“It seems so.” He paused. “If something bad should . . . happen to you, do you want me to reach out to your colleagues at McMurdo?”
Cass considered. She knew it was a risky proposition, and she was touched he’d offered. Although he could probably make contact anonymously, of a sort—McMurdo would know it was someone from Orlova who had reached out—he couldn’t be sure of the reception he’d get. He would, after all, be attempting to convince an American authority that one of its base administrators was insane and guilty of running mind-control experiments on his own crew, with no other proof than the word of a Shackleton mechanic with a spotty emotional and psychological history.
And that was just on the American side. If word eventually got back to his superiors that he’d been maintaining clandestine radio contact with an American crew member and had radioed the main American base, he’d probably be reprimanded, at best. The Cold War was long over, but the relations between America and Russia weren’t exactly chummy. Vox might be punished for just trying to help.
And what if she was simply, catastrophically, wrong? Maybe everything she’d surmised and assumed had a more reasonable explanation. Talk about proof. Where was hers that Hanratty and his cronies had cut the communications on purpose? You’ve had a history with making assumptions before. Or had you forgotten? The thought was bitter.
“No. Thanks, Sasha,” she said reluctantly. “I’m going to give Hanratty enough rope to hang himself on this. And, who knows, maybe this time it really is an accident. We’d both be risking too much to be wrong.”
“Please, call me Vox,” he said. “You are afraid of being mistaken. Why?”
“Vox, I . . .” she began and choked. How do I explain? “I’ve been wrong, very wrong, about some things in my past. Important things.”
“Who hasn’t?” he said lightly.
“It’s not something I’m willing to take a chance on.”
“Tell me. I will listen to you.”
She was quiet a long, long time. Memories rose to the surface of her mind and she groaned out loud. I don’t want to remember .
The voice from the tunnel came back into her head. Face it. Remember .
“Cass.” Across the airwaves, the sound of his voice was metallic and toneless, but the concern it carried was unmistakable. “What happened?”
“I was part of an inspection team in . . . no, I won’t tell you where. I don’t want you to look it up. We were contracted to do inspections of a subway tunnel renovation. Mundane, boring, everyday stuff.” Starting was easier than she thought it would be, which wasn’t the same thing as easy. With each word, a band around her chest tightened until she felt she couldn’t breathe. “But we were brought in with only weeks left on the project, not nearly enough time to do the job right. We should’ve rejected the work, but the department was proud of our track record of saying yes and making good on that promise, so we took it.”
She was quiet for a moment. They’d known they were being rushed, that they had almost no margin for error. But that’s how good they were. How good they thought they were. How good she thought she was.
“I won’t bore you with the details. The outcome was clear enough. We cut corners and raced through checklists. One of the structures failed while in use. People died. Others were injured. I watched it on the news, knowing the entire time why it had happened. And who was responsible.”
Vox was silent.
“I . . . the tunnel suffered from a series of cascading failures, that much any engineer could’ve told you. But I knew, and I suspect my team knew, that it was my work that started it all. Nobody on the team was blameless, but I was the first link in the chain that broke. The rest came after. And it was the whole that killed those people.”
“Were you . . . arrested?”
“No, nothing so dramatic,” she said. A sour taste filled her mouth. If there had actually been consequences, some defining moment of punishment, would she have been able to leave it behind? “The company’s insurance coverage paid the survivors and their families and the mayor threatened criminal action, but it was all bluster, forgotten a few weeks later. None of us even lost our jobs. But I quit anyway. I knew what I’d done and I couldn’t work with people who knew it, too.”
“What did you do then?”
“I bounced around, taking odd jobs in stranger and stranger places. Oil rigs, mining ops, lumber camps. Trying not to put myself in a position to hurt people with my mistakes. But, eventually, each job petered out and it was clear just how trivial the work was, leaving me feeling worse than before. I needed another big job with bigger stakes, to show myself I could pull through. With my track record, no one would hire me for a large contract, but then I thought maybe they had trouble finding people crazy enough to go to Antarctica. So here I am. Hoping I can find myself without hurting anyone.”