows she’d seen. . . .

  Even through her mask, she could feel it. Not even her polar gear could withstand the ice and snow of night. As she walked, her breathing went quickly from tolerable to uncomfortable to painful. She couldn’t imagine how cold it would be if she removed the mask.

  Her body felt hollow, empty of any will. Her weakened legs seemed to be working only by habit and forward momentum, each step getting shorter and shorter. A couple of times, they gave out on her, and Eleanor dropped hard. Each time, Finn and Julian helped her struggle back to her feet, and she kept going, helping them in turn when they fell.

  With the setting of the invisible sun, the white of the world had turned the color of old weathered steel. Less than a mile later, Eleanor felt the nanotech in her suit give out, abandoning her. It took only a few steps for the cold to move in, and soon the pain of it, the frigid air in her lungs, forced her breathing into the shallows. Without the oxygen it needed, her body weakened further, and she grew light-headed. Her thoughts loosened at the edges. Her mind wandered haphazardly, but she kept her eyes fixed on the blankness ahead.

  Then something moved to her right. Eleanor turned to look, but the shadowy figure was there and gone in an instant.

  “Did you guys see that?” she asked.

  They hadn’t. Perhaps she had imagined it.

  “My suit is dead,” Finn said, wheezing.

  “Mine died a little while ago,” Julian said. “I can’t feel my feet.”

  “That might be frostbite,” Finn said. “Can you wiggle your toes?”

  Julian stamped his feet and almost lost his balance. “Yeah. I think.”

  “Then you’re okay for now,” Finn said.

  Eleanor pulled out the Sync. They’d been traveling for ten hours, and they were still nine miles from the coordinates. Nine miles without functioning suits.

  “How close are we?” Finn asked.

  “Not far,” Eleanor said. “Three miles.”

  She didn’t know why she lied, but when Finn’s shoulders slumped even lower, she was glad she had.

  Julian put his arm around his brother’s shoulder. “Come on. One mile at a time. You can do it.”

  Eleanor kept silent and followed the brothers as the three of them resumed their trek. Somehow, they made it another mile. And another. But the cold had its barbed claws in her, and she knew it would win eventually.

  At one point she looked up, and through a break in the clouds she saw a patch of stars against a black sky, like a flag waving in the storm. Dr. Marcus had been right. If they had stayed in the station, if they had done what they were told, what Luke had told them to do, they would have been flying home the next day. By tomorrow night, Eleanor would have been back with Uncle Jack.

  You can do it, Ell Bell.

  She heard his voice as though he were next to her and shook her head. Hallucinations were a sign of hypothermia. She closed her eyes.

  A flag with stars. It was the Fourth of July. A sunny day. Warm enough in Phoenix for a 5K that year.

  You can do it, and I’ll be right there beside you the whole way.

  Eleanor looked down the road. The icy endless road.

  You can do it, Ell Bell.

  Will you stay with me?

  Of course. You lead the way.

  Eleanor pushed herself. She’d never run so fast, or so far, the road not as endless as she feared, and when she crossed the finish line, she and Uncle Jack walked to the edge of that road and threw themselves down on their backs, side by side in the snow.

  Eleanor looked up at the smothering sky, and a howling wind in her ear dragged her partway back to the ice sheet. Finn lay on the ground next to her, Julian kneeling over him, shaking him by the shoulders. Eleanor didn’t understand. Where was Uncle Jack? They had crossed the finish line together. She thought they had made it.

  She pulled out her Sync, checked the GPS. They had made it. They were only a few hundred feet from the coordinates. But this couldn’t be it. There was nothing here. Nothing but barren ice. Nothing but storm and gray and cold. They had risked their lives and made it here for all this nothing.

  That was when the Sync lit up and chimed. A familiar sound. A glorious sound that cut through raging wind.

  There was a message from her mom.

  CHAPTER

  17

  ELEANOR PULLED THE SCREEN CLOSE.

  the message read.

  Eleanor smiled, a movement that hurt the frozen muscles in her cheeks. She tried to type a response.

 

 

 

 

 

  . . .

 

 

  Eleanor forced her mind together, gathering up all the loose fragments and fuzz. She had to answer her mother, but she didn’t know how. So she typed the numbers she had memorized, the coordinates, as accurately as she could.

  <70 56 28 24 156 53 27 80>

  . . .

 

 

 

  . . .

 

  . . .

 

  . . .

 

  . . .

  Eleanor put the Sync back in her pocket and turned her head toward Julian and Finn. Both now lay in the snow.

  “My mom is coming,” she said, her voice sounding odd inside her head. Had she said it out loud? What was wrong with her? The cold could make you stupid, she knew that, but Eleanor didn’t feel cold. Maybe she was tired. Maybe she just needed to sleep and wake up and then everything would make sense. She closed her eyes.

  Shadows moved.

  Paws. Fur. Teeth.

  A voice. Sounds not words. Words not words.

