“What do you want?” she whispered.

  “Same as you,” rasped the painfully hoarse voice of the haggard young man she’d encountered in the window. “To be counted among the forgiven.”

  She didn’t wait to hear more. She ran out the door and kept running, intending to run all the way back to the beach, but her foot caught on something and she fell, landing on what she knew was anything but solid earth.

  Striker sat in the snow on her haunches waiting for her head to clear. Thanks to the flight down from JFK, it had been more than twenty-four hours since she’d taken her meds. The little yellow pills were supposed to keep the blood vessels in her head from constricting. The pills weren’t a cure-all but they seemed to help. On them she experienced fewer blackouts. Her doctor had said the same medication was also prescribed off-label for depression and other darker conditions. When Striker mentioned it to Riley, she’d felt a shiver ripple up her spine. “He wasn’t talking about me,” she’d explained. “Just that it has dual uses.” Her friend had remained uncharacteristically quiet, not even so much as nodding.

  Striker scanned the area where she’d fallen. She was less than twenty feet from the cabin. In the distance the cairns stood on the lip of the crater staring out over the world. She poked around under the snow, probing for what had tripped her up. From the sound it made she knew she’d landed on wood, maybe even a box of some sort buried in the earth. She just hoped it wasn’t a casket. Please god, not another body.

  The snow moved easily. It was wood all right. Her hand cleared a spot. Startled, she sank back on her knees. It was all she could see, the thing a cancer filling her vision.

  What do you want from me, she thought. She looked up at the sky. Patiently the day stared back. Your move, it seemed to be saying. She was tired of it always being her move. When would it be somebody else’s? She exhaled and got back to work.

  The door had obviously been sawed in half, the bottom edge splintery and unsanded, leaving it looking more like a hatch. It was fairly simple in design. Six rough-hewn slats nailed together. A small porthole sat at what had probably been eye level back when it was full-sized. The glass now blackened as if smoked and heavily scratched.

  The symbol was centered above the porthole. It had been gouged in the wood, presumably with an awl as the lines were thicker than a knife would have made. She thought of the Israelites marking their lintels with blood as a sign for the Angel of Death to pass them over. What could this be signaling?

  Striker knocked just under the porthole, two long taps then two short. Instantly she felt stupid. Who did she think was going to answer? But the ground underneath the hatch boomed in response, proving it wasn’t just a long-forgotten door left lying out in the cold. The earth below it was empty. It was a door that led somewhere.

  It occurred to her she should wait for the group. What had she told the Dame about sticking together? Still, there could be something useful buried right there below her feet. Maps, clothing, a radio, food. Or something small and shiny she could tuck in her pocket just in case someone began to change. Just look at Kevin. They had only been without civilization for a few hours and already the guy’s wife was dead.

  Now that she’d cleared the hatch, she could see that her foot had snagged on a piece of rope. She picked it up and had barely started pulling when it disintegrated in her hands. “Plan B,” she said. She bent down to try the brass handle directly, the metal green and flaking, but the handle—

  << Striker is standing in icy water up to her ankles as she pounds on the door. In a flash the water is up to her knees. Trash floating in it. Foodstuffs. A dead rat. The water now waist-high. Her hammering becomes more desperate. Please, somebody let me out. Fingernails clawing at the porthole. The room almost completely flooded. At the ceiling less than a foot of air. Her ears popping in the silence as if she’s buried under a hundred feet of water. Lungs burning with the cold of a >>

  Striker let go of the handle. All around her the earth lay glittering, every object bright with death. She stood up and wiped her brow. “I shouldn’t be doing this,” she said.

  “Are you kidding?” she countered. “It could be a storage space full of goodies.” A few hundred feet away something caught her eye.

  A being in yellow was standing in the shadow of the mama cairn. The figure watching her. Even from far away, she could see a gray lump sitting on the figure’s shoulder. Both the figure and the gray lump stony and mute like the landscape. Striker closed her eyes and counted to ten. When she looked again she was all alone on the side of a volcano.

