“Hannah, that’s fantastic.”
It is. AMASE is the shit, and the selection process to take part in an expedition was brutal, to the point that I’m not quite sure how I made it in. Probably sheer luck: Dr. Merel, one of the expedition leaders, was looking for someone with experience in gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. Which I happen to have, due to some side projects my Ph.D. advisor foisted upon me. At the time, I aggressively bitched and moaned my way through them. In hindsight, I feel a bit guilty.
“Have you been there?” I ask Ian, even though I already know the answer, because he mentioned AMASE when we met. Plus, I’ve seen his CV, and some pictures from past expeditions. In one, taken over the summer of 2019, he’s wearing a dark thermal shirt and kneeling in front of a rover, squinting at its robotic arm. There is a young, pretty woman standing right behind him, elbows propped on his shoulders, smiling in the direction of the camera.
I’ve thought about that picture more than just a couple of times. Imagined Ian asking the woman to dinner. Wondered if, unlike me, she was able to say yes.
“I’ve been there twice, winter and summer. Both great. Winter was considerably more miserable, but—” He stops. “Wait, isn’t the next expedition leaving . . .”
“In three days. For five months.” I watch him nod and digest the information. He still looks happy for me, but it’s a little . . . subdued. A split second of disappointment, maybe? “What?” I ask.
“Nothing.” He shakes his head. “It would have been nice to catch up.”
“We still can,” I say, maybe a bit too fast. “I’m not leaving till Thursday. Want to go out and—”
“Not get dinner, surely?” His smile is teasing. “I remember you don’t . . . eat with other people.”
“Right.” The truth is that things have changed. Not that I now go out for dates—I very much still don’t. And not that I’ve magically become an emotionally available person—I’m still very much not. But somewhere in the last couple of years, the whole Tinder game got . . . first a bit old; then a bit tiresome; then, eventually, a bit lonely. These days, I either focus on work or on Mara and Sadie. “I do drink coffee, though,” I say on impulse. Even though I find coffee disgusting.
“Iced tea,” Ian says, somehow remembering my four-year-old order. “I can’t, though.”
My heart sinks. “You can’t?” Is he seeing someone? Not interested? “It doesn’t have to—” be a date, I hasten to say, but we’re interrupted.
“Ian, you’re here.” The HR rep who’s been showing the new hires around appears at his side. “Thank you for making time— I know you need to be at JPL by tonight. Everyone.” She claps her hands. “Please, take a seat. Ian Floyd, the current chief of engineering on the Mars Exploration Program, is going to tell you about some of NASA’s ongoing projects.”
Oh. Oh.
Ian and I exchange one long glance. For just a moment, he looks like he wants to tell me one last thing. But the HR rep leads him to the head of the conference table, and there’s either not enough time or it’s not something that’s important enough to be said.
Half a minute later, I sit and listen to his clear, calm voice as he talks about the many projects he’s overseeing, heart tight and heavy in my chest for reasons I cannot figure out.
Twenty minutes later, I lock eyes with him for the last time just as someone knocks to remind him that his plane will board in less than two hours.
And a little over six months later, when I finally meet him again, I hate him.
I hate him, I hate him, I hate him, and I don’t hesitate to let him know.
Five
Svalbard Islands, Norway
Present
The next time my satphone vibrates, the winds have picked up even more. It’s snowing, too. I’ve somehow managed to nestle myself in a small nook in the wall of my crevasse, but large flurries are starting to happily stick to the mini-rover I brought with me.
Which is, I must admit, ironic in a cosmic kind of way. The very reason I ventured out here was to test how the mini-rover I designed would work in highly stressful, low-sunlight, low-command-input situations. Of course, it was not supposed to storm. I was going to drop off the gear and then immediately return to headquarters, which . . . well. It didn’t quite work out like that, obviously.
But the gear is being covered by a layer of snow. And the sun is going to set soon. The mini-rover is in a highly stressful, low-sunlight, low-command-input situation, and from a scientific standpoint, this mission wasn’t a total clusterfuck. At some point in the next few days, someone at AMASE （likely Dr. Merel, that asshole） will try to activate it, and then we’ll know whether my work was actually solid. Well, they will know. By then, I’ll probably just be a Popsicle with a very pissed-off expression, like Jack Torrance at the end of The Shining.
“Are you still doing okay?”
Ian’s voice jostles me from my preapocalyptic whining. My heart flutters like a hummingbird—a sickly, freezing one who forgot to migrate south with her buddies. I don’t bother answering, instead instantly ask: “Why are you here?” I know I sound like an ungrateful bitch, and while I’ve never concerned myself with coming across as the latter, I do not mean to be the former. The problem is his presence makes no damn sense. I’ve had twenty minutes to think about it, and it just doesn’t. And if this is the place and time where I finally croak . . . well, I don’t want to die confused.
“Just out on a promenade.” He sounds a little out of breath, which means that the climb must have been a tough one. Ian is lots of things, but out of shape is not one of them. “Taking in the scenery. What about you? What brings you here?”
“I’m serious. Why are you in Norway?”
“You know”—the sound briefly cuts, then bounces back with a generous helping of white noise—“not everyone vacations in South Padre. Some of us enjoy cooler destinations.” The huffing and puffing through the tenuous satellite line is almost . . . intimate. We’re exposed to the same elements, on the same heavily glaciated terrain, while the rest of the world has taken shelter. We’re out here, alone.
And it doesn’t make any sense.
“When did you fly into Svalbard?” It couldn’t have been any time in the last three days, because there were no incoming fights. Svalbard is well connected to Oslo and Troms? in the peak season, but that won’t start until mid-March.
So . . . Ian must have been here for a handful of days. But why? He is chief of engineering on several rover projects, and the Serendipity team is approaching crunch time. It makes no sense for one of their key personnel to be in another country right now. Plus, the engineering component of this AMASE is minimal. Only Dr. Merel and me, really. All other members are geologists and astrobiologists, and—
Why the hell is Ian here? Why the hell would NASA send a senior engineer on a rescue mission that wasn’t even supposed to happen?
“Are you still doing okay?” he asks again. When I don’t reply, he continues: “I’m close. A few minutes away.”
I brush snowflakes from my eyelashes. “When did AMASE change its mind on sending relief efforts?”