She crawled back inside. Admit it, she thought, your plan has failed. Max had not rescued her, despite all the polar bears. He certainly wasn’t coming now, when she was lost in a whiteout. He had failed her. Dad had failed her—just like he’d failed Gail. And just like Bear had failed her, abandoning her one mile north of the North Pole. Or like she had failed Bear, betraying his trust after he had pleaded with her never to look at him.
The look in his eyes…
She had to escape the ice. But there wasn’t an escape.
The closest land was Ward Hunt Island at 83° N and 75° W. Too many miles, her mind whispered. Too many miles and too little food. All the possibilities played through her mind: starvation, dehydration, freezing, drowning. Curling into a ball, she hugged herself. “Oh, Bear,” she whispered, “I’m sorry.” Hours passed.
CHAPTER 18
Latitude 87° 58’ 23” N
Longitude 150° 05’ 12” W
Altitude 8 ft.
Enough waiting.
Enough fear.
Enough of the damn whiteout. She was not going to continue to lie here, obsessing over Bear, until death or insanity claimed her. Whether he had meant to betray her or not, staying here wouldn’t help.
She was an Arctic explorer, dammit. She could survive this. She had her goggles to prevent snow blindness and her GPS to keep her from going in circles, for as long as the batteries lasted. She had her own skill and Dad’s training to keep her from falling through the ice. Even with the risks, it was still her best shot at survival. She had to get further south for there to be any chance of Max (or any other pilot) spotting her, and she didn’t have enough food left to wait for the whiteout to lift. I’m going, she thought. Joints as stiff as wood, Cassie put on her gear inside the sleeping bag, and then she crawled out.
Standing, she felt dizzy. Her knees shook and she sat down hard. She was weaker than she’d thought. The half rations and forced inactivity had taken a toll. Cassie waited until her vision cleared. Visibility was at five feet, maximum. Moving slowly, she wrapped an extra silkweight long underwear around her goggles to cut down on glare, and then she tried to roll her sleeping bag. She had sweat into it, and it had frozen. It fought her for each bend. Finally, she forced it into a squashed polygon and secured it to her pack. She lifted the pack onto her back. The straps cut into her shoulders. Numbly, her hands tried to buckle the waist belt. The belt was encrusted in ice. It took her three tries.
Then she walked into the snow-choked air.
Within minutes, her stomach hurt and even her bone marrow felt cold. The dryness of the air sucked moisture from her mouth, and she felt frostbite prickles in her cheeks under her frozen face mask. She shouldn’t be out walking in a whiteout. Only idiots went out in whiteouts. Kinnaq, her mind whispered—lunatic. But if she stopped here, in the ice rubble, then Max would never see her even when the whiteout cleared. She needed to be on flat ice for him to rescue her. I have to at least try to make it possible for him to find me, she thought. This is smart, she told herself, not crazy. Giving up was for the crazy. As she’d once told Bear, she didn’t give up.
Cassie kept walking, listening for the familiar crackle of breaking ice. Around her, the whiteout gradually—very gradually—dispersed. She caught glimpses of the bears—still out there, still following. Let them, she thought. She didn’t have the strength to fear them anymore. She shuffled across the ice with her eyes only on the next step. When she finally remembered to look up, she could see fifty feet. Beyond, the world was swallowed by snow.
The storm had pulled the ice apart at the seams.
Leads, riverlike cracks, crisscrossed the ice. A dense haze rose off the open water. New pressure ridges had been born, and others had caved. She stared at the landscape. She hadn’t imagined the damage would be so severe. She had been lucky to find a solid floe. Another few feet and… Very lucky.
It took Cassie several minutes to work up the courage to move on. She stepped across a lead onto the more fractured ice. In some leads, the water had frozen into a smooth road. She followed one, watching for mouse gray thin ice. Elastic, the ice bent under her weight. She scrambled forward as the ice fractured behind her. Plates of ice tilted like seesaws under her. The ice made faint grating sounds beneath her. It was so hard to focus. Bear wasn’t here to save her from freezing or drowning, she reminded herself; she had to save herself. “Don’t miss,” she whispered.
Cold permeated her. Her blood felt sluggish in her veins. She placed her foot down, and a plate of ice shot up. Cassie dove forward and grabbed for the top. Her feet slid out from under her and dangled over black water.
All around her, the polar bears watched.
Squinching her legs up, she forced the plate to tilt. Cassie dove for the next pan of ice. Her legs splashed into the water as the plate leaned in the opposite direction. Ice tore her Gore-Tex pants as she, with a burst of adrenaline she did not know she had, hauled herself out of the water.
She forced herself to stand. The cold… It burned. It sliced. She heard her father’s voice in her head yelling out instructions. Shedding her pack, she dropped into the snow and rolled as if extinguishing a fire. Snow absorbed the water on her legs. Her pants crinkled as the outer layer froze.
She had to move. It will dry if you move, Dad’s voice told her. Shivering uncontrollably, Cassie lifted her pack and walked on across the ice. Wind pushed right through her. She wished she were at the castle. She wished this were over. No, she wished it had never begun. She would have given anything, done anything, to have everything back the way it had been. Bear, where are you? She missed him so much that it hurt, like a fist squeezing her stomach. Or was that the cold? Or the hunger?
She missed him with every single cell of her body. It didn’t matter how he felt about her. Whether he loved her or not didn’t change how she felt about him. She loved him independent and regardless of whether he loved her. She wished she had realized that sooner. If she had, she’d never have switched on that flashlight. She’d be with Bear right now.
She kept walking mile after mile, hour after hour. She became coated in snow. Her face mask molded to the shape of her face, stuck to her skin, and her parka and pants were plastered with a sheen of solid ice. A chunk of it had wormed around her hood. Rivulets of ice water ran down her neck. She had a crust of ice between her parka lining and the down. Her parka felt like a straitjacket. Hoarfrost coated her goggles. Creeping cold infused her joints. It hurt to walk. Hell, she thought, has nothing to do with fire. Jeremy was right: Hell is frozen.
She could have frostbite, she knew. She could be slowly freezing to death. Killed by the ice she loved. She kept moving, mostly from habit now rather than conscious choice. Cassie picked her way through the chaos of ice, birthed by the storm and the pull of the moon on the tides. The low sun lengthened the mounds and made the spaces between them dark blue and cold. She shivered in the shadows. She could think of nothing but how cold she was. And Bear. Always Bear. Seeing a patch of warmer gold ahead of her, she tried to hurry toward it.
Instantly, her empty stomach cramped. Clutching it, Cassie lost her balance. She fell forward. She tried to catch herself, but she felt as if her arms were moving in slow motion. She collapsed forward before her arms were half-raised.