  She took a deep breath, grabbed the handle, and pulled, only this time she let go almost immediately. For an instant she felt herself floating weightlessly in a room flooded with frigid water, but just as quickly the door lay open at her feet, the strange hieroglyphic face down in the snow.

  She was standing over a hole, the kind fishermen cut in frozen lakes. The hole barely bigger than a person.

  “Too bad,” said Striker, peering into the earth. “I need a light.”

  “No you don’t,” she said. “There’s more than enough.”

  It was true. The hole was filled with the same flickering radiance that churned up from the vent in the hut. There was an inviting quality to it. She sat down on the edge and let her legs dangle in the brilliance.

  You really gonna do this?

  During childhood, the best part of climbing a tree had been jumping out of it. Just keep moving, she told herself. Nothing can catch up with you if you do. She leaned forward and let gravity do the rest.

  The drop was more than six feet but the impact didn’t hurt her ankles. As in the cabin, it felt like plunging into a roomful of people, the air dense with presence, the sensation that you weren’t alone. She remembered a dog an old boyfriend had rescued from a shelter, how the dog would never step foot in the man’s living room. Then one day when chatting with a neighbor, the man had learned that not one but two previous renters had shot themselves in the head while watching TV. Ever since then, Striker had always deferred to her sixth sense. But despite what her gut was telling her, she didn’t go scrambling back up aboveground.

  “They must have been stuck down here for forever,” she said loudly as she surveyed the space.

  “Yeah, in winter, the cabin probably got awfully small awfully fast.”

  “Totally,” she concurred. “Idle hands.” She realized she was yelling.

  She was standing in a small grotto, the cavern carved in ice and heaped floor to ceiling with trash. Broken crates, chairs, cast-off clothes, things that looked vaguely like S&M harnesses but had probably been used to haul heavy sleds. A wasteland of personal effects. She began to pick her way through. Cracked eyeglasses, single gloves, boots, a sailor’s footlocker with someone’s name still stamped on the wood. And everywhere protruding in the icy floor was a sea of white lumps. They looked like the beginnings of stalagmites only they had no counterpoints hanging from the ceiling. Striker had to work to keep from stumbling on them. She wondered at the manpower necessary to dig such a space, the grotto a little more than five by ten, the room barely tall enough to stand in.

  She could hear something humming like a distant air conditioner. It was probably just that seashell effect again, trapped air circulating in an audible fashion. Or maybe she was hearing the life force of the volcano, hundreds of feet away its heated gases churning.

  A set of wooden shelves sparkled with glass jars, a pantheon of inscrutable objects housed within. She could tell the jars had once been labeled but the writing had faded. The place would’ve made a stunning white elephant room at a county fair. It was easy to imagine. Step right up and pick a jar, any jar, the barker would chant. Open it up and scare yourself silly.

  In the corner closest to the trapdoor, four leathery shapes sat stacked like firewood on wobbly andirons, each the size of a large dog. Underneath the stack an oily puddle stained the ice. Striker took a deep breath and poked one of the leathery sacks with her finger. The thing was springy to the touch. She poked it again only harder. A thick yellow ooze leaked out.

  It was a seal carcass.

  She could barely wrap her head around it. The carcasses were more than a hundred years old, yet the fat was still leaching out of them, a century’s worth of oil falling drop by drop. What would happen if someone were to thaw them out and throw them on the barbie? Would the meat become edible?

  Her eyes landed on a depression in the ice. The hollow was only a few feet long but perfectly smooth as if something had melted there, the resulting trough blood-red in color. And lying in the middle of it was a misshapen disc like a loaf of bread that had never risen, the object dark and scabrous. Lovely, Striker thought. This hollow was probably the spot where the explorers had butchered animals. The oddity was likely part of a carcass the men had attempted to cure, overly salting it into a revolting mess.

