The Arctic Code (24 page)

“But a mammoth got in his way,” her mother said.

Kixi hauled them a short distance, and a minute later, the cracking sound behind them grew frantic and deafening. Eleanor looked back to see plumes of ice and snow shooting hundreds of feet in the air, the spheres of the station beginning to sink, tipping inward against one another with the squealing of tortured metal. Then the ground opened up with a
boom
that seemed to ripple the ice beneath the sled, and the station vanished with the rest of the ice sheet into a gaping hole a mile wide.

No one said anything. They just stared. Tears had started down the side of Amarok's cheek but had frozen there along the way, and Eleanor grieved with him. In an instant, he had just witnessed his entire world buried under a mountain of ice.

A
fter the ground had settled, Amarok's people regrouped near the edge of the crater, tending to their wounded and their dying, reverent at the grave of their village and those who had been caught in the collapse. The hired hands of the station crew had collected some distance away and seemed to have lost
all interest in their former captives.

Eleanor and her mom told Finn, Julian, and Dr. Powers what had happened in the cavern with Skinner, but when it came time to explain how Eleanor had shut down the Concentrator, she couldn't find the right words. To describe it would've required a language she didn't know.

“The Preservation Protocol?” Dr. Powers asked.

Eleanor's mom leaned over Amarok, pushing aside his devoted wolves so she could tend to the warrior's wound. “That's what he called it.”

“They can't hide it forever,” Dr. Powers said. “It's a
planet
.”

“They've kept it secret so far,” Eleanor said. “And look at the damage they've caused already.”

“True,” Dr. Powers said, then turned to Eleanor's mother and gestured to Amarok. “How is he?”

“The bullet passed clean through,” she said. “It didn't break any bones on its way. I think he will heal, especially if the effects of the energy linger with him. Though I can't say the same for some of the others. I should help tend to them.”

She got up to leave, but Amarok took her hand, which was covered in his dried blood, and squeezed it. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” she said. “But I am so sorry about your home.”

He closed his eyes a moment, nodded, and then said, “You go. Night soon.”

He was right. They were in the middle of nowhere, miles and miles from Barrow, without shelter or supplies, none of their suits had power, and they didn't possess Amarok's resistance to the cold.

“Sam,” Dr. Powers said, “do you still have the Sync? Could we contact Barrow?”

“Possibly.” Eleanor's mother dug into a pocket in her suit and pulled out Eleanor's device, but her body sagged when she looked at it. “Oh, no.”

“What is it?” Eleanor asked.

“The cell signal is dead.”

“I thought the Sync could communicate anywhere in the world,” Julian said. “Isn't that the point?”

“Only with the quantum twin,” her mother said. “For normal connections, it used regular cell towers and satellites. Polaris Station had its own relay, but now that's gone. I have no way to reach Barrow.”

“It's okay,” Dr. Powers said. “It'll be okay. Someone from Barrow should be here soon. They had to feel that—it was practically an earthquake. They're going to want to know what happened.”

He was probably right, and that reassured Eleanor. But what did that mean for Amarok and his people? Where could they go? What would they do?

She looked down at Amarok and found him smiling at her from the sled. “Make new home,” he said, as if he'd read her mind. Then, in his own language, he called his people to him, and they gathered around the sled. He spoke to them for several moments. Many of them wept openly, but under the influence of their leader's voice, their shoulders rose and their backs straightened. When Amarok finished, they moved with determination and purpose. A few of them untied the sled from Kixi, then harnessed up Amarok's wolves. There were only six of them.

Before long, they'd assembled together, some of the wounded on the sled with Amarok, others limping along with help. Amarok smiled at Eleanor's mother and the others. “Good-bye,” he said, and with one last glance at Eleanor, “Make new home.”

Then he and his people marched forward as one, away from the crater, toward the horizon. Eleanor watched them diminish in the distance until their individual silhouettes merged into a single moving shadow, Kixi a shuffling bulge in the middle.

“What's going to happen to them?” Finn asked.

“Whatever it is,” Julian said, “it'll be on their terms.
You gotta respect that.”

He had a point, but Eleanor felt something else. Watching that wounded, beleaguered village marching across the ice, diminishing with each step, she thought of what Skinner had said, the future he had described. Tribes like Amarok's, gone. Cities like Phoenix, gone. Whole cultures and civilizations, erased. Humanity reduced to a small group of survivors, chosen by the G.E.T., eking out an existence on a barren, frozen planet for as long as they could, with no real hope.

