“But you killed Ayres. And all the people he was trying to save.”
“He allowed too many people into the Lifeboat—ten might’ve survived over the long term, but not thirty. He knew that and brought them in anyway. Our future can’t be left in the hands of someone so sentimental.”
“So you locked them in and shut off the heat.”
“Yes. And to the station as a whole, of course. That was a nice feature installed on the power plant last summer.” She shrugged. “The TransAnt folks will be mortified, but they’ll come around when they see that I took the experiment to its logical conclusion. Haven’t we always benefited from pushing science through its moral hedgerow and finding out what lies on the other side? It takes someone with true courage to keep the greater good in mind.”
“But why kill everyone? You had your . . . results.”
“Forty-odd legal inquiries would taint the value of my conclusions, I’m afraid. Better to purge the subject pool and deal with the fallout later, don’t you think? Dead men tell no tales, as those rascals the buccaneers used to say.”
“Biddi,” Cass said, grasping for words. “You’re insane.”
“It’s just big-picture thinking, my girl. You’re disappointing me, by the way. I was ready to rank you as the highest performer. But now I’m not so sure.”
“Does that mean I’m to be purged, too?”
“Cass, the ugly reality is that, in any experiment, even the rat who finds the cheese is killed at the end.”
Biddi’s ice axe was an overhand blur, the spiked head aiming for the top of Cass’s skull. But at the first sound of the change in Biddi’s voice, Cass had begun leaning away, and as Biddi moved toward her, swinging the axe like a lumberjack, Cass threw herself backwards, backpedaling and scrambling to get away.
Hampered by the awkward cold weather gear, Biddi’s swings were clumsy and poorly placed, throwing her off balance. Cass turned and ran down the darkened tunnel. She’d thought briefly about standing to fight, but couldn’t imagine trading blows with the person she’d called her friend, no matter what madness she’d just confessed to.
Her breath came in gasps and spasms as she shrugged off the rucksack as she ran, trying to shed weight. The ice axe, she kept.
Behind her, Biddi crooned her name, calling for her to stop. Cass pelted down the tunnel, the light from her headlamp bobbing in time with her panicky strides. She struggled to pull in clean, steady breaths; she felt the bite of that axe in her spine, and the fear caused her breathing to stagger and choke in her mouth.
Calm down. Breathe. In through your nose, out through your mouth .
She raced for the oldest ice tunnels of the original station, the area where she’d first discovered the sewage leak. The only sound was the scrabbling sound of her boots and her heaving gasps, broken only by Biddi’s occasional yell for her to stop.
Put your foot down, bring that boot up . She is slow. You are fast .
Then why do I feel like I’m dragging the world behind me? I don’t think I can feel my legs. I’m swimming in mud.
You were kept sedated and imprisoned for a week , the voice reminded her. You’re fatigued and rusty. That’s all. Keep moving.
Cass ripped the scarf away, feeling like she was being asphyxiated. The icy air hit her lungs like a dagger stabbing her through the mouth and chest, but the shock of the coldest temperatures on the planet jolted her into greater effort—for a moment, her stride lengthened to its normal spread, her arms swinging like she had hit her runner’s high in her best marathon.
But then she hit an uneven patch of ice and her ankle, the bad one, wobbled and buckled. A twinge ran up the side of her leg and she gasped at the old, yet familiar, pain. Please, no . Her runner’s pace evaporated, the ache sending her limping and stumbling forward into an intersection of the tunnel. She would never be able to outrun Biddi like this. She would have to fight.
As she came even with the cross-section, however, a figure lurched at her out of the side tunnel. Cass had a brief flash of a gaunt, terrifying face—black nose, cauliflowered ears, frostbitten gray cheeks—before he clubbed her in the head with a soft, heavy arm, sending her sprawling. She lay on the ground, stunned, as the figure shambled around to face Biddi.