The penguins were already out of view. Lucky them. Striker tried to imagine what it would be like to have a group of besties who were incapable of speech. It probably made climbing a volcano with no discernible knees a lot easier.

  “Yeah, I have plenty of white friends,” she said.

  “Like, too many?” Anders asked. They were almost to the cabin. “Forget it,” they said. “I’m just being dumb.”

  “Forget what?”

  The kid gazed off down the volcano. “Just sometimes I feel like I’m weighing them down. Like, I’ll never get what it’s like to be Black—how could I? So maybe they’d be better off, you know.” The teen stopped and tried to smile.

  Shizer, thought Striker. “Why would your friends be better off without you?”

  They had arrived at the cabin. Anders knocked the snow off the bottom of their feet. “Because how can I ever apologize enough?”

  Striker decided the fastest way to end this conversation was to bunt. “You know what my motto is?” she said. “Cut yourself some slack.”

  The teen sighed. “That’s what my SAT coach always says.” Anders pulled the door open. “Seriously. I will if you will.”

  Good advice is good advice, thought Striker, but as she walked into the cabin, she couldn’t think of a single instance when she herself had taken it.

  On one of the iron bedstands, a lone figure huddled under a blanket. Either that or someone had heaped a pile of junk on the mattress and covered it up with a quilt. Just kidding! She could tell from the lumpy shape it was the Baron. His old-man body rife with ridges and hillocks.

  Two hammocks were gently swaying in the breeze blowing in through the grimy windows. “Guess my mom and Kevin must be napping,” Anders whispered.

  Striker couldn’t blame them. It felt like good sleeping weather. She wondered if the air from the vent was stable. Did it ever fluctuate? Could it unexpectedly shoot up a burst of steam like Old Faithful, a shot of superheated vapor cooking them to death in their hammocks like lobsters in the shell? She unzipped her dry suit and wriggled out of it before peeling off her gloves.

  What the hell?

  The skin of her palm was completely smooth, interrupted only by a long, shiny scar in the center of it, her hand totally healed as if some hungry bird hadn’t slashed it.

  Anders didn’t seem to notice. Maybe the teen didn’t remember Striker complaining about her injury back at the rock pool. Instead, the kid pointed to a series of pots lining the floor by the vent. “The meat’s inedible,” they said, “but the broth ain’t bad, just super salty.”

  Striker walked over and took the lid off one. “Remind me what this is.”

  “I dunno. Maybe seal?” The teen pulled a dark wad out of the broth, popped it in their mouth. “You can totally chew on it,” they said. “Chewing makes you feel full. My mom says you could swallow it if you want to, but it might make your stomach hurt.”

  Striker stared into the pot. Something about the color of the water, the way it absorbed the light, told her it was nothing she wanted any part of. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosey. She fished out a small piece and laid it on her palm. Once on location in Africa, she had eaten all kinds of meat including zebra, even giraffe. How was this any different? She slipped it in her mouth and started to—

  << the unearthly screams of some dying animal fill Striker’s ears. The small ax raining down blow after blow as the creature tries to twist away. All she can see is blood fountaining in the cold. The thing screaming >>

  She swallowed hard. The meat got stuck in her throat, but she swallowed again and the vision disappeared. “Where’d this come from?” she said, putting the lid back on.

  “What do you mean? You guys found it down there. In the grotto.” Anders tossed the journal they’d been reading on a pile of books and picked up another. “You’re not okay,” they whispered.

  I’ve never been okay, Striker thought. “Anything interesting?”

  “Just journals. Logs. Whoever was here kept track of everything.” Anders flashed the book at her, the pages filled with columns and figures. “I can’t tell the exact number, but a lot of people wintered in this spot. And they were here, like, for forever.”

  Striker pictured the icicles she’d seen down in the tunnel. Each one a dark indigo, the color of time.

  “Some of this stuff makes zero sense,” said Anders.

  The teen handed her two journals. She flipped through the first. The script was tight but the language was definitely foreign.

