His eyes flare. He sets the bowl down to sign, ‘If you cut the sled apart and can’t fix the airplane, we are stuck here.’
‘I know, but…’ An idea starts creeping in. I take a big gulp of my soup and nod at Katvar’s bowl.
He blanches. ‘I don’t think I can stomach another drop.’
I catch myself before asking if he doesn’t like the taste. I could totally gobble up his leftovers. ‘It’s that or the dogs.’
He pauses, squeezes his eyes shut, and methodically forces the stew down his gullet. He’s not going to eat another of his dogs, not if he can help it.
I follow his example and very nearly throw up. The knowledge of what we are eating and enjoying puts my stomach in knots.
‘The aircraft is our biggest asset,’ I say. ‘We have to take it with us. The sled is less important. We can get a sled anywhere in the North, but not an airplane. We blew up the entire satellite network. Global communication is fucked, which means that getting from one place to another real fast will give us an edge.’
Katvar’s gaze darkens.
I lower my bowl. ‘I’m not in a warmongering mode. I’m just trying to not be stupid. The BSA are still around. We merely clipped their wings. But we clipped those of the Sequencers, too. Our main problem besides the obvious…’ I tip my head at the empty pot, ‘…is that both organisations hate me right now. So once we cross to the mainland, we have to hide our machine. Keep it safe. If the Sequencers find it, so be it. But I’ll blow it up before I let the Bull Shit Army get their dirty hands on it.’
‘How do you hide a thing that big?’ Katvar asks, but behind his eyes I see a strategy already blossoming. ‘Is there a manual?’
‘For the aircraft?’
He nods.
‘Don’t know. But we can see if it’s in my SatPad.’ I dig through my bag, thinking back to when Runner and I were crawling through the Taiwanese forest, our backpacks heavy with ammo and explosives, survival and communication gear. My hands still. I wonder if this war will ever be over. People have a tendency to keep pissing each other off on a global scale. So why try to end this war if some asshole is guaranteed to start another, two weeks later?
Katvar touches my shoulder and pokes his chin at my bag. ‘What’s this?’ he signs.
I almost forgot I took this. ‘It’s an MIT FireScope.’
He lifts an eyebrow in question.
‘I…um…found it in the Vault.’
He knows I’m not telling him everything, so he just waits.
I brace myself. ‘I took it so we can sequence your genome.’
His throat works. He lifts one hand, then slowly the other to sign, ‘Hope is a two-edged sword.’
‘I know. But no hope at all is worse. Will you let me do it?’
He scans my face, and gives me a brief nod. I’m pretty sure I won’t find any genetic defects, despite his being a product of inbreeding. I think of the large black tattoo on his chest: the Taker — the ritual knife the Lume fear and hate. The mere sight of the Taker and its obsidian blade hauls up in all the Lume a collective memory of infanticide. The knife is used to kill newborns who are too ill and weak to survive. Katvar said the Lume have little choice. For semi-nomadic hunters, a baby who will forever be sick is a danger to the health and well-being of all the others. They can’t afford to raise a child who’ll never be able to provide for the clan, who’ll always need help to accomplish the smallest of tasks. To the Lume, the Taker is a bitter necessity.
And because Katvar is the child of brother and sister, the ritual knife was carved into his chest when he came of age, so that no woman would ever want him. So that there is not the slightest chance of him fathering defective kids.
But he’s here, and I am not afraid. Chances are that our children, should we ever have any, will be healthy because he is healthy. But he himself needs proof. Something he can trust. To have a child who couldn’t live would destroy him utterly.
I clear my throat. ‘I used it only a couple of times. I have to read up on it again.’
‘I’ll do the reading. You have enough to do as it is.’ He’s been feeling useless and weak, but the curtain of insecurity is pushed away with one word. ‘Priorities.’ His hands cut through the air. He tugs the furs closer around his shoulders. ‘I’ll figure out what we need to get off the ground. Do you think the GPS still works?’
I shrug.
