Outside the sky glimmered bright as noon. The teen marched the captive out to the hatch gaping wide in the snow.

  “Now get in,” Anders commanded. The little black hole shook in their fist.

  “At least give him his jacket, Anna,” said Bobbi Sue.

  “Why bother?” said Kevin. “It’s like frigging spring out here.”

  “Down there is not up here,” the Dame pointed out.

  “Extreme cold is exactly what the doctor ordered for a case of criminal randyness,” said the Baron in ecstasy.

  All the same Bobbi Sue disappeared inside the hut and came back out with Vadim’s things, shoving them in his arms.

  “Not ship, not submarine, not killer whale,” explained Vadim as he calmly suited up. He took a deep breath. To Striker, he seemed to grow ten feet with every inhalation. “Face it. Was bomb,” he said. “Nuclear bomb.” Behind him the sky shone bloodless and pale, the sun without heat or color, a titanium star stuck a few degrees past noon. “Yegorov, gone, beloved North America, gone.” He finished zipping up his parka. “I am strongest man left on earth. When you need me—”

  He put his hat on at a rakish angle and disappeared into the hole. Striker had to admit the guy had a flair for drama.

  If they hadn’t already been standing around outside, they might have missed the tiny white triangle floating on the blue.

  “Talk about a Christmas miracle,” said la Grande Dame.

  “I prefer deus ex machina,” said the Baron.

  “Shut up, Robert,” said the Dame, but there was a discernible note of relief in her voice.

  Kevin seemed weirdly glum. “I suppose we could borrow their radio,” he said.

  “They might even be happy to anchor in our little bay until help arrives,” said the Baron. Already there was a little more color in his old-man face though it might have come from throwing the Russian in the hole.

  “Vadim could paddle that in under fifteen minutes,” said the Dame.

  “Agreed,” murmured Bobbi Sue. “He’s the only one fast enough to catch up with it.”

  “We just sent the guy six feet under with extreme prejudice,” said Kevin. “You wanna be the one to go ask him to bail our asses out?”

  Details, details.

  The general consensus was that the boat was some kind of high-end sailboat, not exactly a yacht but close. The Baron went one step further, pulling out his maritime bona fides and spraying them all with his seafaring wisdom.

  “You ask me, that beauty rides like a vintage Hallberg-Rassy ninety-eight-footer. The Swedes know how to build ’em,” he said. “Those things practically sail themselves.”

  “I thought you were from Omaha,” said Kevin. “Now you’re a seaman?”

  “What, a man can’t travel?” the Baron retorted.

  “You’re not at the helm,” said Bobbi Sue. “How can you tell how it rides?” Somehow all this talk of boats was bringing her back to life.

  “If you’d ever piloted a Hallberg-Rassy, you’d know,” said the Baron, the condescension coloring his voice.

  “We live within hours of some of the best sailing in the US,” said Anders. “Michigan and Superior. My mom and dad sail a Hanse forty-two-footer out of Sturgeon Bay in Door County, the Cape Cod of the Midwest.”

  “No disrespect, young ’un,” said the Baron, winding back for the pitch, “but the Great Lakes are a bathtub compared to the Pacific.”

  Bobbi Sue ignored the comment. “All I know is that boat’s closer to sixty,” she said, “and you’d be crazy to come down here in a vintage sloop with no autopilot. Yeah, you could have a Hallberg retrofitted to make the journey, but folks who own the vintage boats aren’t the kind who like to modernize.”

  All Striker wanted was a lounge chair with deep cushions, a nice cold mai tai, and to sit back and enjoy the view. Nobody had remarked on the beauty of the day. Was it possible the others couldn’t see it, the whole lot of them stumbling around with scales on their eyes? Everywhere the terrain glimmered as if frosted with a pearliness. The boat floating easily on azure waves.

  The group was going nowhere fast as they continued to bicker. Bobbi Sue Sarah, goddammit! Her name’s Sarah shook her head and headed into the hut. She reappeared with a bowl of jerky she’d been soaking. “Pemmican?” she said, offering the group sludgy bits of cardboard. The chick’s hostessing skills were nonpareil.

