Smiling, she repeated the word back to me. My heart fell open. Here was another loanword, an expression from her language that had persisted across all these centuries.
Raj took the drawing and flattened it on the specimen table. “I never would have believed this if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I mean, look at her. She’s shaking less, her color’s better. And her eye… It’s incredible.”
Sigrid slid off my lap, went to the table, and turned her drawing over. Drew two circles. Scribbled over the second one and handed it to me.
I said, “She has two days, maybe just one.”
The walkie-talkie on the table crackled to life. Wyatt’s voice was low and raw. “You need to get your asses back here right now.”
We all looked at one another.
“Fuck him,” Raj said. “Nora and me—we’re going to get cracking on these traps. Figure out how to get them as far down as we can.”
A surge of hope rang through my body as I suited up to head back to the Shack, a sense of being so much less alone, so much closer to understanding how to save Sigrid. I prayed she felt this as well, but all kinds of exhaustion had flooded back into her face, and her hand felt limp and lifeless in mine as we made our way across the ice.
thirty-one
In the spectral gloom of the Arctic twilight, Wyatt sat hunched over his desk, the beam of his headlamp lasering a spotlight into Odin’s dissected body. Paws pinned in four directions on a rubber mat, the mouse lay spread-eagled on his back, his tiny intestines piled in a glossy knot.
I slipped off my parka. Sigrid took one look at Wyatt and the dead mouse and vanished down the hall, slamming the door of my room behind her.
“You let this happen,” Wyatt said, not looking up from his project.
I dropped down on the couch and took off my boots. “She was already at the beach by the time I noticed she was gone—”
“You’re telling me you couldn’t catch up with an eight-year-old?” He spun around; I squinted into the burning light. “Why couldn’t you bring the body back?”
Beyond him, framed by the window, mountainous bergs limned in black shadow loomed in the bay. I pictured the tiny boy, a dash of pink and green floating in an incomprehensible Enormity, under towering ice arches, past bergs shaped like mosques, dragons, monsters, gods.
“It was impossible. She’d already put him on the floe.”
“I see.”
He kept the blinding light in my face until I dropped my gaze down toward the ratty braided rug, rubbing my hands together. Warmth melted into my fingers. “It’s what she wanted to do, Wyatt.”
He turned back to his work. With a needle-nose tweezer, he extruded something gristly from the body cavity, draped it over a slide. “Like that’s some sort of respectful burial. Some polar bear’s having himself a tasty snack right about now, I’ll bet.”
“She did what was traditional in her culture.” My shoulders slumped. Fatigue pummeled me. “I’m going to get some sleep.”
“Where are the lovebirds?”
“They’ve got things to do. What happened to Odin?”
He flipped the light up on his head, rubbed his eyes. “He died last night. Must have happened while we were busy with the boy.”
“He wasn’t looking too well, I noticed.”
Wyatt pulled off his headlamp and tossed it on the desk. “His eye was drooping and he was starting to stumble around, starting to get clumsy. He was just a fucking mouse but he was my pet, too. Loved the little guy.”
What was I supposed to say—sorry for your loss? I gathered myself to leave. In full view were contents of his small refrigerator; slides and test tubes covered every available space. For the first time I noticed the slides weren’t just labeled by content. A few had been turned over, revealing a date scrawled on a piece of masking tape attached to the other side.
The door burst open; Jeanne blustered through. “You ready to head out?”
“Give me a minute,” he said.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Something’s wacko with the weather equipment,” Jeanne said. “We got some real weird readings, these really high temps. I mean crazy high. Then no readings at all.” She poured herself a glass of juice and knocked it back. “I think a bear took it down, but I don’t know. We’ve got to check it out.”
“Yeah, haven’t you noticed?” Wyatt said. “It must be forty degrees out there. And it’s gone up a few degrees just in the past hour. Something screwy is going on.” Quickly he assembled the slides and tubes back into the fridge and began suiting up, signing off in the log with a flourish. “We might be a while. I wouldn’t wait up.”