Ice (3 page)

She wished she’d caught that bear. If she had, they could’ve run tests on him, taken a blood sample, even tagged him with an ID and tracked his movements. She could have proved he was ordinary.

Maybe she still could. If she called their bluff, they’d have no excuse to force her to Fairbanks.

Without waiting for second thoughts, Cassie tiptoed out into the hall and then cut through the research lab. The fluorescents were off, but the computer screens glowed green. She heard hushed voices from the direction of the kitchen. If she were quick enough, no one would even notice she had left her room. She exited the lab, closing the door softly behind her, and then flicked on the light of the main room.

Someone stirred. “Whaa . . .”

Cassie froze. It was Jeremy. He’d fallen asleep at his desk again. “Go back to sleep,” she whispered.

“Mmmuph,” he said, closing his eyes.

She held her breath. He was the newbie—the cheechako, to use Max’s native Inupiaq. Dad and Gram wouldn’t have told him anything, she assured herself. If she acted normal, he wouldn’t be alarmed, and he wouldn’t fetch her father. She moved slowly to her desk and pulled on her Gore-Tex pants. The pants rustled, and Jeremy’s eyes popped open again.

Jeremy peered at her blearily. “Where are you going?”

“Repair work,” she lied. “Nothing to worry about.” She shoved her feet into her mukluks and secured her gaiters over them.

“Don’t know how you can stand it out there,” Jeremy said. “It’s a wasteland. An ice desert. At least you’re getting out, eh?”

Her fingers faltered as she fixed her face mask. “Who told you that?” she asked, trying to keep her voice calm and casual. She pulled the hood up over two wool hats—almost ready. She felt as if her insides were shouting, Hurry, hurry!

“That plane guy, Max, said you were going to undergrad.”

“Max talks too much,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.” She Velcroed the throat gusset of her hood shut and then fetched her emergency kit. The small pack held a flashlight, her ice axe, extra flannels, and a few food rations. With this, she could search the pack ice for several days, if that’s what it would take.

“Just because this is all you know, it doesn’t mean this is all there is,” he said. “Don’t you want a normal life? You’ve never lived outside this station. You’ve been homeschooled your entire life.

Don’t you want to get out there, meet kids your age, do what normal people do?” She loved the ice. She loved tracking bears. “This is home,” she said shortly.

“I thought this would be my home. Coming here was my dream, you know, for years. But now . . .

Hey, whatever, dreams change. Nothing wrong with that. I’m applying for a nice, cozy postdoc back at UCLA.”

“Good for you,” she said. Her dreams weren’t changing. Nothing and no one—Dad, Gram, Max—

could force her to leave her life here. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said as she opened the inner door and shut it behind her.

For a brief second, she debated staying inside and trying to talk sense into Dad and Gram, but words had failed to convince them before. No, she thought, if I don’t act now, I’ll be on a plane to Fairbanks in three hours. she couldn’t let that happen. She opened the outer door and stepped out into the Arctic.

Cold seared into her, slicing her, and her face mask instantly frosted. She took a deep breath of night air. It felt brittle and sharp in her throat, as if the air were filled with shards of glass. This was exactly what she needed to clear her mind. The piercingly cold air soothed her, as it always did.

Standing within the station floodlights, she faced out toward the blue darkness. Silence surrounded her. “Polar Bear King!” she shouted into the silence. “I’m coming to find you! Do you hear me?” She waited for a moment, listening. Snow drifted over her feet. Rubbing frost from her goggles, she scanned the darkened ice fields. Wind blew surface snow over the moonlit snowbanks and ridges.

Blue shadows oscillated over the ice.

Cassie shook herself. She hadn’t honestly expected the so-called Polar Bear King to answer, had she?

That was crazy. Kinnaq, she remembered—that was the Inupiaq word for lunatic.

Just because she had let her overtiredness make her (for an instant) want to believe in a magical polar bear, that did not mean she was snow-crazed. Just because she’d wanted Gram’s story to be real and her mother to be alive, it didn’t make her crazy. She’d find that bear and prove to Gram, Dad, and herself that he was ordinary. Cassie marched toward the shed with the snowmobiles—

—and a shadow rose over her.