  Agus chaidh an còrr a mharbhadh leis a’ chlaidheamh a tha a’ tighinn amach à beul an fhir a tha na shuidhe air an each. Agus chaidh an eunlaith gu lèir a shàsachadh leis an fheòil aca.

  The second was more unsettling. In the same neat script:

  RÌGH NAN RÌGHREAN AGUS TIGHEARNA NAN TIGHEARNAN.

  RÌGH NAN RÌGHREAN AGUS TIGHEARNA NAN TIGHEARNAN.

  RÌGH NAN RÌGHREAN AGUS TIGHEARNA NAN TIGHEARNAN.

  RÌGH NAN RÌGHREAN AGUS TIGHEARNA NAN TIGHEARNAN.

  RÌGH NAN RÌGHREAN AGUS TIGHEARNA NAN TIGHEARNAN.

  RÌGH NAN RÌGHREAN AGUS TIGHEARNA NAN TIGHEARNAN.

  RÌGH NAN RÌGHREAN AGUS TIGHEARNA NAN TIGHEARNAN.

  RÌGH NAN RÌGHREAN AGUS TIGHEARNA NAN TIGHEARNAN.

  RÌGH NAN RÌGHREAN AGUS TIGHEARNA NAN TIGHEARNAN.

  RÌGH NAN RÌGHREAN AGUS TIGHEARNA NAN TIGHEARNAN.

  RÌGH NAN RÌGHREAN AGUS TIGHEARNA NAN TIGHEARNAN.

  RÌGH NAN RÌGHREAN AGUS TIGHEARNA NAN TIGHEARNAN.

  RÌGH NAN RÌGHREAN AGUS TIGHEARNA NAN TIGHEARNAN.

  It went on and on, page after page filled with the same one line.

  Striker gave the book back. “Guess somebody had a lot of time on their hands.”

  “I think some weird stuff went on down here,” the teen said. “You see that creepy mask?” They pointed to the basket where Bobbi Sue had tossed it.

  “It was probably just for sun protection,” said Striker.

  “Someone wrote in his journal that there was a religious nut among the crew,” Anders said. “Supposedly the guy wore it as some kind of penance. You ask me, it’s very Hawthorne-esque.”

  Striker didn’t bite. “Live and let live.”

  It probably wasn’t the response the kid had been hoping for, but they shrugged and moved on. “Tell me when you’re ready to go,” they said.

  “Ready to go where?”

  “I’m not dumb,” said the teen.

  “Keep your voice down,” said Striker. “I never said you were.”

  “You think someone’s in trouble.”

  “Someone’s always in trouble. I’ll be in trouble if you come.”

  “What if you need help?”

  “What would your mom say?”

  “Long as we aren’t headed down the hole, it’s cool,” said the teen. “Plus my mom’s harmless. My dad was the one—”

  Striker could feel the sudden sadness well up in the teen. It was a small room. They were practically crawling over each other. It wasn’t hard to sense. She felt the teen push the emotion down and stamp on it like putting out the last embers of a fire.

  Anders went over to the shelves and dug through a basket. They found what they were looking for and handed it to Striker.

  “It’s what the early explorers wore. You can still read the Burberry label,” they said. “It’s made out of canvas. You gotta wear it over other clothes to stay warm, but it’ll be easier to move around in than the dry suit.”

  Striker slipped the Burberry on over her fleece. It was filthy, smudged with countless hundred-year-old stains. The air outside was heating up, a Christmas miracle. She could probably do without it, but better safe than sorry.

  “I’m serious, you’re not coming.”

  Anders ignored her as they continued getting ready. They slipped a hand into the dry bag attached to the low-riding hammock where Kevin was sleeping, the bottom of it practically skimming the floor, and pulled out the stainless steel knife. “Think we’ll need this?” they whispered.

  Striker noticed another bag locked to the empty bedstand with a bungee cable. God, Kevin was such a freak. Either that, or he really had something in there he didn’t want folks to know about.

  “At the very least, leave a note,” she said, not answering the teen’s question. “This place have any hundred-year-old pens lying around?”

  “Plenty but the ink’s dried up,” said Anders. They tore a piece of paper out of one of the logbooks. “Don’t worry, we also got pencils.” They scribbled something down and left it on the table, then kept the scrap from blowing around with a rock.

