The drones move. I can hear this roaring of engines and see snow moving around in their wake. I can hear the soldiers’ rifles, and they sound like they’re aching.
I feel a little tug and look down to see I’m squeezing Stan’s hand way too hard. Just as I’m letting go, I feel and then see a flash of color and movement on the field below. We all look down. Remember how I said it looked like the ground was shaking itself loose of things before something shakes itself loose from the ground? This, I guess, is what was trying to shake itself loose. The ground shudders and shakes like someone’s just grabbed it, and there’s this sound I can’t place as this . . . hole opens up. And there’s something like smoke, but I know it’s not smoke, it’s more like a mist, like what might happen when warm air meets Arctic air. And then what shakes itself loose from the ground is this . . . body.
I don’t know what else to call it. There are two arms, and they’re shivering, and they’re attached to a torso that just shoots up, as if the shaking gives it energy. As it keeps rising up it keeps looking like a human figure, and it looks like a him, and then he looks like an Iceling. He’s got that flaxy dirty blond hair, and when he walks, he walks like a part of him always needs to feel the ground. I think he’s headed toward this big mound of snow. He doesn’t once look at the soldiers. None of the Icelings do. But you can tell that they all see them. It’s in their bodies. It’s the first time Callie’s looked like she perfectly understands the world around her.
“Who the hell is that?” asks Stan, but I don’t answer him. I don’t want to move a muscle, that’s how scared I am to lose sight of what’s unfolding below.
The Iceling person reaches the mound and steps on top of it. He turns around and stretches out his arms, and all of our brothers’ and sisters’ body language changes, like they’re all deferring to him.
Their eyes snap over and their arms fall to their sides, like an army at attention. The new Iceling drops his arms, fingers tight and hands curved like scoops, palms up. Everyone grabs hands, and the effect is somewhere between the beauty of a choreographed dance and the weird terror of a cult ritual. I don’t know how to feel. Mostly what I feel is awe, and terror, and fear for Callie—and for me. So I just keep feeling that.
“Lorna, what the hell is going on?” Stan asks, but again I don’t answer him, and I’m not going to, because my legs are moving and I’m heading down the hill.
It’s a short descent, maybe twenty feet, to Callie, whose back is to me. I can hear Stan coming down after me, and I can see the soldiers. They started to move down, maybe in response to me, but then someone yells—maybe not a soldier but a commander of some kind—and I hear them stop all at once. “Hut!” they say again.
I reach the edge of the field, where I get the strong sense that I’m to go no further. That I don’t belong here, and that that’s okay. That what’s happening here has nothing to do with me and that to cross this boundary made of Icelings would be a trespass of the most awful kind. I move around so I can see Callie. Her eyes are closed, and then they open, her stare fixed on this new guy, who is, I guess, their leader. She looks like she belongs here. She looks like she’s noticing and accounting for everything around her in a way that I’ve never seen her do before.
And it hits me that maybe every time I was tired, or kind of mean to her, and despite that she would just smile at me, like It’s okay, Lorna, I love you anyway, that maybe that . . . that maybe that smile. Maybe that smile was just something her face did. That nothing I ever did, good or bad or mean or kind, made any sense to her at all. And even if any of it—any of the hours I spent sitting up with her or any of the times I stayed at home instead of going out with my friends because I thought she seemed sad and needed comfort and companionship—did get through to her in some small, simplistic way, it would be nothing like the way this moment right here is affecting her. Is making the purest sense possible to her. And that kind of wrecks me a little.
And as it wrecks me, the soldiers adjust their grips on their rifles, and everyone takes one step forward.