Towering over her, the bear was immense. He blotted out the stars. In the station light his fur was luminescent, his silhouette glowing as if he were some Inuit spirit-god, Mashkuapeu himself.

Suddenly, the Arctic didn’t feel big enough. It collapsed down to just her and the polar bear.

He opened his jaws, and she glimpsed white canines and a black tongue. A massive paw came down toward her, and she dodged. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a glint drop from the polar bear’s claws. As the glint hit the snow, the bear twisted, dropped to four paws, and retreated to the edge of the station floodlights.

Cassie looked down at her feet, at the snow where the bear had stood. Dusting snow blew into the concave curves of his tracks. In the curve of a paw-print lay a silver needle with an orange tail, the tranquilizer dart.

THREE

Latitude 70° 49’ 23” N

Longitude 152° 29’ 25” W

Altitude 10 ft.

SHE WAS ONLY A FEW YARDS FROM THE DOOR. If she lunged, she could be safely inside with solid metal between her and the bear. But she had called to him, and he had come. The tranquilizer dart that she had shot on the sea ice now lay in front of her. Impossibly, inexplicably, the bear had brought it back to her. She felt light-headed, and she knew she was shaking. She raised her eyes to look at the bear.

He was a mass of shadows at the edge of the station floodlights. She could make out the shape of his muzzle and the hunch of his shoulders. “Cassandra Dasent,” he said. His voice was a soft rumble.

She felt as if her heart had stopped beating.

He spoke.

It was hard to breathe, and she felt dizzy. He’d said her name. She was certain she’d heard him say her name. But real polar bears did not speak. They couldn’t. Their mouths weren’t shaped for it.

“I will not hurt you,” he said.

He didn’t have the right vocal cords. His muzzle couldn’t move like lips. His tongue couldn’t form words. “Polar bears don’t talk,” she said flatly. “You aren’t real.”

“Do not be afraid,” he said. He stepped into the circle of light from the station floodlights, and she automatically took a step backward. Her heart thudded faster as he came toward her. His paws were silent on the ice.

“Wake up,” she whispered to herself. “Snap out of it.” Cassie dug her fingernails into her palm inside her glove. It hurt, but she didn’t wake, and the bear didn’t disappear.

He halted directly in front of her. Up close, she could see he was huge. His shoulders were even with hers, and his muzzle . . . On four paws, he was as tall as she was. They were eye to eye. “You’re a hallucination,” she said. Her voice sounded thin and weak to her ears. “A mirage, a sun dog.”

“No. I am not.”

She flinched as she felt his breath hot on her frozen face mask. Oh, God, that felt real. That could not have been her imagination. “I don’t believe in talking bears,” she said—a whisper.

“You are Gail’s daughter,” he said. His voice was soft, gentle even.

“You’re a scientific impossibility,” she said. She could not be seeing this, hearing this. The universe had rules, and they did not allow for talking bears, especially talking bears who knew her mother’s name. She swallowed. No one had ever referred to her like that, as her mother’s daughter.

“You called to me,” he said softly, inexorably. “I have watched you for a long time, waiting until you were no longer a child, waiting until you knew me. A few hours ago, you did not know me, but now you called to me. Your family told you who I am?” It was a question. She almost missed it, caught in the slow rhythm of his voice.

“They told me fairy tales,” she said. She thought of Gram: Once upon a time, the North Wind said to the Polar Bear King . . . Fairy tales and lies. But which was the lie?

“Believe them, beloved.”

Beloved?

“No,” she said. No, she wouldn’t listen to this. She wouldn’t believe. Believing meant Dad had lied to her. Believing meant her mother had bartered her off before she’d been born.

But believing also meant her mother hadn’t died in the storm that had flattened houses in Barrow, Alaska, and buried half of Prudhoe Bay.

