“We’re going,” he says. “We’ve got to. I get why you maybe think you can’t, but you can. We can all do this. You’re welcome to come with us. Just follow our tracks and you’ll find us.”
He turns and catches up with us. We trudge on after the speck in the distance we know, in our hearts, to be our siblings. We trudge on and on and on.
I KNOW THAT I shouldn’t be running like this, toward whatever’s to come, happy or horrible. But I can’t help it. And it looks like neither can anyone else. At least, anyone else who’s with us. Stan, Emily, Jayson, me, and about thirty others are running along this path up one of the low-slung hills, and when we get to the top, we stop and stare.
Because below us is the trembling field of ice. A field about the size of a middle school auditorium, sheeted completely in ice, and it’s trembling. There’s snow all around the ridge of hills bordering the whole island, not so much piled up as somehow shaken off. The ice is starting to look weird. The snow is scattered and heaped in such a way that it’s as if the ground is shaking itself loose of things before something shakes itself loose from the ground. I mean that it looks like something’s under the surface, and it wants to come out. After several seconds of silent staring, we trudge on again, and as we get down to the bottom of the hill, we see them.
Our Icelings.
And I see her.
Callie.
Callie and Tara and Ted and Greta and all the rest, holding hands. They stand in a circle along the perimeter of the trembling field of ice, and all I can say about it is that they look like they belong there. I zero in on Callie. She knows exactly where she is, exactly whom she’s with, exactly what she’s supposed to be doing. In other words, she looks a way I’ve never seen her look before. Like she belongs. Like what I feel like when I walk through Mom and Dad’s front door and think—not actively, not even with my brain, because when you belong, you don’t really need to think—This is home. And I feel safe. They all look like that, like they just got back from a long, long trip, which was exhilarating and rewarding but ultimately really difficult, but they’re home now, and they remembered to clean up before they left so that their homecoming could be that much warmer.
Their eyes are closed, and they’re holding hands, and they’re smiling.
And we stand above them, shivering and numb with awe and terror, and we look at them like we have no idea who they are, and we realize we are strangers here. To each other, to our brothers, to our sisters, to this frigid mystery of a place.
TWENTY-ONE
SAVE FOR THE trembling, all is still. Until it isn’t.
Suddenly, the whole island bellows with a chorus of terrible, unfamiliar sounds. We cover our ears and cower, but they just grow louder and closer and louder and closer until they’re right on top of us. And it’s not the sound of thunder, and it’s not the sound of the lightning that we smelled earlier.
Stan grabs my wrist, then Emily’s.
“Holy shit,” he says, and points skyward. Three winged, needle-nosed aircrafts soaring over the island. On each of the wings is a missile. Which means, I think, that these are drones.
And then we hear what sounds like a fleet of jeeps churning slowly toward us. And then after we hear them we see them, pulling up over the ridge, and from these jeeps pour soldiers, and the soldiers have guns. “Hut,” they say. “Hut.” They de-jeep, rifles slung low with their elbows straight out, wrists limp, like at any minute they could flick their wrists and spit a hundred bullets at your skull and heart. If they weren’t on the other side of the ridge, I might honestly just hand myself over.
But they are. They’re over there, and we’re over here, and the Icelings are between us. It’s a pretty clear Us vs. Them situation here. People gasp. Someone faints. A girl next to me pees herself, and for a second I envy the fleeting moment of warmth she must be getting from it, and then I remember where I am.
I feel like I’ve floated up and out of my own body, and I’m watching myself from up above, and I watch myself look down to the trembling field below. And then I see something that makes me forget all about the drones and weapons and army that has descended upon us.
Because below this ridge of snowy hills, the trembling field is shivering and shaking. The ice is cracking apart. At first it’s just the very outer surface, but then dozens of little holes start to crack open, like they’re being punctured from below, and then the cracks grow longer and deeper, and it’s all happening so fast, like when a nature doc shows the process of a plant blooming from a seed in superfast motion.