  Striker glanced at the note.

  Gone fishing.

  The kid wasn’t wrong. In a place like this, who knew what they might catch?

  Then she noticed the rock Anders had used for a paperweight. The rock an unearthly blue-red color that seemed to glow. She knew if she flipped it over, she’d find the eerie carving on the other side, the lines measured and exact in a way that made her shiver.

  On her way out the door, Striker could feel her heart beating in her palm even though her hand was completely healed. Unlike St. Teresa, her flesh had been pierced by a winged creature but the wound hadn’t brought her heart any peace. No transverberation in sight. Just an endless, unmoving wall of time and no sign of the Yegorov.

  The hatch lay gaping open on the snow. To Striker it looked like a beam of light was shooting straight up out of the hole. Maybe it’s some kind of beacon, she thought. It reminded her of one of those klieg lights you sometimes see at a car dealership, the lights flashing up into the sky to attract buyers. If it was a beacon, it wasn’t meant to summon anyone she knew.

  She reached down to close it up, then thought better of touching it. “Could you gimme a hand with this?”

  “How do we know Jane and Vadim aren’t down there?” asked Anders.

  “Doing what?” She pictured her night with Percy in the dark of the sauna.

  “I dunno. Scavenging around for more stuff?”

  “I thought you said they went back to the boats.”

  “I did, but I don’t know that for a fact,” said the teen.

  God, these people! It was like herding cats. She could hear Taylor the Tech Titan in her helium voice prattling on about cooperation. Chick hadn’t been wrong. If you wanted to survive, you had to be willing to lean on people. Thing is, there had to be people worth leaning on.

  “Get a load of that.” Anders nodded at the cabin’s roof.

  Striker looked up. Jesus. How many scavengers fit on the roof of your only shelter waiting for you to die? Judging from the look of things, it was probably the same answer as the number of angels that fit on the head of a pin.

  Infinite.

  The roof was carpeted with birds. You couldn’t see the wood, the whole roof rippling with wings. Everywhere scavengers of various sizes and colors sat roosting.

  “Dark, huh?” said Anders.

  Fear purred up Striker’s spine. Didn’t these beasties know there was a whole colony full of fat, juicy, defenseless penguin chicks just down the road? It wasn’t the sight of hundreds of scavengers massed in one place that set her on edge. It was their otherworldly patience. Some of them groomed their feathers, others raked their talons on the wood, the birds collectively twisting their heads anytime she or Anders did anything of interest. It reminded Striker of Lucy. The little girl with the stony face taking in whatever you’d done without comment or concern. Yeah, the silence was the worst part. When the universe watches without uttering a single word, you can feel your own self-judgement rising. Nothing it says could ever be as damning as what you yourself already think.

  A bird fluttered down off the roof and landed on the hatch. The red hole where one of its eyes should be was puckered tight like a sphincter.

  “Let’s go,” said Striker.

  “Just a sec.” Anders rushed back into the hut and reappeared with a pair of walking sticks. They passed one to her.

  What did the Irish call them?

  A shillelagh. She hefted it in her hand. She could feel where the wood thinned from being held. The sticks had probably come from across the sea, maybe from some county in Ireland. She was glad to have it. Once on location in Dublin, she had learned from a costumer that a shillelagh was both a cane and a weapon. She ran her thumb along a dent deep in—

  << Striker is stealing through the dark. The cairns towering all around her in various states of construction. She moves soundlessly, the howling wind masking the noise of her legs plowing through the waist-deep snow. A crescent moon hangs just above the horizon, the moon’s yellow light reflecting off every surface. It comes to her that this could be midday, 12:14 p.m., that this is what noon looks like in deepest winter. The cold in her lungs is like nothing she has ever felt, the edges of a million knives stabbing her every breath. Something clings to her face like a second skin, frost forming around the eye and nose slits. Both her own true beard and the ginger beard of her second face softly tinkle as she moves, hair matted with ice. She turns in the direction of the wind and spits, releasing the pus that collects on her tongue as she can never shake the terrible taste of her own teeth slowly rotting in her mouth.

