Gritting her teeth, Cass turned on her headlamp and opened the outer door. The initial paralyzing cold was held at bay by her layers of clothing, but the brute physical force of the wind pushed against her as though she were a sail, and she had to lean into the first step just to get through the door. She exited the base, stepping into the night, and slammed the door shut behind her.
Fat flakes of snow pelted her face and Cass blinked in reaction even though her ski mask protected her face. Pausing for a moment to adjust, she tromped down the steps to the ground level, then turned her headlamp back toward the base of the stairs, illuminating a metal pole that had been planted to the right of the door. Welded to the pole was a group of lanyards. Lashed to each lanyard was a colored polystyrene rope, different than its neighbor, and tied to each line was a small nylon tag with a handwritten word on it. Fighting the wind, Cass fumbled with the rope until she found a red one marked “COBRA.” She glanced down its length. Every fifteen feet, held up by a small pole, a scrap of red nylon was tied to the line, though only the first two flags were visible in the dark. Cass shook the line and the rope bounced, sending the flags dancing frantically in the wind.
She stared for a long, long moment into the looping continuation of white snow and black night. The vision made almost no sense, as though she were staring into the sea, trying and failing to find a measurable length of space. There was no way to bind it, no way to put a limit on the endless. Though seemingly only an arm’s length away, the end of the rope was tied to the infinite.
Cass cursed and shook herself. Thinking like that would get her killed. Life wasn’t measured in the limitless. You paced it off, one step at a time.
She adjusted her grip on the cooler with her right hand, tightened her left on the flag line, and plunged into the darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Despite reading the diaries of expired explorers, and listening to all the warnings, and enduring TransAnt training sessions with titles like “How to Survive the First Hour,” Cass had never actually believed she might die in Antarctica. Too many people had come before her, too many safeguards were in place, life was too modern for her to die from something as mundane as the weather. Pulling Sheryl’s body—or what she’d thought was Sheryl’s body—onto the sled had shaken that confidence badly, but as time had passed, she’d gradually returned to the belief that life in Antarctica was, at its core, safe, that it was almost impossible that she could die from simply being at the South Pole.
Until now.
With her left hand clutching the flag line, she staggered forward against a wind that, had she tried to fall, would’ve held her perfectly upright. The flurries were so savage that they turned the spray of ice crystals into a physical attack that largely ignored her three layers of clothing, dotting her neck and face with searing pinpricks and hitting her hood with a sound like radio static at full volume.
Visibility was zero. She knew that several red signal lights topped the COBRA lab building and, at just over a hundred meters away from the main station, she should be able to spot the lights from here, but the whiteout was total—she could see nothing but billions of snowflakes whipping past her face, barely illuminated by the frail red light of her headlamp.
The single piece of good news was that, with the wind rushing at the speeds it was, there was little buildup on the ground, and so no drifts to push through. If she could simply put one foot in front of the other one hundred and ten times, and not let go of the flag line in the meanwhile, she would find herself at the door to COBRA. She could drop off the cooler, put both hands on the line, and walk back to claim her reward from Pete. Struggling against the gale, feeling the ice begin to make its way down her neck and between her shoulder blades, it crossed her mind that she’d come across as seriously cheap at nothing more than two desserts and an extra glass of wine. She must’ve been food-drunk.
To occupy her mind, she began counting steps, kicking herself for not starting the moment she’d left the base. She might as well begin counting now . . . but how far had she come? Granted, it might seem like she’d been walking forever but, in truth, she’d been moving slowly, forging one step at a time. She’d only come thirty steps at best, so thirty it was. Thirty-one, thirty-two .
Her mind wandered, lighting on subjects then taking off again, landing nowhere for very long, blown off course like the flurries around her. She thought back to the conversation she’d had with Vox, about the potential that she was the subject of a psychological test meant to push her to her emotional limits, and what she should do about it.
From a number of perspectives, it seemed unlikely that she was the only one being tested. What kind of findings would they get by testing one person, under a single set of circumstances? It wouldn’t be worth it. Assuming that the theory of a station-wide test was real and not just a function of her suspicions, that meant that others were being tested in the way she was. But how many? And how often? And to what extent?