  “What about the extra eggs?” asked the Dame. Striker took it as a good sign the old girl was hungry. The appearance of the sailboat was having a positive impact on all of them. Like Kevin’s high-tech x-acto knife, the Dame’s humanity was inching out bit by bit.

  “We should ration them for later,” said Sarah.

  “Later?” scoffed the Baron. “Later we’ll be eating the other white meat.”

  “Pork?” asked Bobbi, er, Sarah.

  “No, people,” said Kevin under his breath. Too bad for him but in such pristine air, sound traveled freely. His words came out loud and clear as if he were speaking directly into their heads. Great! The guy who’d packed a loaded gun for a simple kayak outing had cannibalism on his mind.

  The other white guy realized his mistake. “I meant the other other white meat,” the Baron said. “Poultry.” He squeezed his wife by the shoulder. “We have opposable thumbs. I say we use them.” To demonstrate, he made a pistol with his fingers, shooting Anders in the face.

  “Guys,” said Kevin. “Our boat’s on the move.”

  Shizer! They didn’t have much time.

  “How many miles we think that is?” Sarah asked.

  Striker took another peek through the binoculars. She was pretty good at this sort of thing. Often she needed to be able to judge distances for a principal cinematographer. She had come of age before all the laser tapes and digital gizmos. On set, she’d often wow people with her accuracy. She was usually right within a tenth of a mile.

  “Not quite three miles,” she said. “2.8.” The Dame looked at her approvingly and nodded.

  “What are we gonna do once we get there?” asked Anders.

  “Asking for help is the easy part,” said Kevin. “We gotta get there first.”

  It came on abruptly. The group was standing in a spot that hadn’t hosted human habitation in a good hundred years, and suddenly it smelled like a city dump. Striker wondered how long it would take for whatever bad mojo was gunning for them to arrive.

  “I’ll go with Vadim in one of the tandems,” she said.

  “What if he tries to manhandle you?” asked the Dame. There was genuine concern in her voice.

  “The guy wants to get rescued as bad as the rest of us.”

  “What about what he said?” asked Sarah.

  “You mean that the Ruskies dropped the big one?” said the Baron.

  “If it happened, I don’t think you can drop just one,” mused Sarah.

  “Like potato chips,” said Kevin. Nobody laughed. “Sarah’s right,” he said. “All that stuff’s run by algorithms. One drops, they all drop.”

  “Can we just focus on this?” asked the Dame.

  For the first time since Percy’s death, Striker could hear a faint whisper of panic in la Grande Dame’s voice. Our girl’s name is Jane. A light sweat glistened on the older woman’s upper lip. Jane, thought Striker. The name made her seem vulnerable. Had she always presented that way, her caustic demeanor masking an obvious brittleness that Striker had used as an excuse to cast her in the one-note role of villain?

  “Vadim was about to get dropped in a hole by a kid,” she said. “The guy was bluffing.” She did her best to look like she believed it, but all you had to do was open your eyes. Everywhere the colors seemed off. Fiery but with a hint of something else, maybe something atomic? And what was going on with the temperature? It was growing warm enough that soon they’d find themselves wishing Kevin had packed a deodorant stick in one of his dry bags.

  “Fine,” said the Baron. “Let’s dig the bastard up.”

  He spit out the pemmican he’d been chewing on. Striker couldn’t say why but she buried it in the melting snow with her foot.

  They circled up around the hatch.

  “Vadim?” called Striker. “You down there?”

  No response.

  “Poor baby’s hiding,” said the Baron.

  Striker knew she was the only one with a shot of getting this done. Vadim would throttle the Baron if given the chance, same for the old girl. He also wouldn’t be overly keen on having a heart-to-heart with either the teen who’d held a gun on him or the teen’s mom. Kevin might have been his heavy-metal bro, but Kevin was weak and a loose cannon. They couldn’t risk Vadim talking the guy into some crazy plan, like shooting all of them in the head and then feasting on their flesh until spring, when they would sail out into the watery blue yonder and take over the globe, a Golden Horde of two, the last real men on the planet.

