“Why do you ask?”
Raj peered out at the never-ending storm, the snow so heavy it was like the sky falling to the earth. “So I can steal your fucking ideas.”
Wyatt let the comment slide, as if it were beneath him to react. “I’ve worked with Arctic char, cod, flounder—they can all survive temps below freezing—all kinds of Arctic shellfish, some amphibians, lichens, moss. You know there are lichens that stay frozen for years and thaw out just fine?” Wyatt jumped to his feet and withdrew a glass tray from under a heat lamp. Tiny green shoots poked from what looked like a thin mat of black dirt. “This stuff’s been locked in the ice for hundreds of years. Put it under a heat lamp and bam, it sprouts.”
“Fine, but what’s your process? How do you study the why and how of all this?”
Wyatt considered Raj, said, “I test for cryoproteins, or other cryoprotectants, isolate them, then try them on their own, or combine them in every possible way.”
Raj listlessly tossed the bag of peanuts on Wyatt’s desk. Plopped down on the couch and folded his arms behind his head, glasses flashing in the dim light. “What do you mean, try them?”
“Raj,” Nora said from her sprawled-out position on the rug. “Can you get me some tea?”
“In a minute.”
Wyatt said, “I worked with lemmings at first. Put them on special diets, injected them, froze them, but so far…”
“Just a bunch of dead lemmings?”
Wyatt swirled his can of beer, knocked the rest of it back. “I think I need to be working with larger mammalian subjects. You up for it?”
Raj scoffed, got up and poured himself some wine, Nora her tea, and sat back down next to her. “You’re wasting your time, man.”
“I’m wrong until I’m right.”
“With all due respect, Wyatt, this is crackpot science. There’s no methodology. You know it, and I know it.”
Wyatt crushed the beer can in his hand and tossed it in the trash. “Tell you what I know. Odin exists. Three times in a year he’s thawed alive.”
“Where’d you find him?”
“In the Dome. What difference does it make? Sigrid’s alive. And people all over the world are freezing to death in these ice winds. Five, six, a dozen people at a time, wiped out. And it’s going to get a lot worse. You think knowing what kept Sigrid from dying won’t help the human race?”
“So that’s what you’re doing?”
“Beats making kelp sandwich bags.”
Sigrid turned to Raj from her perch on Wyatt’s desk, a smile dimpling her cheeks. She said, “Seal Man.”
“That’s me, darling,” Raj said to Sigrid with pride. “Seal Man.” He hopped to his feet and went to her as if to give her a hug—it looked like he could have used one—but she withdrew, smile fading, so he only stood awkwardly close to her and took the time to have a good look at her. “You know, she looks a little peaked. She okay, you think? Can we at least try to give her a bath?”
“She won’t do it,” I said. “We heat up the water, but she won’t go near it.”
“So, Raj, you two seem tight,” Wyatt said. “She say anything else to you besides ‘Seal Man’？”
“Oh, for sure. We chat all day long, don’t we, Sigrid? She’s told Seal Man all her secrets, every last one of them.”
“I see.” Wyatt got up, brushing past Raj on his way to the kitchen, where he extracted another beer from the fridge. “Gotta say, she’s not looking a hundred percent to me. You know what I’d like to do? Get a blood sample from her.”
Sigrid drew her circles in the condensation, one after the other in neat rows, before rubbing them away, the wailing wind the only sound in the room.
I thought, It’s impossible to escape this place, no matter how bad this gets…
“Wyatt, no, seriously?” I sat forward, clutching the arm of the couch.
“Bad idea,” Raj said.
“Why would you do that?” Nora pushed herself up to one elbow.
I got to my feet. “Wyatt, come on. You can’t do that to her. You’re just going to ruin any progress I’ve made.”
“Any progress you’ve made?” Wyatt snorted.
I boiled inside but said nothing.
Wyatt kept his eyes on me, said, “Hey, Jeanne, got a second?”
Jeanne set aside some bread dough she’d been working and dutifully came into the living room.