  Her bed fell away, the ground where she wanted to sleep.

  Put me back.

  She felt something. Something she had forgotten. Warmth. More fur.

  Another shadow, this one tall, more words not words.

  She was moving.

  A familiar voice woke her. “Eleanor.”

  She opened her eyes. Finn leaned over her, gently shaking her. Julian sat next to him. They were in some kind of hut built out of massive, bleached-white bones and a covering of animal hide. It smelled of woodsmoke, leather, and the dirt floor beneath them.

  Eleanor sat up, covered in furs. “Where are we?”

 
; “Don’t know.” Julian rubbed his head. “Just woke up.”

  Eleanor dredged her mind for what memories she could find in the murk of their trek across the ice. She knew they had somehow made it to the coordinates, or close to them, but there wasn’t anything there. And she remembered Uncle Jack for some reason. That had to be some kind of hallucination, which meant hypothermia.

  Finn looked around. “This hut is . . . Paleolithic. I mean, look at these bones.”

  Some were as thick as Eleanor’s waist, stubby, like leg bones. Ribs as tall as Finn arched overhead from a foundation of vertebrae. They were basically sitting inside the rearranged skeleton of something huge.

  “I think they’re from a woolly mammoth,” Finn said.

  Eleanor’s head had started throbbing, and pain flared in her joints as she moved. Pockets of memory continued to bubble up. Images Eleanor didn’t trust. “Hey,” she said, “do you guys remember . . . wolves?”

  Julian shook his head, while Finn’s gaze went vacant. A moment later, he said, “Actually, I think I do.”

  So they shared that, at least. Then Eleanor remembered trying to type something. She threw the furs off and dug frantically into her pocket.

  “What is it?” Finn asked.

  “My mom!” She pulled up the Sync, staring at a string of new messages, some of which Eleanor had typed that made no sense. “Look,” she whispered, and showed them the screen.

  “Is that how we got here?” Julian asked. “Did they find us?”

  Eleanor struggled to her feet, each bend and flex of her body an ordeal. She had to see what was outside the hut. She hobbled toward the entrance, an arched opening framed by what looked like mammoth tusks, pushed aside a flap of animal hide, and stepped through.

  She gasped at what she saw.

  An enormous ice cavern opened wide before her, its walls vast enough to hold several city blocks, its ceiling high enough for a bird to soar. Columns of light crossed the vaulted space at intersecting angles, and where they landed, grass grew. The air felt cool, but not cold, like a summer day back in Phoenix, and the ground rose in gentle hills and dipped in shallow washes, studded here and there with large, pale boulders.

  Several other bone huts surrounded her. And people. They wore clothing made mostly of furs and skins, with a few roughly woven fabrics. There were men and women, some working outside the doorways to their huts, others standing around a large fire pit. They all had dark-brown or black hair, with deeply tanned skin, and prominent brows jutting over deep-set eyes.

  Their eyes.

  Black voids as endless as the ice sheet, somehow not right, not human, and all of them had turned to stare at her. Eleanor had never felt less like she belonged in a place.

  Finn and Julian came out of the hut behind her, and both of them went rigid.

  “You,” one of the men said, his voice guttural. He strode toward them with an energy Eleanor could somehow sense, but not identify. Like she was looking at him through heat vision goggles. “You wait,” he said, and motioned for them to go back into the hut. Not angrily. But firmly.

  “Wait for what?” Julian whispered.

  Finn backed away. “I don’t know, but I think we better do what he says.”

  They reentered the hut, sat down, and just looked at one another in stunned silence. Eleanor imagined her expression matched the wide-eyed, exhausted disbelief she saw on Finn and Julian.

  “I feel like I must still be hallucinating,” Eleanor finally said.

  “Can two people have the same hallucination?” Finn asked. “Because I’m having it, too.”

  Except Eleanor knew that wasn’t true. This was all real, this hut, this village, this cave, and there had to be an explanation for it, even if she couldn’t imagine what it might be. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s think about this logically. What’s the last thing you remember?”

  For all of them, it was the storm. Collapsing in the snow. And for Eleanor and Finn, there were wolves.

  “Have either of you heard rumors of people seeing wolves out on the ice?” Eleanor paused. “Or . . . an Inupiat hunter?”

  Julian and Finn both nodded, and Finn said, “I overheard one of the scientists saying he’d seen something like that. Everyone laughed at him.”

  “Back in Barrow,” Eleanor said, “this guy, a mechanic, said there was something going on out here. I think we’ve solved that mystery.”

  “Maybe,” Finn said, then pointed at the hut’s entrance. “But I don’t think those people out there are Inupiat.”

  Eleanor had to agree with him. This village and its inhabitants felt utterly removed from the world. Almost alien. And with each moment that passed in this place, she became more aware of a deep . . . sensation. A kind of hum she felt but couldn’t quite hear. These people, the bones of this hut, even the ground beneath them, all seemed to resonate with it.

