CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
He had never been so cold.
As a young boy, he’d been through winters on the plains so hard that the cows had frozen and died standing up, but they didn’t compare to the warmest day at the Pole, and it was colder than that. Even when he’d first stepped off the plane at McMurdo, in full gear, when the wind had screamed in his ear and the icy fist of Antarctica had slammed him full in the chest—unprepared and weak—he hadn’t been this cold.
It hurt to make a fist and his joints ached. His cheeks and the flesh of his chin felt sandpapery and strange. A few days ago, he’d wiped his running nose and realized he hadn’t felt the touch of his own hand on his face. But worst of all was the simple, hurtful cold. He couldn’t escape it and he couldn’t remedy it. Short stints with a fabric tent held over the propane stove chased it away, but then the waves of shivering came on twice as bad and his muscles would rattle and flinch until his body acclimated once more.
A voice in his mind—weak and distant—reminded him that he could be warm again. All he had to do was leave the nest he’d made for himself, trek back through the tunnels, and climb the steps to the station above. There were blankets and beds, hot drinks and warm forced air blowing through the halls. All he would have to do was listen to the wind once more.
He cried as he thought about the voice of the wind, talking to him, shrieking at him constantly. The people around him had begun to look at him strangely and fall away, but they didn’t understand the restraint he’d shown, the strength of will it had taken to fight and refuse what he was being commanded to do. When he’d felt himself begin to buckle and weaken, when the wind began to make sense once again, he’d headed for the tunnels, where the wind was a timid thing and—sometimes—blissfully, wonderfully nonexistent.
With the wind silenced, however, the cold had moved in and the only thing that seemed to take his mind off it were the blue and pink pills he’d found back in his room. At first, after washing them down, they made him feel edgy and irritable, but the sensation went away if he kept his mind cleared and tried to stay calm. Before long, he was lying on the frozen floor of his nest, bundled in full parka, boots, and gear, almost warm under six layers of ancient carpeting he’d torn up from the floor.
Dimly, he wondered what would happen when the pills ran out. But for now it was enough that he was holed up deep in the ice, away from the people, away from temptation, and—most important—away from the wind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Elise Simon saw blinking lights everywhere and all the time. They forced their way into her thoughts, even when she wasn’t working, showing up in conversations and idle moments. They went along for the ride into the frustrating slide into sleep that so often didn’t come, and slipped into her dreams when it did. She wanted to scream sometimes, when her sleep-self—gently tipping into the soft, velvet bank of slumber—chose that moment to invent the lights of an imaginary emergency call on the inside of her lids, yanking her awake with her mouth dry and her heart pounding.
Sometimes after waking in the absolute darkness of her berth, she would lie with her eyes oyster-wide and stare at the ceiling, sure she could see the square, gem-like greens and reds from her switchboard arrayed above her bed. Fascinated at what her mind conjured out of thin air, she would watch the imaginary calls come and go, and fill in the backstories of the people on the other end. What they needed and why. Who and where they lived. She pushed hard against reality, inventing benign calls for help, like cats up trees and requests for fire engines to make a big show at the Fourth of July parade.
When her mind ran out of happy stories and her memory started replaying what she knew actually went on behind an emergency call, the horrific reality of experience, she knew it was time to get out of bed and get to work, no matter what time it was or how little she’d slept.