  “Okay, lemme go talk to him.” For the third time in forever, she sat down on the lip of the hole. It’s all in my mind, she consoled herself. There’s nothing down there but a Russian and a stack of frozen seals. Despite what her watch said, it was probably officially Christmas, the day her sister had died in juvie twenty-five years ago. As she slid down into the light, she could hear voices talking aboveground.

  “Should we have given her a weapon?”

  “Too late now” was the last thing she heard.

  Striker surveyed the grotto. The air smelled musty and close. The only light was the thin shaft trickling down from the opening. Standing in the gloom she knew there was no tunnel. This space had never been crazy bright like an operating room. Somewhere she had read that for a tree to touch heaven, its roots must first reach down to hell. That’s all this icy cavern under the scarred wooden door ever was. A hell of the mind. A place to frighten yourself silly with shadows and possibilities and regrets. A hall of mirrors reflecting your inner life back to you.

  “Vadim?” she called. “Can we talk?”

  Great. The guy was hiding somewhere behind a mountain of garbage, whimpering about being the strongest man on earth yet stuck down here with the trash.

  Striker began to pick her way through the heaps of refuse. In spots the junk scraped the ceiling. Uneven shelves, foodstuffs hardened into unrecognizable shapes, cracked lanterns, century-old down pillows now calcified stiff, a pianoforte with half its keyboard missing. The floor was still studded with icy knobs. Striker noticed part of a toothbrush poking up out of the white. If a man got scurvy and lost his teeth, he probably didn’t have much use for it.

  It was her craving for a mai tai that spurred her on. The sailboat will be fully stocked, she told herself. They’re on an around-the-world voyage. They’ll have it all. Expensive rum, little colorful umbrellas. Ice, real ice, cubes of it, not the towering blue stuff that seemed to stalk you wherever you went.

  “Vadim?” she called out again.

  An old fear colored her breathing. But I’m not alone, she told herself. Vadim’s floating around here somewhere. Still, another part of her couldn’t keep from picturing a larger presence nearby that dwarfed the both of them. The thing waiting for her to come sniffing around a corner and walk straight into its web of decay and madness.

  She found him behind a pyramid of splintered tables. He was lying in the red hollow melted in the floor. Nearby the hundred-year-old placenta lay tossed on a broken chair. It was the spot where some poor woman had birthed her lover’s baby just feet from a cabinful of starving men. The woman’s scalp laced with cuts from shaving her head, voice hoarse as she tried to pass herself off as one of them.

  Striker’s first thought was that he was dead. Dead dead. Vadim’s pallor ghoulish, skin mottled like an old bruise. Just to be sure, she prodded him with her foot.

  He opened his salt-white eyes and grabbed her ankle.

  She spun around and took off running.

  Head-on she smacked into a pile of crates. It toppled over. A broken violin fell out, smashing with a discordant clang on the ice. Where was the entrance? How had this tiny room suddenly become so big?

  Figures she’d never seen before began to emerge on every surface. In the walls, on the ceiling, in the floor. Images like looking in an icy mirror. Everywhere she turned gaunt and hollow-eyed men glared from the shadows of their ragged anoraks. Beards straggly, faces burned by cold. Their numbers seemed to multiply. Two of the men waved shillelaghs. Several were missing limbs. One man looked to be missing both arms. The man snarling at her intently.

  She watched as the tallest man in the group began punching his way through the ice. Cold chips shot through the air. The man’s face was sheathed in leather, two yellow fangs slick with spit. She could practically smell his rancid breath. The figure wasn’t using his fists to break through. He was wielding an ax, his face a void. Expressionless.

  Striker knew she was running in circles. She would never get away. The sound of her panic bounced off the walls. Turning corner after countless corner. She could hear the ice splintering. Everywhere the sound like glass breaking.

  She rounded yet another corner and saw the worst face yet. The shriek on the face like death itself. Mouth a black hole of despair. Eyes colorless. Lips shrunken, black twists clinging lifelessly to the patchy scalp.

