“What?” Emily says. “You mean we’re not going to use these to carry fuel over to the other boat?”
“No,” he says. “We’re going to use them to float the raft.”
Emily and I look at each other as if in agreement that this is it, this life is over, our death warrant has just been signed by this one massively terrible idea.
“Just trust me,” says Stan.
We take the containers and screw the caps on tight, and Stan and I fasten them to the bottom of the raft, while Emily works on calming the Icelings and keeping them together so we can get them on the raft when it’s time.
Stan ties off the last knot, and together we glide the structure into the water, tying it to the dock first, to test it. It’s all the way in, and I’m holding my breath, and then my heart both soars and sinks to see that it works, it floats. Stan smiles and leaps up onto the shore, where he takes the containers filled with fuel and piles them onto the raft one at a time, securing each of them to the dock wood with the rope that had been used to lash the tires hanging off the docks as bumpers.
We can hear gunfire.
“Ready?” says Stan.
I nod, and he holds the raft steady as Emily and I coax Ted, Callie, Greta, and Tara onto the raft. But Greta won’t leave. Callie and Tara take her hands and sort of tug her along. All I can guess is that she doesn’t want to leave Bobby. Then there’s another round of gunfire, loud and cracking, and Greta jumps, first up, then out onto the raft. When it doesn’t shatter and capsize, I give Stan a thumbs-up.
Callie was never super big on baths at home, so I’m a bit surprised she’s not kicking up more of a fuss about the raft, which is just planks tied together on top of tires, with the empty fuel jugs acting as buoys. Stan’s gripping a makeshift paddle, which is just a jagged plank.
Now, finally, we’re all on the raft, every last limb just barely fitting within the perimeter of our close quarters. Stan pushes us off. The water around us is perfectly still, weirdly still, save for the modest wake our craft makes. Callie and Tara lean over the side and touch the water, and I flinch even though I know they can’t feel how freezing cold it is, that what is freezing cold to me is something else entirely to them. I can’t read their faces. Can’t read their bodies. But I try, because I can’t not. Here is what they say to me:
Greta hates leaving Bobby. Ted hates leaving the island. Callie and Tara are still, I think, too stunned by all the death to really process this. They finally got home, and then everything around them died. What would that feel like? To have spent your life wanting to go back to the place you were born, and from where you were stolen, and then finally you get there! And you’re there for the most wonderful reason: to meet the next generation! And then the big event happens, and they’re all stillborn. And then come the people with guns, who don’t understand you, and they burn all the babies’ bodies, and they shoot your family. And this person pretending to be your sister drags you away from it to save your life, but for what?
Callie, kid sister, I wish I knew. But there’s a chance we might still find out.
IF IT WAS freezing before, it’s now the kind of cold that there isn’t a sufficient word for. Out here on the water, with not a single buffer between the icy air and the frigid water, it’s scary-cold, and I think but I don’t say it: We’ll freeze to death before we make it. But Stan knew exactly where he saw that dot of color. And it’s right up ahead. We’re getting closer now, close enough to see that it’s really more shaped like a boat and not a dot, and though the cold is closing in on me and my eyes are getting tired and my head is feeling so light that it’s heavy, the closer we get the more sure I am that the dot is indeed turning into something that can only be a boat. Emily says she can see it too, and I force myself to believe her. We have to see it. That has to be what we see. Because if it isn’t, then it’s just us, on this raft, in this freezing cold water, which is perfectly still.
In the distance, we see the beginning of a sunset. But then, in an instant, that light turns from pale to angry orange, and for a second I wonder if Arctic sunsets are somehow sped up, if the sun works differently way up here on the top of the world. But then I watch the looks on Stan’s and Emily’s faces as they watch too, and then I look again and realize it isn’t the sunset. It’s fire. And then there’s this hiss in the air and a loud, low, ominous whistle, and then at least a dozen more, and the whole world howls and shakes, and the raft breaks, and we’re thrown headlong into the sea.