  Sickened, she turned toward the entrance and was about to head back up when she noticed it leaning against the far wall. She was surprised by its dimensions. The painting came up to her chin and was a few feet across, its simple frame cobbled together from old boards. The artist had probably used the canvas from the ship’s sails. It wasn’t like the men had needed it anymore.

  Striker studied the scene. As many as forty men stood in front of a ship with its mast splintered like a compound fracture. The ship sat imprisoned in the ice, its decks visibly listing at 50o. You could tell the vessel was on the verge of being crushed. Pieces of ice had already burst through several of the windows. It made for an eerie tableau—the skies a creamy blue, the scene without shadows. Surprisingly the men looked upbeat, faces beaming like they were at the start of a great adventure. A few hoisted their arms in the air as if to say huzzah! Cheeks rosy with sun and cold.

  He was standing in the back, his presence easy enough to spot as he towered over the rest. Striker’s eye fell on him. When she’d gripped the ax and seen the cabin from another’s perspective, she had felt herself to be the tallest person in the room, the others barely coming up to her shoulder.

  At first she attributed the barrenness of the man’s features to the painter’s lack of skill. Then she realized he was wearing a mask, his face hidden behind a sheath of leather. He was too far away to see much else, the leather a smooth blank. The most reasonable explanation was that he was simply shielding his face from the wind. Even so, just gazing at him made her shudder.

  Striker held out her hand. A soft breeze was blowing through the canvas. It was the source of the sound like a white noise machine. She gripped the painting’s frame and pulled. It slid easily. She kept pulling, inching it out of the way, until she uncovered what she was looking for. I knew it, she thought, as it eased into view.

  A tunnel gleamed in the icy wall.

  Just out of curiosity she got down on her hands and knees and poked her head in. The ice was bright, the air pristine. To go forward she would have to crawl. All that talk about the fear of peering under the bed felt like lifetimes ago. She ran a finger around the entrance, felt

  what in the holy hell? She was hunched over in a long white tunnel, body surrounded by ice. A vein throbbed in the side of her head. The air smelled of feces. This is not happening. It was probably the single worst place in the entire world for Dark Striker to make an appearance. She had no memory of crawling in and no idea how far in she had crawled. Her shoulders brushed the ceiling. The feeling of dividing by zero began to engulf her, heart on the edge of igniting. She heard the first faint notes of music. The fine hairs on her arms stood up like hackles.

  Something else was down there. Something corporeal. She could sense it. Ages ago what had that little towheaded kid from Texas called them?

  Shoggoths. Shape-shifters.

  God. Why didn’t I listen to him?

  The tunnel began to narrow. Squeezing her. She imagined it caving in.

  All the body’s phobias hit her at once. Fear of caskets, fear of closets, fear of airplane cabins, fear of being trapped in an elevator for untold hours, fear of being a hundred feet underwater.

  She knew if she could turn around she would see a being emerging from the brightness, the smell of blood flooding the space. It would take a small eternity but eventually a head would appear. When enough of it had been extruded, the thing would grab her foot and pull her toward it.

  “Percy?” she whispered.

  If she were lucky, it might be harmless like an insect trapped in amber. If she were unlucky, it was a presence hibernating at the bottom of the world until disturbed. If she were damned, the thing would rip her from the pleasant dream she had spent her whole life cocooning herself in, every one of her personal beliefs shredded in an instant.

  What if you just stopped pretending?

  A hand wormed up through the ice. It wrapped its tiny fingers around her

  back aboveground and running down the volcano. The vein in the side of her head once again throbbing, a tiny supernova in the chaos. Striker didn’t question Dark Striker’s timing, Dark Striker leading her into the tunnel and then just as suddenly pulling her the hell out. It just felt good to be out in the open. She was beginning to realize it was true. What Ama used to say.

  Being awake is overrated.

  She was coming around the last bend. The whole way down she hadn’t stopped running. She could already hear the commotion among the normal sounds of the island. Up ahead, a dark mound was writhing on the beach. Instantly she felt sick.

