Dr. Arthur Caswell and Dr. Kathleen Schafer expected nothing but perfection from their sole progeny. Even after their bloodless divorce, they’d still expected Rowan to do exactly as they wanted.
Rowan had long-ago realized that nothing she ever did would please her parents for long. She blew out a breath. It had taken a painful childhood spent trying to win their love and affection—and failing miserably—to realize that. They were just too absorbed in their own work and lives.
Pull up your big-girl panties, Rowan. She’d never been abused and had been given a great education. She had work she enjoyed, interesting colleagues, and a lot to be thankful for.
Rowan watched her team pack the last of their samples onto the sled. She glanced to the southern horizon, peering at the bank of clouds in the distance. Ellesmere didn’t get a lot of precipitation, which meant not a lot of snow, but plenty of ice. Still, it looked like bad weather was brewing and she wanted everyone safely back at camp.
“Okay, everyone, enough for today. Let’s head back to base for hot chocolate and coffee.”
Isabel rolled her eyes. “You and your chocolate.”
Rowan made no apologies for her addiction, or the fact that half her bag for the trip here had been filled with her stash of high-quality chocolate—milk, dark, powdered, and her prized couverture chocolate.
“I want a nip of something warmer,” Lars said.
No one complained about leaving. Working out on the ice was bitterly cold, even in September, with the last blush of summer behind them.
Rowan climbed on a snowmobile and quickly grabbed her hand-held radio. “Hazen Team Two, this is Hazen Team One. We are headed back to Hazen Base, confirm.”
A few seconds later, the radio crackled. “Acknowledged, Hazen One. We see the clouds, Rowan. We’re leaving the drill site now.”
Dr. Samuel Malu was as steady and dependable as the sunrise.
“See you there,” she answered.
Marc climbed onto the second snowmobile, Lars riding behind him. Rowan waited for Isabel to climb on before firing up the engine. They both pulled their goggles on.
It wasn’t a long trip back to base, and soon the camp appeared ahead. Seven large, temporary, polar domes made of high-tech, insulated materials were linked together by short, covered tunnels to make the multi-structure dome camp. The domes housed their living quarters, kitchen and rec room, labs, and one that held Rowan’s office, the communications room, and storage. The high-tech insulation made the domes easy to heat, and they were relatively easy to construct and move. The structures had been erected to last through the seven-month expedition.
The two snowmobiles roared close to the largest dome and pulled to a stop.
“Okay, all the samples and specimens to the labs,” Rowan directed, holding open the door that led inside. She watched as Lars carefully picked up a tray and headed inside. Isabel and Marc followed with more trays.
Rowan stepped inside and savored the heat that hit her. The small kitchen was on the far side of the rec room, and the center of the dome was crowded with tables, chairs, and sofas.
She unzipped and shrugged off her coat and hung it beside the other red jackets lined up by the door. Next, she stepped out of her big boots and slipped into the canvas shoes she wore inside.
A sudden commotion from the adjoining tunnel had Rowan frowning. What now?
A young woman burst from the tunnel. She was dressed in normal clothes, her blonde hair pulled up in a tight ponytail. Emily Wood, their intern, was a student from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She got to do all the not-so-glamorous jobs, like logging and labelling the samples, which meant the scientists could focus on their research.
“Rowan, you have to come now!”
“Emily? What’s wrong?” Concerned, Rowan gripped the woman’s shoulder. She was practically vibrating. “Are you hurt?”
Emily shook her head. “You have to come to Lab Dome 1.” She grabbed Rowan’s hand and dragged her into the tunnel. “It’s unbelievable.”
Rowan followed. “Tell me what—”
“No. You need to see it with your own eyes.”
Seconds later, they stepped into the lab dome. The temperature was pleasant and Rowan was already feeling hot. She needed to strip off her sweater before she started sweating. She spotted Isabel, and another botanist, Dr. Amara Taylor, staring at the main workbench.
“Okay, what’s the big issue?” Rowan stepped forward.
Emily tugged her closer. “Look!” She waved a hand with a flourish.
A number of various petri dishes and sample holders sat on the workbench. Emily had been cataloguing all the seeds and frozen plant life they’d pulled out of the glacier.
“These are some of the samples we collected on our first day here.” She pointed at the end of the workbench. “Some I completely thawed and had stored for Dr. Taylor to start analyzing.”
Amara lifted her dark eyes to Rowan. The botanist was a little older than Rowan, with dark-brown skin, and long, dark hair swept up in a bun. “These plants are five thousand years old.”
Rowan frowned and leaned forward. Then she gasped. “Oh my God.”
The plants were sprouting new, green shoots.
“They’ve come back to life.” Emily’s voice was breathless.
*
The clink of silverware and excited conversations filled the rec dome. Rowan stabbed at a clump of meat in her stew, eyeing it with a grimace. She loved food, but hated the stuff that accompanied them on expeditions. She grabbed her mug—sweet, rich hot chocolate. She’d made it from her stash with the perfect amount of cocoa. The best hot chocolate needed no less than sixty percent cocoa but no more than eighty.
Across from her, Lars and Isabel weren’t even looking at their food or drink.
“Five thousand years old!” Isabel shook her head, her dark hair falling past her shoulders. “Those plants are millennia old, and they’ve come back to life.”
“Amazing,” Lars said. “A few years back, a team working south of here on the Teardrop Glacier at Sverdrup Pass brought moss back to life…but it was only four hundred years old.”
Isabel and Lars high-fived each other.
Rowan ate some more of her stew. “Russian scientists regenerated seeds found in a squirrel burrow in the Siberian permafrost.”
“Pfft,” Lars said. “Ours is still cooler.”
“They got the plant to flower and it was fertile,” Rowan continued, mildly. “The seeds were thirty-two thousand years old.”
Isabel pulled a face and Lars looked disappointed.
“And I think they are working on reviving forty-thousand-year-old nematode worms now.”
Her team members both pouted.
Rowan smiled and shook her head. “But five-thousand-year-old plant life is nothing to sneeze at, and the Russian flowers required a lot of human intervention to coax them back to life.”
Lars perked up. “All we did was thaw and water ours.”
Rowan kept eating, listening to the flow of conversation. The others were wondering what other ancient plant life they might find in the glacial ice.
“What if we find a frozen mammoth?” Lars suggested.
“No, a frozen glacier man,” Isabel said.
“Like the ?tzi man,” Rowan said. “He was over five thousand years old, and found in the Alps. On the border between Italy and Austria.”
Amara arrived, setting her tray down. “Glaciers are retreating all over the planet. I had a colleague who uncovered several Roman artifacts from a glacier in the Swiss Alps.”
Isabel sat back in her chair. “Maybe we’ll find the fountain of youth? Maybe something in these plants we’re uncovering could defy aging, or cure cancer.”
Rowan raised an eyebrow and smothered a smile. She was as excited as the others about the regeneration of the plants. But her mind turned to the now-forgotten mystery object they’d plucked from the ice. She’d taken some photos of it and its markings. She was itching to take a look at them again.
“I’m going to take another look at the metal object we found,” Lars said, stuffing some stew in his mouth.
“Going to check for any messages from aliens?” Isabel teased.