“Take care of yourself,” she said, hugging Bernie carefully around her pregnant belly. “I’ll be back in a few days. If the baby moose decides to come early, reserve my godmother rights.”
Bernie hugged her back. “We wouldn’t want anyone else.”
Inga climbed down the old wooden steps to the beach. The Dingboat was moored to one of the pilings where it could rise and fall with the changing of the tide. Right now the tide was low, so she walked to it across the fishy-smelling rocky beach, strewn with seaweed and other beachwrack.
Out on the bay, a handful of seal heads bobbed. Inga smiled and waved, although she didn’t think they saw her. That would be the Westerly family. The entire town were used to seeing them there, although only the shifters of the town and those inon the shifter secret were aware that it was anything other than a family of seals who liked to play in the horseshoe-shaped bay and sun themselves on the rocks across from the town.
Inga climbed into the skiff. It was about as rudimentary as this kind of vessel got, a beat-up metal boat long enough for two crosswise bench seats and an outboard motor at the back. She stowed her pack next to the cooler, which was lashed down in case of waves, and tucked the backpack under a strap. There were life vests stowed next to it, along with other emergency supplies. As she had told Tor, Inga felt no concern. She had never feared the water. She had been swimming as both a polar bear cub and a human since she was old enough to dog paddle.
She untied the heavy, damp rope and tossed it into the bottom of the boat, then pushed off with a hand on the piling it had been tied to. The boat floated free with the next rolling back of the waves. Inga started the motor with a pull on the cord. Someone must have tuned up the engine lately, probably Dad, because it started on the first try and ran like a dream.
With an expert hand on the tiller, she arrowed across the bay, past the shifter seals, who splashed their flippers and rolled on their backs to wave at her. Inga waved back, and then she was past them and out into the open water.
Now that she was clear of the bay, she could see the storm that Tor had mentioned, a dark blue line of clouds barely visible on the distant horizon. It was always difficult to say for sure what such storms might do, so she decided not to worry about it yet; with these clear skies, she would have plenty of warning before it hit the coast.
The boat rocked on long, regular swells of the deep blue-gray water. Large chunks of ice bobbed past her, remnants of the great polar ice sheet to the north that was breaking up around its edges in the spring thaw and drifting south.
Inga deftly avoided them and turned the bow of the boat north.
LUKE
Another dayon the ice floe.
Dear diary: extremely sick of fish.
Luke dragged a large fish out on the ice with his massive polar bear jaws. He was getting very good at catching them, leaning into his bear instincts, which somehow, against all odds, he seemed to have. At first he had worried about catching so many fish he would affect the local supply, but as it turned out, the ocean was (like the old saying) full of fish. A fishing fleet might impact their numbers, but not a single polar bear.
He was starting to have a bigger concern, which was that as winter turned to spring, the ocean was getting warmer, and the ice floe was slowly but steadily disintegrating around him.
.... Well, okay, he had a lot of concerns. That was only one of them. But it was going to become his biggest problem if the ice floe melted before he got close enough to land to swim for it.
Luke dropped the fish and held it down with one massive paw. The ice floe stretched in front of him, a long expanse of white-blue, seemingly solid but, as he knew all too well, riddled with crevasses and cracks. There was no sign of his companion. Luke growled, then let out a loud cough, a sort of lowWhoof!He had a limited number of vocalizations that he could make asa bear. This particular sound was the loudest one other than his roar, and carried the best. When no answer came immediately, hewhoofedagain with more force behind it.
Rogue’s head popped up out of a nearby crack in the ice, floppy ears perked.
Luke grunted in relief. Recognizing that food was available, Rogue wriggled his large, black-furred body out of the crevasse.
The dog was simply bored. Luke related to that, but it wasn’t as if an iceberg offered ample enrichment activities. There wasn’t anywhere to go other than jumping into the water—which Rogue did on a regular basis. Like all dogs of his breed, a Newfoundland or something like it, he was covered in thick fur and as home in the water as on the land.
Rogue swished his plumy tail and stared hopefully at the fish. At leastoneof them wasn’t completely sick of fish. Luke crunched their lunch in half and nudged the head end towards his companion.
He had worried at first about Rogue eating fish bones. For that matter, he’d worried abouthimselfeating fish bones. But it seemed that wild animals—which both of them were right now, more or less—could handle it just fine.
He had no idea how he would have made it without Rogue. Physically, he could have survived by himself; Rogue, as a dog, wasn’t contributing a whole lot to their general preparedness plan. But mentally, he found that he needed someone to take care of, a companion to make him feel as if he wasn’t the only living thing in this vast, empty ice-and-water world.
Rogue settled down to eating. Suddenly he raised his head, ears pricking forward and then flattening. He let out a deep-voiced bark.
At the same time, that strange, half-sleeping presence within Luke’s brain stirred.Danger, it said.
Luke tried, as usual, to ignore it, but he swiveled his shaggy head in the direction the dog was looking and sniffed the air. He didn’t smell anything strange, but over the sounds of the ice floe, the soft slapping of waves and the nearly silent whisper of ice through water, he detected a faint thrumming.
A helicopter?
The dog barked again. He was standing, but his ears remained low, his tail down. This was not a dog in eager expectation of rescue.
Luke wished it was possible to ask what Rogue knew that he didn’t. He had long suspected that Rogue was much more than an ordinary dog. They had escaped together from the research facility where they were both held, and while he didn’t know what exactly had been done to Rogue, he knew that the dog was as altered as Luke himself.
But while Rogue couldn’t speak in words, any more than Luke could as a bear, the dog was still capable of communicating just fine. With tail down and ears flattened, Rogue moved closer to Luke as the sound of the helicopter grew louder.