  A small towel lay nearby. Someone must have left it covering what had once been his face before they went gallivanting off to wherever it was they’d gone. It wasn’t enough. Not even close. Just a token of decorum. This place would not react well to half-hearted measures.

  Striker couldn’t tell his head from his feet. Couldn’t see his body. She knew it was in there somewhere under the thrashing cloud. A human being left out in the Antarctic elements. Exposed. What were they thinking? She began swinging her arms, wildly punching the air. She could see hints of yellow. Mostly she saw blood.

  The birds were surprisingly stubborn. Why shouldn’t they be? The only law they recognized was the law of the jungle. Animal law. Finders keepers.

  “Get out of here!” she yelled.

  Even over the roar of a thousand furious wings, she could hear someone kicking their way into the scrum, punting birds off the body. Striker felt one slash her palm. The pain strangely familiar. She punched harder. Where did she begin, where did she end? There was only this angry throng of energy. It was a dance. She kept fighting, driving the skua up into the sky, letting herself be carried by the moment.

  Finally the birds were gone. The skua had retreated into the rocks on the edge of the rookery. She could see hundreds of scavengers perched on the hillside. Hooked beaks thirsting for an opening.

  Striker approached Alexei’s ruined face with the towel. She did her best not to look. Just rise up out of your body. Don’t be present. Lay the shabby towel over what may or may not be the remains of a man. A thousand distant eyes are watching. At your feet may be a human body slashed to the bone by talons evolved over thousands of years to tear apart raw flesh. But if you don’t actually look, there may be no body at all.

  “Lord have mercy,” someone said. That same someone was crying. “We can’t treat each other like this, we just can’t.”

  Striker was too tired to figure out who was weeping.

  It was only after she had repelled the birds that she noticed the pile of small, light-colored stones standing out against the darkness of the sand. It wasn’t a coincidence in the rocks. It was an arrow pointing to the far end of the beach.

  “After you,” said Striker. She headed toward where it was aiming.

  An elephant seal watched her pass. She was surprised by the wiriness of the hair sparsely riddling its body. The creature was nonplused by the mauling that had taken place only a few feet away. It seemed like the right attitude.

  At the end of the shore was another arrow.

  “What is this?” she said. “A scavenger hunt?” She followed the arrow’s direction, the land growing rocky and then curving out of sight. She didn’t have far to walk.

  They were still wearing their dry suits. She could see them at a few hundred feet. Each one a floating yolk. It was some kind of thermal spring. A rock pool slightly bigger than a hot tub. There were similar formations spanning the archipelago, the islands volcanic and rocky. Underwater vents scattered throughout the landscape. Striker remembered seeing photos of smiling passengers in the Yegorov’s brochure. Tourists in bikinis and swim trunks like they were anywhere but Antarctica.

  “Come on in, the water’s lovely,” called the Baron.

  “You guys left Alexei lying on the beach,” she said. She could feel her voice growing shrill. There was that word again, but thanks to Kevin, she knew it wasn’t always gendered. Her hand was throbbing where the skua had slashed her. She glanced at it. Through her glove the gash was deeper than she’d realized. The fabric sopping wet. The pain still eerily familiar, the wound as if ancient of days. From between some rocks she scooped up what snow she could and squeezed. Pink water dribbled out between her fingers. “Do you know where we are?” she said. “This isn’t Club Med. The skua ate his eyes. His eyes. You hear me?” She tried to collect herself but she couldn’t not see it. The hot mass writhing ecstatically, orgiastic. Small, hot bodies following their deepest hungers, their insatiable drives. “They ate his whole goddam face!”

  The winds had picked up. She didn’t know if anyone had heard a single thing she’d said. Her words floating uselessly back into land. The only sound the rush of the waves, the music of the ocean lapping the rocks. An organ playing in the distance without affect or melody.