Forty-five, forty-six .
The answer was important, because three people staging a protest wouldn’t be effective, but ten times that number would. But how was she supposed to compare notes with the crew without tipping off Hanratty and whoever else was involved? What if half the base were subjects of the experiment . . . but the other half knew about it?
She shivered, and not just with the cold. Imagination was the cork in the bottle of paranoia. Open it up and there was no end. What if this season’s winter-over had never been meant to have any scientific research benefit? What if the crew members had been recruited with some kind of experiment in mind? Was she delivering a meal to Jun the astrophysicist or to Jun the psychology post-doc brought in to test and record her emotional and mental reactions?
Fifty-eight, fifty-nine .
She shook her head, a futile physical gesture. Giving in to her suspicions wouldn’t work; she needed allies. And, anyway, she’d spent too much time with them to believe she could be fooled by Jun or Ayres or Biddi. No one could keep up an Oscar-worthy performance for that long.
She cursed out loud, the words muffled by her mask and scarf. She didn’t have to give into paranoia, but that didn’t mean she was going to be someone’s guinea pig. Armed with the knowledge—or belief, at least—that she was being manipulated, she would stay alert, record the things that were done to her or around her, and face them all down once she was safely back stateside.
Seventy-three, seventy-four .
Seventy-four divided by one hundred and ten was . . . sixty-seven percent. She was two-thirds of the way through risking her life to deliver a single meal to a man because she felt bad for him and had been bribed with sugar. Actually, she corrected herself, she was just one-third of the way through. She still had to return to Shackleton to claim her reward.
She pulled back hard on those thoughts like she was sawing on the reins of a horse. Think too hard about how far you had to go on the ice, and you were laying the groundwork for surrender. Focus on the task at hand.
Eighty-two, eighty-three .
Her body swayed in the wind like a mast as she paused for a minute to orient herself. The lights of the lab were still hidden. Moving with exquisite care, she turned in place and looked back at the way she’d come. A hollow feeling raced through her chest. Shackleton, normally lit bright by red spotlights at each corner of the building, was gone.
Fear clutched at her and she squeezed the rope in her hands. Easy. Take it easy . Shackleton wasn’t so much gone as she was blind to it—her headlamp illuminated a curtain of snow that effectively blinded her beyond three feet. Even if the station wall had been an arm’s length away, she probably wouldn’t have seen it.
Well, there’s an easy way to test that, isn’t there? Swallowing her anxiety, she put the cooler down and slowly reached up to turn her headlamp off. Absolute darkness engulfed her and she had the disorienting sensation that she’d stepped outside her body. Only the relentless wind gave her any sense of place. She looked back the way she’d come.
Shackleton was nowhere to be seen.
A slight groan escaped her mouth; she clamped down on it. Relax. Nothing’s changed. You’re no more than a football field away from the station . Visibility, even for a one-thousand-lumen lamp, was reduced to just a few feet. If she’d used her brain and thought about it before turning around, she would’ve laughed to think that the lights of the station would be blazing like a lighthouse.
The vista abruptly vanished as she turned her headlamp back on and forced herself to face front, away from the endless black. Carefully and intentionally clearing her mind, she returned to the march toward the lab, focusing on each physical step forward—literally looking at her feet and letting the flag line guide her—instead of listening to the wanderings of her mind.
Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine. One hundred!
Cass raised her head. The deep, dark vista she’d been staring at for twenty minutes stared back at her.
COBRA should be ten, maybe fifteen, steps away. But there were no lights, no building.
She stumbled forward—to hell with counting —the cooler banging against her leg. With the beam of the headlamp jogging up and down, she followed the line as she ran, five steps, six steps, her breath coming in rasps, until she saw that the flags simply . . .
. . . stopped. One last post kept the cord in place for the final eight feet, but the excess whipped back and forth in the wind like a dying snake. The flag line led precisely nowhere.