Cass stared at the end of the rope, unable to reconcile what she was seeing with what she’d been expecting. She took a few hesitant steps forward, then stopped. Where did she think she was going to go?
The other end of the line leads back home . The thought was the only thing that kept her from panicking. Once again, she turned in place, swapping hands on the line as she did a slow-motion pirouette. Kneeling, she put the cooler down on the ice and pocketed the one or two portable food items, then left the cooler behind. It was a shame Jun wasn’t going to get his entire midwinter meal, but she had bigger problems than one man’s disappointment right now. She wouldn’t be heading to COBRA tonight—or ever, if she had her way. She was going straight back to Shackleton.
She took obsessive care to count her steps on the way back. At twenty, she raised her head to check her progress. There was still no beacon coming from the direction of Shackleton, but to her left, she suddenly saw a bright red flare, like a bloodshot eye staring back at her in the darkness.
Is that the lab? It didn’t seem possible she could’ve missed it—and that still didn’t explain why the flag line had veered away from the lab instead of heading right to it—but this was about the same place where she’d put her head down and stared at her boots for what she’d thought would be her final push to COBRA. She’d been concentrating on her steps and the flag line, trusting it to take her to the lab, not looking around. So . . . she’d missed it. But that wasn’t the real question.
What was she going to do now?
If she wanted to head for the light, she’d have to abandon the flag line. Untethered, she’d be like an astronaut on a spacewalk, with about the same amount of risk. Or she could do the sane thing and return to base. After what she’d been through, she’d still be claiming those extra desserts or Pete would risk losing a mouthful of teeth.
She looked at the light again, trying to calculate the distance. How big did a light have to be to figure out how far away it was? She glanced along the flag line, then back at the red light. When she’d looked back to find Shackleton, she’d been no more than seventy-five meters away—maybe closer—which would seem to suggest, naturally, that the COBRA lab was less than that. As long as the light didn’t go away, she could march right to it.
The idea was ridiculous. Nobody in their right mind would let go of a flag line so they could deliver a mauled midwinter’s dinner.
Then she thought about the day in the galley, and the look on Jun’s face as the tears had rolled down his cheeks as he told her about his wife.
How much was a small kindness worth?
Squaring herself to the light, she let go of the line.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Cass stared at the red light without blinking. Thirty paces after letting go of the umbilical cord that was the flag line, she calculated that she was a little less than halfway to the lab, but what scared her was that the wind had started to pick up and what had been a bright, if baleful, beacon was now flickering and disappearing as the increased snow started to blind her. She realized belatedly that when she’d first caught sight of the light from the flag line, a momentary lull in the wind had increased her visibility. She hadn’t counted on the gale force returning and cutting off her vision.
The main culprit was the light from her headlamp, which, as before, was bouncing off the sheet of white blowing a foot from her face. Reluctantly, wondering if she truly had gone insane, she reached up and turned the light off. The plunge into darkness was enough to make her heart stop, but as her eyes adjusted, the red star of the COBRA lab shone more brightly than before. She reoriented herself and trudged forward.
At fifty paces, her stomach muscles began to relax as two more red and one very small green light appeared. The whine and roar of the wind were deafening.
At eighty paces, the red light was almost directly overhead, the only guide she had to keep from running into the wall. She put a hand out until she finally felt something solid. Looking up, the two-story outline of the COBRA building was barely visible above her. Keeping constant contact with the wall, she walked the building’s perimeter until she found the door dimly illuminated by a red spotlight so encrusted with ice and snow that it gave off nothing more than a weak pink glow. Struggling against the gale, she opened the door and tumbled inside.