Well, those were not Eleanor's terms. That was not the future she wanted.

In the next moment, Amarok's people were gone, swallowed up in the empty vastness of the glacier, lost to the ice once more.

T
HE COLD DESCENDED ON THEM RAPIDLY.
B
UT AFTER
everything they'd been through, Eleanor wasn't about to let it win at the end. She gnashed and growled inside, fighting back the cold with her mind, even as her body weakened and went numb.

They had all gathered together, forming a tight circle, shoulder to shoulder, to conserve body heat, teeth chattering, clapping hands, stamping feet. Off in the distance, the crew of Polaris Station did the same. But soon they mustered and moved, setting out over the ice in the direction of Barrow, and a short while later they disappeared.

At one point, Eleanor's mother leaned in to Dr. Powers. “I've been monitoring my symptoms. Hypothermia will set in soon,” she whispered.

He put his arm around her. “Someone will come. Hang in there, Sam.”

But as the afternoon sun fell closer and closer to the horizon, and Eleanor lost feeling in her feet, she began to wonder if the cold had finally been given the time it needed to take her and all of them. Its waiting game had paid off.

“Perhaps we should start walking, too,” her mother said. “Toward Barrow.”

“No,” Dr. Powers said. “Here, near the crater, is our best chance of being spotted.”

That made sense, but Eleanor felt the cold robbing her hope. She remembered all the times it had assaulted her—in the tunnel, and after she'd run from Skinner. She realized it had only been running her down, exhausting her with its lethal strategy.

Just then, the distant sound of an engine whined along the ice toward them. They all looked at one another, then leaped to their feet, scanning the horizon and the sky.

“Do you see anything?” Julian asked.

“Nothing,” Dr. Powers said.

But the sound was real, growing louder, getting closer, and a few moments later, Finn pointed up in the sky and exclaimed, “There!”

It was a small plane, with runners along its belly, able to land and take off on the ice. As it neared the crater, it dipped low, and Eleanor and the others began to jump, flail their arms, and shout at it.

“Hey!”

“Down here!”

“Help us!”

The plane circled a couple of times around the crater in a lazy arc, showing no sign that its pilot had noticed the people stranded down below, and Eleanor began to worry that any moment, it would head back to Barrow, leaving them to die. But in one last pass, the pilot took the circle a little wider, flying almost directly over Eleanor and the others. They jumped and screamed at its belly, then its tail.

“Did they see us?” Finn asked. “Did they?”

“They had to,” Dr. Powers said, and he was right.

The plane swung out far and banked, lining up for an approach, then came in for a landing very close to where Eleanor and the rest stood waiting. As soon as it reached a stop, they all rushed toward it.

As Eleanor approached the craft, the door opened, and a familiar face appeared, covered in stubble.

“Did you guys make that mess?” Luke asked, pointing at the crater.

Eleanor couldn't believe it. How was he here? How did he know? “We did,” she said as she boarded the plane with the others. “Are you impressed?”

“Very,” he said, and pulled her into a quick, backslapping hug. “Good to see you, kid.”

“Good to see you, too,” Eleanor said.

When they were all onboard and seated, Luke closed the main door and returned to his open cockpit. “I take it these two are Dr. Perry and Dr. Powers?”

“We are,” Eleanor's mother said. “And you are?”

“This is Luke Fournier, Mom,” Eleanor said. “If it wasn't for him, I would never have found you.”

“Then I am very grateful to you, Mr. Fournier,” her mother said.

“Just Luke,” he said, facing forward for takeoff. “And if it wasn't for your daughter, I'd probably be kicking back with a warm drink in Phoenix right now. So let's get going.”

A few moments later, airborne, Eleanor was able to see the full scale of the crater. It looked as if a meteor had struck the ice sheet. The open pit, wider than a football stadium, dropped hundreds and hundreds of feet from the surface to a jagged field of icy rubble at the bottom. In shutting down the Concentrator,
Eleanor had left a terrible, gaping wound on the ice sheet from which it would not easily heal.

She found a measure of satisfaction in that.

O
n the short flight back to Barrow, Luke explained how he had ended up at the crater, circling. It turned out the whole town had felt the impact of the cavern collapse, just as Dr. Powers had expected they would, and several pilots had wanted to investigate. But the G.E.T. had seized the airport and grounded everyone.