“Doubt your family, then, but believe your own eyes and ears.” Her eyes told her he was an Ursus maritimus; her ears told her he was talking. Cassie squeezed her eyes shut. “You don’t exist.” She was deluding herself. Her senses were betraying her and making her believe something she’d given up believing more than a decade ago: that her mother was still alive. Cassie opened her eyes. The bear was still there.

“I am the polar bear,” he said, “and you are my bride.”

“No,” she said—no to him, no to this, no to everything.

His expression was unreadable. “Your mother made a promise.” This was cruel. Simply cruel. “My mother is dead. Killed in a blizzard after I was born.” She felt her heart twist as she said it.

There was silence for a moment. Snow swirled around them—around Cassie and the giant polar bear—like in a snow globe. “Is that what you want?” the bear asked.

So softly that her voice barely carried beyond her face mask, she said, “No, of course not.” All her life, she’d wanted a mother. It was a hole inside her that nothing had ever filled. Not Dad. Not Gram.

Not Max. Not any of the station staff who had come and gone.

“The North Wind did not kill her. He blew her to the trolls. For that, he has never forgiven himself.” The polar bear’s voice was a low rumble that rattled in her bones. Part of her wanted more than anything else to believe him. But she couldn’t let herself. Fact was fact; gone was gone. It didn’t matter how badly she wished it weren’t. “And I regret that the Winds found her, despite my best efforts.”

“Your best wasn’t good enough,” she said. She knew the words of the story: Bring me to my love and hide us from my father. If the story was true, then this polar bear had failed Cassie’s mother. If he’d done what he’d promised, Cassie would have had a mother.

“I did all I could.”

“Your promise is invalid,” she said. “You’ve no right to be here.”

“The promise holds,” he said in the same calm, impossible voice. “The North Wind would not have found her if it were not for his brother.”

He talked about the winds as if they were sentient. She squeezed her eyes shut. “You should have hidden her from him, too,” she said. “You failed.”

“I cannot leave the Arctic. I have responsibilities that I could not neglect,” he said. “I had to hide her in the ice. I am sorry.” For the first time, she heard a hint of emotion. That was almost as disturbing as the speech itself. He believed what he was saying. He believed her mother was alive.

“’Sorry’ doesn’t help,” she said. She tried to sound strong, but her voice betrayed her and cracked.

Her heart beat so fast and loud that it thundered in her ears.

“If I could make it right, I would.”

Would he? Could he? “Would you free her from the ‘trolls’?” His great jaws opened and shut, as if she had struck him speechless. She nearly smiled—she had flummoxed him. She’d turned the tables on the creature that was turning her world upside down.

“You do not know what you are asking,” he said finally.

Oh, yes, she knew very well what she was asking: an impossibility. “Bring my mother back from the dead.” She felt light-headed as she said it.

“She is not dead.”

“That should make it easier.”

“I have responsibilities that I cannot risk.”

Without stopping to think, she said, “You free her from the trolls and I will marry you.” For a long moment, he was silent. The northern lights filled the sky behind him. With his brilliant white coat and black unreadable eyes, he looked majestic and wild. Wind stirred his fur. “Is that a promise?” he asked at last.

Suddenly, it didn’t seem like a dream. It didn’t seem like a hallucination. It seemed real, overwhelmingly real. She put her hand on the station wall to steady herself. Her fingers were numb inside her mittens and gloves, and she felt her disbelief cracking as if her words had shattered it. Her mother . . . My mother is alive? And she had the opportunity to save her. Her head reeled. “Yes,” she said.

“Climb onto my back,” he said, kneeling in front of her.

She stared at him as the word “yes” rang in her head. Yes, she’d said. Yes, her mother was alive. Yes, Cassie would save her.

“I will carry you home,” he said.

She tried to read his inscrutable black eyes and failed. Her throat felt dry. She started to speak, swallowed, and then tried again. “Home?”

He inclined his massive head, and she shivered. “Your mother will be returned to the Arctic once our bargain is complete,” he said. “I will arrange it after we arrive.” Wind whipped into her. Ice crystals pelted her parka. Gulping in burning air, she tried to nod as if she understood.