  “Can you guys feel that?” she asked.

  “Feel what?” Julian said.

  Finn turned his head at an angle, like he was trying to listen for something, and then shrugged.

  “That. It’s like we’re in the middle of a big machine or something.” Eleanor looked from Finn to Julian; both of them looked back at her with the same expression Jenna used when she called Eleanor a freak. “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “Okay,” Julian said. “So. If they’re not Inupiat, who are they? How did they get here?”

  “Where is here?” Finn said. “From the glance I got outside, I think we’re under the ice sheet, but—”

  “We’d have to be.” Julian thumped his boot. “We’re down to solid ground. That means we’re miles from the surface of the glacier.”

  “How is that possible?” Eleanor said. “We—”

  The hide flap over the entrance whipped open, and she turned toward the figure who entered. A mere second of disbelief carried Eleanor into the next moment, when everything changed.

  “Mom?”

  Shock, joy, relief—each filled a second of its own. “Mom!” Eleanor leaped to her feet and dove into her mother’s arms.

  “Eleanor?” her mother said, squeezing her tight. “My God, Eleanor!”

  “Mom,” Eleanor whispered, and felt her mother trembling. This was real. This was all real. Somehow, Eleanor had succeeded. She had come here, into the farthest reaches, and found her mother alive.

  At that thought, Eleanor’s chest heaved, halfway between laughter and crying, and big fat tears wet her cheeks. She had never given voice to the fear that her mom was dead, but she had been carrying it with her all this time, and now she could let it go.

  “I love you, Mom,” Eleanor said.

  “I love you, too.” Her mother squeezed her again. “I still can’t believe—sweetie, you’re here. You’re here.”

  Eleanor pulled away enough to look into her mother’s face, her cheeks and forehead peeling from sunburn and windburn, her eyes brimming with her own tears. “I came to find you,” Eleanor said.

  Her mother covered her mouth and shook her head. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Dr. Perry?” Julian said.

  Eleanor had forgotten that he and Finn were there.

  “Oh my goodness,” her mom said. “Julian! Finn!”

  “Do you know where our dad is?” Finn asked.

  “Yes!” her mother said. “Yes, he was right behind me. He’s probably just outside.”

  The two brothers looked at each other. Then they ran from the hut, and Eleanor heard them calling for their father.

  Her mother put her arm over Eleanor’s shoulder. “I’d like to see this,” she said, and guided Eleanor from the hut in time to watch Dr. Powers gather his sons, one in each arm, into the same tight hug. Dr. Powers was a broad-shouldered man, with a darker complexion than Julian and Finn, and narrow, glinting eyes that made him look permanently curious.

  The villagers stood around them watching, whispering to one another, and smiling. One of them, the tallest in the village who Eleanor could see, stood apart. He had f
aint tattoos on his neck and held a long spear.

  Dr. Powers kissed the tops of his boys’ heads, then looked up at Eleanor’s mother with an openmouthed grin. “Can you believe this, Sam?”

  Sam? The only man Eleanor had ever heard call her mother Sam was Uncle Jack.

  Her mother shook her head, laughing. “No, I truly can’t.”

  Dr. Powers walked Julian and Finn toward Eleanor and her mom, an arm slung over the shoulders of each son. “I think we need to hear all about it,” he said, and led them back into the hut.

  Eleanor and her mother followed, and as they all settled down on the ground in a circle, the tall villager Eleanor had noticed ducked inside. He carried a wide flat basket with him, which he set on the ground in the middle of the room, and then took a seat along the wall of the hut, bowing his head a little toward Julian and Finn, then Eleanor.

  “This is Amarok,” her mother said. “At least, that’s what I call him. That’s not his real name, which I still can’t pronounce, but Amarok sounds close.”

  “He is the leader of the village,” Dr. Powers said. “He’s the one who spotted you on the ice and brought you down here.”

  Amarok bowed his head again. “Welcome,” he said, his voice hard and smooth as a polished stone. He made a sweeping gesture with his hand around the hut. “Your home.”

  Eleanor thanked him, and so did Finn and Julian. The basket bore meat from some kind of small animal Eleanor couldn’t quite identify, as well as a few berries.

  Dr. Powers passed them a canteen. “You must be hungry and thirsty.”

  Eleanor was, and so were Finn and Julian, based on the way they tore into the food.

  Eleanor’s mother spoke while Eleanor and the others ate. “We’ve been teaching Amarok English.”

  “Who is he?” Eleanor took a drink and tipped her head toward the entrance. “Who are they?”

  “In due time,” her mother said. “First, I want to hear about you.”

  So after Eleanor had eaten, she told her mother about her journey to the Arctic, how she had stowed away on Luke’s plane, then the events in Barrow, and the journey to Polaris Station. Then she told her about Skinner, and Boar, and the escape across the ice. Through that last part of the story, her mother and Dr. Powers kept exchanging looks with each other, Dr. Powers clenching his jaw, his neck tense.