“Whatever had happened out there,” he said, “they didn't want anyone to see it.” He turned around and looked back into the cabin with a crooked grin. “Which naturally meant that I
had
to. So I, uh, borrowed this little girl and got in the air as quick as I could. Bit dicey at takeoff, though. Bastards actually tried to shoot me down.”

“We are very grateful you risked it,” Eleanor's mother said.

“I admit,” Luke said, “I wasn't expecting to find you all alive.”

Eleanor rolled her eyes. “Thanks a lot.”

“The G.E.T. won't show any of us mercy, going forward,” Dr. Powers said, and a somber silence took hold of the aircraft.

He was right. They were outlaws now. The G.E.T.
might even try to hunt them down for what they knew, to ensure their silence and maintain the UN's so-called Preservation Protocol. They would have to go into hiding somewhere.

Eleanor grabbed her mother's arm with a sudden panic. “We need to warn Uncle Jack!”

“As soon as we get to Barrow,” she said, nodding.

“So what happened down there?” Luke asked.

Eleanor and the others just looked at one another, not sure where to start. But Eleanor took the lead, explaining everything, aware of how impossible it all sounded. But Luke just kept nodding along, occasionally glancing back at her. His eyebrows stayed pressed together, except the few times his eyes widened, but he seemed to be taking it all in. Maybe it was the fact that there were four other people, two of them scientists, nodding along in agreement.

When she finished, Luke rubbed the whiskers on his chin for a solid minute, thinking. Then he said, “So there's aliens up there on some planet? Right now?”

Eleanor thought back to her vision of the dark world. Its terrible surface had felt . . . dead. Long, long dead. “I don't
think
so,” she said. “I think the planet and the Concentrators are running on their own. Automatically.”

“So where are the others?” Luke asked.

“The others?” Eleanor's mother said.

“The other Concentrators,” Luke said. “There's gotta be more than one, right? Probably several. I don't imagine this rogue planet would come all this way to suck power from one little hose. You said there were lots of these, uh, telluric whatevers, running around the earth?”

“Yes,” Eleanor whispered. What Luke said made sense. “Mom, do you still have the Sync?” Her mom nodded and handed it to her. The device's cell connection might be dead, but Eleanor could still access its data, and she opened the file with the map of the world. “Look,” she said, pointing. “There are all these lines intersecting here in Alaska. But look over here.” She traced a line to Egypt. “There are just as many here.”

“And there,” Finn said, jabbing Peru.

There were several such intersections around the globe, all of them possessing a strong convergence of telluric current. But there was something else they all had in common. They were places von Albrecht had written about.

Gradually, Eleanor began to form a theory of her own. “What if aliens visited the earth tens of thousands of years ago to prepare it for their planet? All these places have something in common. Some people
think they were built by aliens. Like the Great Pyramids. Well, maybe the aliens planted Concentrators at all these sites, and then they left, and now the dark world has come to harvest the energy!”

Everyone fell into silence again, listening to the purr of the plane's engines.

“We'll reach Barrow soon,” Luke said. “I'm going to land far outside of town, or the G.E.T. might try to shoot us down again.”

“Do you know anywhere we can hide?” Dr. Powers asked.

“Felipe?” Eleanor suggested.

Luke nodded. “You kidding? Aliens? He'll love this.”

“Then what?” Julian asked.

“Then we jailbreak my plane,” Luke said. “Head to Fairbanks. Betty can hide us for a little while. From there . . .”

From there,
Eleanor thought,
we have to travel around the world to those other sites
. It sounded like an overwhelming mission, an impossible task, but then, that was exactly what people would have said about Eleanor's trip to the Arctic to search for her mom. Yet she had found her, and her mom was here, sitting in the seat next to her, alive and safe.

If there were other Concentrators, they would find
them, and Eleanor knew now how to shut them down. If they succeeded in that, if the rogue world could no longer drain the earth's energy, would it die? Or at least leave their solar system and move on?

A new vision of the future filled Eleanor's mind, an alternative to Skinner's dire apocalypse. A vision of an earth returned to its orbit, a world of warmth and thaw and hope.

“From there, what?” Finn asked, in response to Luke's open question.

“From there,” Eleanor said, thinking of Amarok's smile, “we make a new home.”