“Don’t be sad, Lorna. It’s a good thing. It’s why we came here.”
I nod, pulling my gaze away from my sort-of sister and her new real sister. “What the hell do you think is on that island?”
The island that is now coming into view.
We’re finally at a close enough distance where we can start to make it out, and it’s actually pretty breathtaking.
And now that it’s in our line of view, our eyes play tricks on us, making us feel like we’re moving more quickly than we were at the beginning of the trip, or like the island is a magnet and we’re magnetic and it’s pulling us in. The closer we get, the more we can see. There are these mountains that are—wait, no, those are hills, snow-capped hills that rise up in a massive line across one whole side of the island. They look like mounds of packed ice and snow and topped with more ice and more snow—layers of ice and snow, like rings of bark on an old tree. The wind is whipping now, and we can see it rolling these big boulders of snow around, and they get bigger and bigger, accumulating with each tumble like snowmen in cartoons. Sprouting up in between and behind those icy ranges are what look like tall, tropical-style trees, almost like palm trees, with these low-hanging branches forming canopies covered in more snow and ice. As we cross these final lengths to the shore, our captain steers us around to what looks like some kind of dock or landing, old and odd-looking but maybe recently reconstructed, and then I, along with every other non-Iceling being around me, suck in a terrified gasp.
Because what we see in front of us now is nothing new. We’ve all seen it before. Our eyes narrow in on the wide-open space beyond the dock: a big, expansive field, trembling. The field from the sculptures they built. And then we get closer and see that the trembling goes even deeper—it’s so intense that the hills around it begin to vibrate. Even the air seems to shake. There’s this smell of green in the air. Like a greenhouse. Like something living. And something else I can’t quite place.
“Holy hell,” says Bobby, who is now behind us.
All we can do is stand there, taking it all in. All of the Icelings are crowded along the bow. They look like they’d walk across the water right now. There’s an energy building, a hum. Like how the sky gets before it opens up for a summer rain. The sky over the leftmost part of the island starts to get all purple and yellow.
And everything smells like lightning.
That’s it. That’s that smell from before. The one that wasn’t the green one. It’s lightning. Just like Dad talked about in the car way back at dinner, forever ago. Everything smells like lightning, and the ground is trembling, and I know this means something, but whatever it is is completely beyond me.
“What the hell is this?” I say.
“Couldn’t say,” says Bobby, not so much calmly as with an air of inevitability, as if to say that whatever’s happening right now is beyond us both in terms of our ability to understand it and our ability to change it. He’s staring out to the island like he’s looking for something he knows should be there. “Couldn’t say,” he says again, a little quieter.
The ferry drops anchor right by the rickety yet nearly new dock. So used to rushing to our siblings’ side in moments of arriving and departing, we all leap from our places and seek out our Icelings, forgetting that they’re the ones who know the secrets of this place, and we’re the total foreigners. But then we don’t even have a chance to fully make that mistake, because all at once, the Icelings jump. They vault off the boat, none of them wearing jackets, and they hit the water and just light right out for that trembling expanse.
And they’re off, they’ve lit out for a vision they’ve held maybe since birth, a vision of home, of the kind of home they’ve never even had a chance to know. And we, their siblings, we stand and we stare.
TWENTY
BOBBY’S GONE, DISAPPEARED in the swarm of shepherds and Icelings, but Stan’s still right here, with Emily beside him. The captain, obviously furious and shouting left and right, pulls us in as close as he can and lowers the gangplank, setting it heavily down on the dock, where it scrapes and rattles and bangs because of the trembling.
“EVERYONE OFF!” he shouts, and we file out as quickly as we can, doubling up on parkas and hats and gloves, because this is the coldest any of us has ever been.