He revved off across the hard-packed ice, directly into a headwind, as usual. Some days were like that: headwind coming out, headwind going back in, as if they followed him purposely. The winds here defied common sense.
He frowned, thinking of a conversation he’d overheard at base between Angel Smith and Pam, the station’s doc. They’d been discussing love languages or some crap. Apparently, there were people who needed gifts in order to feel wanted, while others sought quality time with their loved one or acts of service. Whatever those were.
Coop craved headwinds and bracing chills the way others did human contact. His love song was the crackling of ice underfoot, staccato and sharp as a snare drum, his language the low, melodious roar of a Condition 1 storm blasting over endless white expanses. He’d take the translucence of blue glacial ice over diamonds any day.
Angel Smith, of course, wantedtouch.
Which he wouldn’t think about. Instead, he focused on the landscape spread before him. He’d heard it described as lunar, empty, or flat, but it was none of those things. This place was as vital and complex as the ocean, its depths as fascinating as the Mariana Trench. He’d never tire of this view.
Thirty minutes into his ride, something flashed to his right.
Blinking through his dark goggles, Coop eased to a stop and stared across the wind-scoured stretch to the east, where Cortez had set up his research site.
Hadn’t Cortez moved his equipment yesterday? With the coming winter, he’d planned to settle a new site closer to the station.
Coop waited for another movement, his sun- and snow-blinded eyes working hard to focus this late in the day. And then, because Cortez was one of the only people whose company Coop actually enjoyed, he veered off in that direction with an internalWhy not?Maybe he had last-minute cleanup to do on the site. In which case, Coop could lend a hand.
Ha!a tiny voice whispered as he cut due east.Anything to avoid her.
He shoved that as far down as it would go. No point in dwelling on the person who turned him—an awkward man at the best of times—into a monosyllabic robot. Angel Smith would be gone by this time tomorrow. Thank God.
Cortez’s site had been right around here. He slowed and swiveled his head a hundred and eighty degrees—noting nothing out of the ordinary.
Wait. There.What was that?
A pennant flag, used by researchers to mark a specific spot or, in some cases, a camp itself, lest a snowstorm cover it up entirely. This one, a reflective silver, was what he’d no doubt spotted. No Cortez, no more research site. Nothing but a lone flag in the middle of the colorless landscape. A glance at the sky confirmed that it was a rare flat white evening—the kind that pilots preferred not to fly in, since there was no way to tell the difference between the ground and the clouds above it. Earth and sky mingled until there was nothing but pale, milky white everywhere.
For one strange, discomposed moment, Coop saw himself, in his red NSF-issued coat, as a solitary drop of blood in the middle of all this vastness. If he wasn’t careful, he’d get soaked up by the ice, by the ground itself. Not eaten so much as absorbed, covered, layered over, forgotten until some enterprising researcher with a drill chose this particular spot to study.
Jesus. Better nip this kind of thinking in the bud. Coop swallowed and shook his head, tried to blink dark spots from his vision. He considered pulling the flag up, and then went very still.
Rather than disappear, one of the dark spots coalesced into a stain on the ice. It didn’t belong there.
Some old instinct kicked in, making him check his surroundings with jittery eyes before getting off the snowmobile and crunching over to look.
About six feet away from the bright red mark, he stopped and stared, unblinking.
Itwasblood. Had to be, or maybe Cortez’s team had used a dye to test something out here and left some of it behind. But that was unlikely, given how obsessive most scientists were about keeping this continent clean. Coop knew for a fact that Cortez wouldn’t contaminate future research by leaving something, even a thimbleful of blood, behind.
Funny how half his mind flew immediately to the new slew of crew members, while the other half fixated on that stain with absolute certainty as to what it was.
Yeah, it was blood all right. And since no flora or fauna lived this far inland, it had to be human.
It was as bright red as his parka, which shouldn’t have surprised him, given the low temperature. Still, he always thought of blood as brown when outside the body for any amount of time. If it weren’t so grisly a sight, it would be pretty, actually. It wasn’t massive—maybe the size of his hand, bright and colorful as a bouquet in this pale place. A sprig of tiny red flowers haloed on one side with the lush, deeper red of velvety roses beyond. Not a huge stain, but enough to make him curious.
In an absurd feat of human self-deception, Coop’s useless sense of smell gave him the sweet, rusty stench of blood, viscous and battlefield fresh. He stumbled back from the shock of hot, dusty, diesel-scented memories he’d never expected to follow him here and did nothing but breathe for close to a minute.
There’d be an explanation for this. All he had to do was return to base and find Cortez. Probably one of his research assistants had cut herself or something and they’d had to rush back without cleaning up the site first.
Right.
And because he’d never been one to accept bullshit—especially his own—he climbed back onto his snowmobile and took off for the station, full of the knowledge that something was very, very wrong.
Chapter 2
Burke-Ruhe Research Station, South Pole
Angel leaned over the bar and grabbed a glass of water. Around her, the Skua’s Nest was raucous, teeming with that last-day-at-camp energy. It was fun.
