Max was back! And they’d gotten the grant! And she’d missed it. “That’s wonderful!” she said, as enthusiastically as she could. Really, it was wonderful news. She’d wished for Max to come back for years. Cassie grinned at her former babysitter. “What’s the grant for?”
“Denning behavior,” Dad answered. “All five polar bear nations are participating, but we are the ones who will be combining the data.”
“Laszlo had us out poking sticks into dens till we got Max back on staff. Scouting the ice with headlamps. Your kind of stuff, kiddo,” Scott said. “Sorry you missed it.” So was she.
Jeremy gave a visible shudder. “Insanely suicidal.”
“You didn’t get eaten,” Dad said.
“Pure luck,” Jeremy said. “Glad that’s over with.”
She’d missed all of it. Well, she was back now, and she wasn’t missing anything else. Out of the corner of her eye, Cassie watched Gail perch on a stool and smooth her napkin across her lap. I’m home now, Cassie thought, and I’m staying.
Cassie shot upright in her bed. What the hell was that? “Bear?” she said. A woman was screaming. It took Cassie several seconds to remember where she was, and several more seconds to remember what other woman was in the station.
Her mother was screaming.
Cassie chucked off her comforter and ran out her bedroom door. She made it to outside her dad’s room as the screams subsided to sobs. “It’s all right,” her father was saying. “You’re here. You’re free. It’s over. It’s all right. They won’t take you again.”
“You don’t know that.” Her mother’s voice, broken.
Cassie pushed through the door. “Mom? Gail?” She halted in the doorway. Her mother was curled against Dad and was weeping on his shoulder.
Dad raised his head, and the expression was so raw that Cassie had to look away. “Nightmare,” he said to Cassie. “She’ll be all right. You go back to bed.”
Cassie took a step toward the door. She wanted to retreat. She didn’t know what to do with her mother weeping like that and her father looking so… so… stricken, so helpless. Every crease in his face was a deep shadow. His eyes looked like smudged holes. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“Go ahead,” he said. He pressed his face against her mother’s hair, and she could tell that to him she was already gone. Cassie backed out the door and closed it behind her. She hesitated in the hallway. She could hear her father’s voice clearly through the door.
“Same dream?” he said.
Cassie couldn’t hear the reply.
“Blame me,” he said. “I failed you. I should have saved you. Blame me. Hate me. But don’t be afraid. You don’t have to be afraid. It’s over. It’s all over. You’re home.”
CHAPTER 11
Latitude 70° 49’ 23” N
Longitude 152° 29’ 25” W
Altitude 10 ft.
Cassie threw herself into data processing. For five days, she transferred several thousand latitude and longitude measurements into minuscule triangles on a topographical map, one triangle per den. She finished late on day five, and then stepped back to survey her work. She wrinkled her nose. Anyone could have done this—a kid, a monkey, Jeremy.
“Good,” Dad said behind her. “How many do we have?”
Cassie counted. “Forty-one on eastern Ellesmere, maximum distance twelve and a half miles from shore, twenty-eight within five miles.” Bear could be there now, distributing souls. “Baffin Island, twenty-three near Cape Adair.”
Her father took notes. “Foxe Basin?”
“Bear must have visited a number of these by now,” she said. It was the height of birth season. Had any of the cubs been stillborn? Some must have been. If he were in Karaskoye More and he felt a call in the Chukchi Sea, he might not make it even at superspeeds. She thought of Bear alone in his castle, mourning the cubs he’d failed to save.
Dad’s pencil paused. “Cassie, you don’t need to think about him anymore. You’re safe here.”
Not again. She forced herself to smile and say in an even voice, “He’s not dangerous. He’s sweet.” And fun and funny.
“It’s a common psychological reaction for people to identify with their kidnappers,” he said. “But you’re home now. We won’t let him take you again.”
Dad was so stubborn. “You know what Bear did one time? I woke up with a sore throat, and he brought me breakfast in bed.” More like a feast, really. Pancakes, waffles, cereals. She’d never had anyone bring her breakfast in bed. “And then the rest of the morning, he told me stories so I wouldn’t have to talk and I wouldn’t be bored.” He’d even acted some of them out. Even with her sore throat, she had laughed a lot. “Does that sound so terrible?” She hadn’t laughed like that since she’d returned to the station.
“You don’t need to tell me,” he said. “Whatever happened, you’re safe now. You’re with people who love you.”
Bear loves me, she thought. “He’s not a monster,” she said.
Gail poked her face into the room. “It’s after midnight. Would you two workaholics come to bed?” She smiled with all her teeth.
“Do you want to call it a night?” Dad asked kindly, as if talking to a child.
Cassie sighed. One more argument wasn’t going to convince him. “All right.” She deposited her papers onto her desk, and she trotted after Dad and Gail.
At the door to her bedroom, Dad paused. “Good work today, Cassie.”
She wasn’t sure of that. Bear did more to help the polar bears in one jaunt across the ice than she could do in one year of drawing triangles on maps.
“Night,” Gail said. She didn’t try to hug or kiss Cassie. After the first few awkward nights, they had let that drop in a tacit acknowledgment of the gulf between them.
Managing a halfhearted wave, Cassie backed into her bedroom and closed the door behind her. She heard her parents’ voices receding, and then their door shut too.
Cassie flopped down onto the bed. Yellow fluorescent light reflected on the photographs that her younger self had taped to the cement walls. She rolled onto her stomach to look at the shrunken images of snowdrifts and mountaintops. She leaned over and smoothed the crumpled corner of one photograph. She had scrawled: “Lomonosov Ridge 89° N.” She remembered it: the fierce jumble of ice blocks, the expanse of sky, the burning cold. “Oh, Bear, what are you doing now?”
She threw a rolled sock at the light switch, and it bounced off. Third sock, she got it. In the darkness, she missed Bear more. She knew she shouldn’t. She was home now. She had her life back, plus her mother. So why wasn’t she happy?
Tossing beneath her comforter, Cassie thought about her life in the castle, how she’d never gotten tired of the afternoons they’d spent in the garden, of the evenings they’d spent playing chess (even when he’d won three out of four games because she’d never had a backup plan), or of the late nights when they’d drunk hot chocolate in the dark and he’d made up stories just for her. She remembered how he had laughed the first time she’d slid down the banister, and how he had cried when that first cub had been stillborn. How many more stillborns had he had to face alone? If only she could find a way to be with him and help the polar bears.
Cassie sat up in bed—she was on the verge of an idea. She could feel it. Bear missed births because he did not know where and when they would be. But she had access to the precise denning dates for hundreds of expectant bears.
Cassie threw off her comforter and hurried to Owen’s workroom. She clambered over boxes and engine bits to the new computer. After yanking the protective cover off, she hit the power button. She paced as it booted. Births were not random. She could predict them—or at least their likelihood. Cassie perched on the desk chair and clicked to the denning file.