  Someone is whispering.

  “Please sir,” says a hoarse voice. “Wouldn’t it be more fitting if we just interred him in the chamber?”

  Striker tests the weight of the shillelagh in her hand. Up ahead a hooded figure stands alone beside the tallest cairn as he looks out to sea. “Sayin’s 21:15,” she quietly tells her companion. “Whaen justice is done, lad, it brings bonnie joy tae the righteous.”

  “But he’s the captain,” murmurs the hoarse voice.

  “Bide quiet noo an’ watch while God is served.”

  Suddenly Striker rushes out of the shadows. In the final moment her victim turns. Hurriedly he searches the mask before finding her true eye hidden in the leather. “May whatever devil you serve have mercy on your soul,” the man proclaims as she swings the walking stick through the dark and cracks it into the side of his >>

  Striker pointed the shillelagh at the one-eyed bird.

  “Bang,” she whispered.

  The bird stayed put, but on the roof the mass of its compatriots took off into the air, a great cloud of feathers shrieking uncontrollably. The downdraft from their wings like standing under a helicopter.

  “I dunno,” shouted Anders over the noise, “but maybe let’s try not to piss ’em off.”

  “You think this is some normal everyday island?” yelled Striker. “You think those are regular-ass birds?”

  When Anders didn’t answer, Striker couldn’t tell if it was because of the storm of wings or because she hadn’t asked the question. Actually, it wasn’t important what this kid thought. She knew the score.

  They decided to walk down the volcano in the opposite direction from the beach. It was a gentler walk, the slope more gradual. This was the side of the island that took the wind. The landscape was less rocky. The remaining snow had been blown into exposed crevices, much of it melted. Everywhere the ground was shrouded with a shimmering mist. The island lay under a blanket of smoke, the unseasonable heat causing what snow there was to sublimate, move from a solid to a gas without ever becoming water. It was beautiful. The air not exactly foggy but shimmering.

  “Is this where your noise is coming from?” asked Anders.

  “Yeah,” Striker lied. How else to explain it? The crying goes with me, kid. Wherever I go, it goes. And sometimes, if I’m really unlucky, it brings bad things with it.

  Like last Christmas.

  The four of them were skating at Rockefeller Center. Her and Riley and Riley’s then boyfriend Dante and the dentist Striker was pretending she was serious with. The Christmas tree twinkling bright. The past few years her anti-migraine meds had been working wonders. Before them, the holidays had been a season when time itself became unstable, the days around her birthday ragged with holes where her mind went blank, Dark Striker walking the earth for hours. Afterward, Striker trying to piece together what had happened while the lights were out.

  When the organ music started up at Rockefeller Center, Striker didn’t flinch. That time of year there was an actual calliope up on street level, the instrument on wheels like the kind drawn by horses in the circus, its brass pipes tooting some Christmas song, the steam shooting up into the air.

  It was late, almost midnight, people starting to pack it in. Striker was flying over the ice. The dentist reached for her. He was clumsy on skates, jerking himself around the rink as he tried to stay upright and not appear silly. Striker heard the first notes of “Silent Night” hissing from the dark pipes of the calliope. Suddenly the night winnowed itself down to a windowless room. The smell of rot coated her skin. The sound of heavy feet clomping overhead. Her throat swelling as if she were falling into shock.

  Even now Striker shudders when she thinks of the little girl out on the ice with her parents. All night she had skated past her, each time the child smiling, the epitome of merry and bright with her long blond pigtails, her blue eyes. Then that dreadful song, the breathy notes of the calliope, and the next time Striker passed the child, she was every little girl from Zinnia Trace, the whole damn town, the one at the pool asking why she was dirty, and before she knew it the child was falling (or did Striker push her?), her small bright face smashing the ice, blood from her nose and lips, and here is what Striker pieced together later, that she looped back around and skated straight for her (“I was headed back to try to help, officer”), the child crying, Dark Striker’s blades like knives, Dark Striker managing to turn at the last moment but not enough, never enough, skating over the little girl’s right hand, three fingers left severed on the—