  A hand landed on her shoulder.

  “You came for me?”

  She had no choice but to turn and face it.

  “You need me,” sighed Vadim. He seemed tired but otherwise healthy, all his impishness drained away. “Why, I not know, but okay.” Striker realized they were standing below the entrance. He leaned over and intertwined his fingers. “You think this maybe heaven?” he asked. He spoke while working something out in his mind. “I think yes,” he said. “We are dead. We just need to believe we are. Then comes big peace.”

  She stepped into the web of his hands, felt the thrust as he boosted her back up among the living.

  And so she was out on the Southern Ocean paddling hard toward a mai tai, the possibility of a few ounces of smooth Jamaican rum all the motivation she needed even if her hands wouldn’t stop cramping.

  Before she set out from the beach, Jane had awkwardly approached her. The penguins scurried about like small black-and-white traffic cones, but the old woman navigated her way through. At first, Striker didn’t know what she wanted. She took a step back as Jane entered her personal space. The old woman held out her arms. Oh, Striker thought. Half-heartedly she let herself be embraced.

  “Good luck,” Jane whispered in her ear. “You can do this.”

  “Thanks, Jane,” Striker said. She realized it was the first time she’d said her name.

  The sailboat was growing closer though there were moments she had her doubts. It was hard to tell how long they’d been chasing it. Like the sun, the few existing shadows seemed stuck in place. If the boat slipped away, Striker knew the group would only have the long, slow trek into hunger and madness to look forward to, that plus whatever else those two ingredients cooked up.

  Out on the ocean with no sense of time, she felt herself grow wistful. Ama used to lie in bed on nights with a full moon and talk about traveling to the great white hole in the sky, babbling on about how long it would take to get there and what the sisters would find once they did. “Ice cream,” she’d say. “That’s why it’s so cold.” Having snuck out of her own room, Striker would bed down with her sister and listen to her sugary dreams, the two of them safe and happy on their own planet. “We can do it,” Ama would say, pointing out the window, the gap between her teeth somehow twinkling in the dark. “We just need a way up into the sky.” At her sister’s nudging, Striker would sit up on her elbows and peer out into the night. “See?” her sister would say, pointing off in the distance at Our Lady of the Annunciation with the copper cross like a sentinel keeping watch over the sleeping town. “It’s the same distance as the church.” And each time as Ama predicted, there was the full moon drifting just above the steeple, the moon and the copper cross within inches of grazing each other.

  Now Striker had found it. The way up into the sky. Everywhere the water like velvet stretching to the horizon, the Southern Ocean a giant infinity pool. From her kayak there was no difference between the sea and the cosmos. If she paddled hard enough, she could slip the bonds of earth and launch herself into the heavens.

  She was surprised Vadim wasn’t much further ahead. Possibly he was growing weak from the lack of food. Or maybe she herself was getting stronger. Every few minutes Vadim would turn and call over his shoulder. Push! And she would dig deep, lengthen her stroke, unsure of where her inner reserves were coming from, wondering how they’d make it back to the island or if it was an open secret that they were never meant to. Like Robert Scott and his men pushing on to the Pole knowing full well all was lost, that Amundsen and his dogs had already been there and back. Scott’s team trudging on in agony through the unforgiving whiteness, skin blackened as though charred by fire. The way the objective changes when you realize there’s no returning. The journey becomes its own reward.

  She and Kevin were trailing in a second tandem but still close enough to hear Vadim’s exhortations. Though the sailboat was their goal, she was discovering she didn’t need a mai tai to see this through. With each stroke, she could feel herself winnowing down, every unimportant thing falling away, her mind quieting, body jazzed like she could paddle all the way to New York and back. Admittedly it was a little uncanny. She’d never felt so alive, as if the kayaking group had just pushed off from the Yegorov only minutes before.

  Up ahead, Vadim paddled languidly over the ocean. “Big push,” he called.

  The air felt fresh on her skin, the universe vast and shining and intimate. He didn’t need to tell her to push. She was already halfway to the moon.