‘And maybe it’s not too late to tap into some kind of weather forecast?’ He chews on his lower lip and frowns. ‘The destruction of the global satellite network will be completed in a week, but if we’re lucky a few weather satellites are still up there and can show us which way the storm is moving. Shit. We might be visible once the sky clears. But the Sequencers and the BSA will have bigger problems than to go looking for us. They are probably trying to get a fix on this.’ He twirls a finger at the ceiling of our snow cave, indicating the burning satellites in the sky.
‘Shit tends to hit the fan when I’m around.’ I press my knuckles against my eyes until lights pop in my vision. ‘Our main problem is food. We’re running out of it, no matter what we decide to do next. We could take the sled, but we have only three dogs. None of them trust me, so they won’t let me catch them. Even if they were already in their harnesses, it’s four hundred kilometres to the mainland. We have three quarters of a corpse left. That’s less than fifty kilograms of lean meat.’
‘Brain has a high fat content,’ Katvar interrupts.
‘Ugh, thanks. Anyway. Flying shortens the travel time, but I don’t know how to navigate the aircraft without a GPS. We have a compass and some old maps in the machine, but flying over sea ice, we’ll have no reference points. We’ll get lost.’
‘How’s that any different from when we found our way to Svalbard? You forget the Lume never had access to satellite navigation. Give me a stretch of clear sky and I’ll tell you which way we’re heading.’
‘Oh, right. Okay, but…there’s still the food problem.’
‘Why not check if there’s a book about Bear Island on your SatPad?’
I huff. Of course, I’d only ever checked how best to get off this island, not how to survive on it.
He grins at me. ‘Show me how to work this thing.’
I log in, and tell Katvar that the SatPad uses voice recognition. I hold it to my mouth, say, ‘I give operating rights to…’ and shove it in his face.
He blinks, swallows, and croaks, ‘Katvar.’
‘Operating rights to Kark Var, please acknowledge,’ the machine squeaks.
‘Acknowledged,’ I say, and give him an apologetic shrug.
He takes the SatPad from me and scoots back to give me more space. For a moment, I hesitate. I want him to rest, not work. But then, reading can be done in bed. Quickly, I show him the main functions of the SatPad, and then say, ‘I’m going to check on the ice anchors. Make sure the storm can’t move the machine. Or rip out the anchors and tear the aircraft to shreds.’ My nerves are raw. I knuckle my thighs. So much can go wrong…is going wrong already.
He shifts his gaze to me, and brushes his fingers over my cheek. ‘We are alive, Micka. We have food; we have ways to get out of here.’
We might have a little food left, but ways to get out of here? I can’t see those, but I don’t have the heart to tell him that. Not yet. I blink the burning from my eyes and look away.
‘What?’ he rasps. ‘What’s wrong?’
Shit. Most days Katvar sees straight into me. It’s scary sometimes. Slowly, I pull in a breath and tell him. ‘There was a rattling when I checked the ice anchors last night.’
He narrows his eyes. ‘It was loud enough that you could hear it in the howling storm?’
I nod once and drop my head. ‘I don’t know how to get us out.’ Admitting this to him is hard. I don’t want him to lose what little hope we have left. My throat hurts. ‘If there hadn’t been a thick layer of snow covering the ice when I crash-landed, half the plane’s belly would have been ripped open. The snow
cushioned the landing, but I broke one of the skis and damaged the undercarriage. Something is loose, probably bent. Maybe even cracked. That’s what’s rattling. And the…’ Angry, I slam a fist against my knee. ‘The fucking storm has exposed the jumbled ice. We can’t take off without a runway, and even if we had one, the landing gear would probably fall off before we got in the air. I screwed up. I’m… I’m so sorry.’
Three
Katvar grunts ‘Uh-huh,’ stares at the SatPad for a long moment, and signs, ‘Once we reach the mainland, where are we heading?’
‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’
He lifts an eyebrow. ‘Are you giving up?’
‘I’m just being realistic.’ Truth is, I’m exhausted. I haven’t stopped running for months.
‘Let’s assume we make it, okay?’ His expression is soft, as though I’m a wild animal that might bite if he’s not careful.
I open my mouth to point out that we never thought we’d survive this trip, so naturally, I didn’t plan beyond the impossible task of getting us to Norwegian territory, didn’t fool myself into thinking anything more could be done. But somehow, Katvar’s stoicism is infectious, and it lightens my exhaustion. ‘Do the Lume have connections to the peoples of northern Scandinavia? Do you think we might find someone friendly with your clan?’
