Cass flinched, then retreated a step. Taylor had a dark reputation—Shackleton’s chief of security was rumored to have history with everyone from Blackwater to Israel’s Mossad—but he was probably right. If the sight and feel of Sheryl’s dead body, hidden by layer upon layer of clothing, was almost too much for her to take, the image of her face would definitely send her to a place she didn’t want to go. She moved farther away and watched Taylor finish tightening the crisscrossed straps. The body rocked with each tug.
Hanratty approached, stomping through the snow. “Taylor, you drive the body back. Doc Ayres should be waiting for you in the garage. No one except you two are to look at it . . . at her . . . before I return. And not a word to anyone.”
“You aren’t coming back now?” Taylor’s twang—Southern Comfort with a hint of backwoods bayou—came through in the five simple words.
“I want to keep looking around. We’ll join you in a few.”
“The met report said the next storm is due at fourteen-thirty.” Taylor would never come out and chide his boss, but the warning was clear. “Con two.”
“I know it,” Hanratty replied, turning his face southwest into the thickening flurry. “The blow that caught Sheryl probably covered anything worth seeing, but if we don’t look now, for sure it’ll be gone in another hour.”
“What was she doing in the Dark Sector, anyway? I thought she was with the weather gang.”
“No clue. She liked to jog. Maybe she thought she’d go for a long loop. Jennings, you’re a runner. You ever come out this far?”
She shook her head. Was she a runner? Yes. Ten miles a day, every day, for years. Running away from something, running toward something. But never on the ice, where she didn’t trust she would ever come back if she dared venture out.
“On the far side of the skiway?” Taylor pressed, gesturing. “In bunny boots?”
“Hell if I know, Taylor,” Hanratty said, annoyed. “Maybe she spaced out and started chasing sun dogs. Get the body back to the station and we can spend the rest of the winter guessing.”
Back stiff, Taylor nodded once, then hopped onto the Skandic. The snowmobile’s engine caught on the first try and he motored back toward base, nothing more than a blue-gray Lego block at this distance.
Cass turned to Hanratty. “You want me along?”
“You’re not going to walk back, I assume,” he said, swinging a leg over the saddle of the other snowmobile. “And I want to be there. I can trust Taylor not to talk.”
Cass mounted behind Hanratty, but underneath her mask and gaiter, her face burned. Rather than put her arms around his waist for support, she gripped the bottom of the seat instead. More precarious, maybe, but she’d rather fall off the back than give him the satisfaction of holding on to him.
As though reading her mind, he took off with a jolt that snapped her head back. For a long second, she teetered on the edge of pitching backwards off the seat. Hanratty, known for his object lessons, probably would make her walk back to base then. But she regained her balance as he slowed the snowmobile in order to follow Sheryl’s tracks.
Or, rather, where the tracks should’ve been. In the arid, desert-like climate of Antarctica, little snow fell day to day, but tens of thousands of accumulated years of the stuff blew around the continent in curtains. The rest was sculpted into frozen waves of glass-like hardness, what the old ice-heads called sastrugi . A single footprint appeared occasionally, but there was no reliable trail thanks to the crystalline surface. And since bunny boots had been standard Antarctic issue for decades, any footprint they spotted could’ve been Sheryl’s . . . or it could’ve been laid down by any other Polie in the last twenty years. At certain points, there seemed to be a cluster of footprints, but again the temporal element was missing: they could be prints from a group of two or three or those of singular individuals inscribed over years.
Snowmobiling over sastrugi was no picnic, and Cass’s teeth clacked together painfully as the Skandic bucked up and down on the icy fins. Thankfully, Hanratty kept their speed to a crawl so they could look for clues as to why Sheryl had been outside the base, alone and without a radio. None of it made sense. Leaving base without a radio was a violation of policy; doing so during the previous day’s storm was a violation of logic.
As was keeping up a fruitless search while visibility began to fail. Cass tapped Hanratty on the shoulder and leaned forward to be heard over the snowmobile’s whine. “We’re running out of time.”
“I’m aware.” The reply was terse, metallic.
Veering south, they drove farther onto the plain. Shackleton, glimpsed over her shoulder, was nothing more than a dot on the horizon, and when she turned to look front again, wind drove the snow directly into her face. They continued for several minutes, bucking over the troughs of the sastrugi, eyes glued to the ground, trying to spot one man-made anomaly in an ocean of natural deviations.