Ice Read Online Free Page B

hood up over two wool hats—almost ready. She felt as if her insides were shouting, Hurry, hurry!
     
    “That plane guy, Max, said you were going to undergrad.”
     
    “Max talks too much,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.” She Velcroed the throat gusset of her hood shut and then fetched her emergency kit. The small pack held a flashlight, her ice axe, extra flannels, and a few food rations. With this, she could search the pack ice for several days, if that’s what it would take.
     
     
    “Just because this is all you know, it doesn’t mean this is all there is,” he said. “Don’t you want a normal life? You’ve never lived outside this station. You’ve been homeschooled your entire life.
    Don’t you want to get out there, meet kids your age, do what normal people do?” She loved the ice. She loved tracking bears. “This is home,” she said shortly.
     
    “I thought this would be my home. Coming here was my dream, you know, for years. But now . . .
    Hey, whatever, dreams change. Nothing wrong with that. I’m applying for a nice, cozy postdoc back at UCLA.”
     
    “Good for you,” she said. Her dreams weren’t changing. Nothing and no one—Dad, Gram, Max—
    could force her to leave her life here. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said as she opened the inner door and shut it behind her.
     
    For a brief second, she debated staying inside and trying to talk sense into Dad and Gram, but words had failed to convince them before. No, she thought, if I don’t act now, I’ll be on a plane to Fairbanks in three hours. she couldn’t let that happen. She opened the outer door and stepped out into the Arctic.
     
    Cold seared into her, slicing her, and her face mask instantly frosted. She took a deep breath of night air. It felt brittle and sharp in her throat, as if the air were filled with shards of glass. This was exactly what she needed to clear her mind. The piercingly cold air soothed her, as it always did.
     
    Standing within the station floodlights, she faced out toward the blue darkness. Silence surrounded her. “Polar Bear King!” she shouted into the silence. “I’m coming to find you! Do you hear me?” She waited for a moment, listening. Snow drifted over her feet. Rubbing frost from her goggles, she scanned the darkened ice fields. Wind blew surface snow over the moonlit snowbanks and ridges.
    Blue shadows oscillated over the ice.
     
    Cassie shook herself. She hadn’t honestly expected the so-called Polar Bear King to answer, had she?
    That was crazy. Kinnaq, she remembered—that was the Inupiaq word for lunatic.
     
     
    Just because she had let her overtiredness make her (for an instant) want to believe in a magical polar bear, that did not mean she was snow-crazed. Just because she’d wanted Gram’s story to be real and her mother to be alive, it didn’t make her crazy. She’d find that bear and prove to Gram, Dad, and herself that he was ordinary. Cassie marched toward the shed with the snowmobiles—
     
    —and a shadow rose over her.
     
    Towering over her, the bear was immense. He blotted out the stars. In the station light his fur was luminescent, his silhouette glowing as if he were some Inuit spirit-god, Mashkuapeu himself.
    Suddenly, the Arctic didn’t feel big enough. It collapsed down to just her and the polar bear.
     
    He opened his jaws, and she glimpsed white canines and a black tongue. A massive paw came down toward her, and she dodged. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a glint drop from the polar bear’s claws. As the glint hit the snow, the bear twisted, dropped to four paws, and retreated to the edge of the station floodlights.
     
    Cassie looked down at her feet, at the snow where the bear had stood. Dusting snow blew into the concave curves of his tracks. In the curve of a paw-print lay a silver needle with an orange tail, the tranquilizer dart.
    THREE
     
    Latitude 70° 49’ 23” N
     
    Longitude 152° 29’ 25” W
     
    Altitude 10