‘I was with the Sami once, travelling with a small group of reindeer herders through Swedish territory. Birket would know if there are any tribes higher up north who are friendly with the Lume.’
Birket is chief of Katvar’s clan. Or he was, when we left them. A wise man and a good leader. I liked his wry humour. ‘I hope they are safe,’ I say. The chances that the BSA haven’t found the Lume, and retaliated for them helping me, are…slim.
Katvar doesn’t look up as he nods. ‘I need maps, a compass, paper and a pen, if we have any. The manual for the aircraft. Fifty kilograms of lean meat left, you said?’
‘Less than that, I think.’
‘In this cold, we’re using up a lot of energy. I don’t think lean meat alone is enough. We need a lot of fat, but meat is all we have, so…we’ll probably need to eat about four kilograms each day.’
‘Like, together?’
‘No, each. That’s eight kilos a day for the two of us. Which means…’
My stomach drops. ‘Food runs out in four or five days.’
‘Yeah,’ he croaks, and runs his fingers over a stubbly chin.
‘You are anaemic. You need to eat even more than that.’
He sits up straighter. ‘Then I will eat more. Make stew. I’ll do some thinking.’
While Katvar plans our next steps, I chop our corpse into five day’s worth of rations. The brain will serve as our daily energy boost. I cut it into five parts, each about the size of a large duck egg. More than half of the brain tissue is fat. I hope I’ll never again have to hack into a human skull, let alone turn its contents into dinner.
The liver will supply us with vitamins, and is divided into five portions as well. Then I put everything back in the airplane, out of reach of the dogs. I cut through the bones of the corpse’s left arm, add today’s ration of brain and liver to it, then push my way back through the storm and to our cave.
Katvar looks even paler now. He’s shaking under the bear pelt. His lips are compressed, his speckled eyes, the colour of pine bark, are flat with fatigue. I take off my anorak and drop it on his shoulders, then start the burner and chuck meat, lichen, and snow into the pot. Funny, how quickly one gets used to eating human meat when extreme circumstances demand it. You survive, or you fucking don’t.
I’d had worse. Headquarters — the word makes a mockery of that hell prisoners were put through. Memories of the scents of burning skin and hair, of blood and sweat and fear, still crawl up my nostrils at night. Screams, my own and those of others, echo down my throat. I had to make a small room in the back of my mind to stow away my monster and my nightmares. Every morning I shove them into that room, and every night they creep back out. Worst of all, I’m still undecided whether or not to put my dead daughter in that cell as well.
When I look up, I find Katvar’s gaze resting on my face. He knows precisely what’s going on. Knows that I don’t want to be touched when I’m going there. Knows that, in moments like these, my monster hides just beneath my skin.
‘Why is it that one always remembers the things one wants to forget?’
‘Because pain is hard to ignore.’ He clears his throat and asks, ‘The battery’s at nine per cent?’
Glad of the change of topic, I nod. The tiny bit of daylight that trickles through the whiteout has managed to charge the battery a fraction.
‘To get off the ground, we’ll need eight to ten per cent battery power.’ Which pretty much sums up what I know about flying. There’d been no time to read the handbook, let alone take flying lessons before I stole my first solar plane. Same when I stole this one. But I guess when you kill the guys who own the thing, it’s not really stealing. It’s adopting, right?
‘We can’t wait for the sun to come out for a full charge. But maybe… Isn’t there a way to use the wind for that?’ he signs.
My heart bangs against my ribs. ‘You are brilliant!’
He gives me a tired smile, and shakes his head. ‘I don’t know how to do it. Might just wreck the plane if I try.’
I scoot closer to him, alight with hope for once. ‘I’m good with machines. Are there any diagrams? Did you see anything that looked like a wiring diagram in the handbook?’
He frowns. ‘Not yet. I’ll keep looking.’
‘Maybe I can figure it out without a diagram.’ I’ll probably botch it, but there’s no use in telling him that.
The water is boiling. I wait until the meat is thawed, then switch off the burner and wrap up the pot. Katar is scribbling away with pen and paper. I watch and wait for him to finish.
