Borealis Read Online Free Page B

as he stepped one foot up onto the narrow railing. As the hydraulic arm positioned itself at the proper angle, it began to raise Charlie up off the railing. Mike’s fingers trailed down the length of Charlie’s left leg while Joe took a step back, feeding the cable out over the side of the boat.
    â€œKeep steady,” Mike called up to him. “Try not to swing.”
    Thankfully, there was very little wind. Still, Charlie could feel the cold air seeping into every open pocket; he tried to hug himself against the chill, his teeth already beginning to rattle in his skull, as the hydro arm rotated out over the water. He looked down and saw his mirrored self in the glassy surface of the night waters. The hydro arm began to hiss as it extended itself out over the water and toward the floating island of ice. He could smell the gears burning. It seemed to go impossibly slow.
    On deck, Mike raced back up to the control booth and manually swiveled the spotlight toward Charlie, catching him suspended in midair like a yoyo having run out of string. Slowly Charlie rotated in the beam of light, shielding his eyes with one gloved hand as he wheeled around to face the spotlight.
    The arm jerked to a stop, causing Charlie to swing gently from side to side: a hypnotist’s watch on a chain. “What happened?” he yelled. His eyes, which had been trained on the slight, pale form of the young woman sprawled on the ice, turned now to Sammy and Bryan back on deck. “The hell’s going on?”
    â€œIt’s fully extended!” Bryan called back, his hands cupped around his mouth.
    Charlie looked down. The ice below was thin and gray, sloping gradually up toward the snowcapped mounds of ice that made up the first ridge of the massive floe. The boat, he knew, would be unable to get any closer.
    He called back to Bryan, “Lower the arm!”
    Bryan was clearly shaking his head. “No way! Ice is too thin! You’ll go right through!”
    â€œIt’ll hold!” he shouted back. Glancing down a second time, however, he had serious doubts…
    â€œBullshit!” Bryan returned. “We’ll try to get closer!”
    â€œImpossible,” he called back. Mike was outside on the deck now, shaking his head as well. “Just lower me down.” Charlie added, “Slowly.”
    Bryan and Sammy exchanged a look. A second later, the gears above Charlie’s head once again started to whir. He felt himself slowly descending, keeping his eyes locked on his all-weather boots. Water dripped from his boots and struck the ice below as frozen pellets. In his head, he was already doing the math: he was a two hundred twenty-nine– pound man with approximately forty pounds of gear on; below, the tongue of ice was maybe four inches thick…if he was lucky. He could have taken one of the grappling hooks, prodded the ice to test its strength, but he didn’t want to make his fear a reality as the ice broke apart under the weight of the hook. He would just go ahead and do it the same way he’d done everything else in his thirty-nine years, including his relationship with Johanna all those years ago: he’d simply close his eyes and take a single step toward the abyss.
    In fact, he realized his eyes were closed as he felt the world come up to meet the soles of his boots. He opened his eyes just as the hydraulic arm wheezed to a stop. He was standing perilously on the narrow peninsula of ice, conscious of the distribution of his weight equally between both feet. Above his head, the cable slid from the runner and spooled down around his feet. Back on the boat, Joe continued feeding slack.
    Holding his breath, he took one step up the incline. Solid. He took another step—and a distant breaking sound echoed back to his ears, hardly perceptible yet as loud as the rumbling of a cement truck at the same time, causing him to freeze. He sucked cold air through his teeth. There was a