I serve our food and we eat in silence. He keeps looking at the numbers he’s written, keeps flicking through the SatPad, and finally signs, ‘Calculating takeoff distance under these circumstances is a bit of a gamble. The type of surface influences the distance we need. The rough snow and ice add to the distance, while low temperature lowers it. A tailwind would add distance, but we can’t predict where the wind will come from or how strong it will be. Weight, configuration of the flaps, and how much power we use when taking off, all influence the takeoff distance. And the operating handbook is a mess.’ He picks at the thing that is looking more like a bunch of rags with its heavy, bloated pages. The manual is going to fall apart as soon as the ice melts that holds its spine. ‘I did find detailed climb performance, weight and balance information in here, though.’ He taps the SatPad. ‘I’m going to learn how to fly this thing properly.’
‘But did you calculate it? The takeoff distance?’
‘Three hundred to four hundred meters.’
‘Oh…kay. I’ll prep the runway, no problem.’ We are so fucked. The storm has stripped the sea ice of its thick layer of snow. Now there’s only jumbled ice around the aircraft.
‘It will be more if we can’t fix the nose ski.’
‘I’ll build a runway with compacted snow,’ I say. It’s more like an automatic response of my mouth than anything my brain would come up with. Because, really, do I look like I have four horses drawing a snow plow?
He gives me a tiny nod. Not convinced. ‘This solar plane doesn’t run on battery power. It’s more like a…’ His hands hesitate, then he just shoves the SatPad at me and taps the screen.
‘Ni-Co-Fe LDH?’ I read aloud. ‘Oh, okay. Metal hydroxides, double-layered on nickel nano-foam by electrodeposition. It’s a…’ Surprised, I look up. Katvar has never so much as looked inside a motor. ‘How did you know it’s not a battery but a supercapacitator that generates hydrogen from solar power?’
He coughs and points to the last line on the screen. Four high-efficiency dual-function stand-alone energy devices convert solar energy into electricity and hydrogen via a morpholo
gy-tunable nickel-cobalt-iron double hydroxide nano-foam in which hydrogen is also stored.
‘You were guessing?’
Katvar shrugs. ‘I can tell you everything about sled dogs, but this stuff is bohemian villages to me.’
‘What’s bohemian villages?’
‘That whole thing there. Had to read it ten times to understand that solar energy is converted and stored in those devices. I guessed that’s what our batteries are.’
‘I still don’t get the “bohemian villages” thing.’
‘Dog sledding used to be bohemian villages to you before I taught you about it. What you do with your rifle, how you can hit a reindeer that’s a kilometre away is bohemian villages to me.’
‘Oh, you mean that’s all Greek to you?’
He snorts. ‘No. Why would it be Greek to me? I know Greek.’
‘You are fucking kidding me!’
He waggles his eyebrows and guffaws. ‘You think we can build a runway? Won’t that take…long?’
Wrong question. ‘It will take longer if I just sit here and think about it.’ I pull my furs back on, and move the compacted block of snow away from the entrance to our cave. As I tuck it back, taking care to leave no cracks for the wind to sneak in, I’m already making plans on how to build our runway, no matter how ridiculous the idea is. I’ll use the broken ski as a shovel. Then I’ll stomp the snow flat with my boots, so the wind can’t blow it away. Maybe.
But I want to check the aircraft first, and tackle a problem that isn’t as impossible as building a runway nearly half a kilometre long, maybe longer. With my bare hands. In the Arctic.
I push my way through the whiteout. Shards of ice are biting my cheeks just below my snow goggles. Maybe I should have eaten more. Light-headedness from undernourishment stubbornly sticks to me.
Back in the airplane, I switch on all the controls to see if we can get a satellite image of the storm. But there’s no connection. I wipe frost from the screens, and rest my chin on my mittens to think. Somehow we’ll have to rewire the motor and generate wind power to charge the bohemian villages. The undercarriage needs fixing, and the dogs have to be caught. And I need to move and compress snow for a four hundred meter long runway. No problem if I had a few months. But there’s not even a week’s time. Five days is all we have. And this storm is so thick, the longer spring daylight hours aren’t even helpful.
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