tangible waves. It was only when she lay absolutely still that she realized how cold she had been.
She was too tired to figure everything out. Her back was aching, and all her muscles were sore. She had been traveling for God knows how many days, and she only wanted to rest.
She went to sleep on the couch and did not wake up until deep into the next day. Her first thought when she woke was that the members of the party must have left on some sort of scouting expedition. The emperor penguins whose migratory habits they were studying were supposed to begin tending their eggs at this time of year, weren't they? So maybe the team had set out to observe them, making camp on the other side of the mountains.
But she couldn't imagine they would leave the station entirely untended.
Maybe, then, they had been evacuated. Maybe there had been some sort of emergency and they had been lifted out over the ocean, all twenty of them, leaving their equipment behind so they could return for it later.
She sat down at the radio thinking that she might get in touch with Coca-Cola and then with someone who could tell her what had happened to the station's inhabitants, but when she tried to tune the headphones in, they greeted her with a mixture of shrill, discordant tones that cut through her head like a metal rod. The sound made her skull ache. The other frequencies she dialed were no better: all either perfectly silent or filled with the same terrible banshee's wail as the first. She tried to establish a web connection on one of the station's computers, but without luck. Then she found a satellite phone on a stack of books next to the transceiver. Though she didn't see how the thing could work so far away from a relay tower, she punched in the number for the Atlanta office anyway. To her surprise, following a few seconds of soft clicking and humming, the connection went through.
But the corporation's voice mail system must have been out of order.
The phone rang and rang. She counted the seconds off tick by tick, measuring them by the clock above the computer. After five minutes, she hung up.
When she dialed the number again the next day, she heard only an airy rattling noise that seemed to breathe and then suddenly fade away, muffled by the distance the way that bombs detonating on the surface of the earth must sound from the upper reaches of the atmosphere.
The station was fully outfitted, so there was no need for her to unpack the sledge. She found soap and shampoo in the shower, aspirin in the medicine cabinet, and a box of hundreds of red and yellow toothbrushes in clear plastic sleeves beside the bathroom sink. The food locker was filled with vegetables and cuts of meat stacked on top of one another in wrappings of crisp white butcher paper, and the pantry was stocked with several dozen cases of Coca-Cola and bottled water. She would stick to the water. She hadn't really been able to enjoy a Coke in years. It was that old adage about mixing business with pleasure: her days were somewhere between sixty and seventy percent Coca-Cola already, and she refused to give any more of herself over to the stuff.
At first she expected the station's team of scientists and technicians to come walking through the door at any second, shucking their coats and gloves, banging the snow from their boots in a parade of kicking and stamping. She had expected Puckett and Joyce to return to the shelter on the far side of the mountains in exactly the same way. But as the days passed and no one arrived, she grew accustomed to the station's capaciousness and silence. Sooner or later, she was sure, someone would come back for the equipment and find her there. Until then, she was content to wait.
She tinkered every so often with the radio or the computer or the telephone, tapping and dialing, listening for a human voice, but she never managed to reach anyone she could talk to. That was all right. Here at the station, after so many weeks on the ice, her solitude didn't seem to matter so much. For now, it was enough that she had a real bed, a warm room, and a diet free from jerky and granola.
There were still a few hours of indirect sunlight in the middle of the day, a single thin sheet of it straitened over the horizon. That was when she liked to go outside. The kliegs had been fitted with hoods so that they would direct most of their light to the ground, and her view of the sky was remarkably clear. It was a washed-out blue with wide streaks of red and orange in it, and there was a small peppering of stars there, so hot that they shone right through the atmosphere. Sometimes she could even see the trails of the satellites making their transit over the gap in the ozone layer. She would wait for the sun to vanish and for the rest of the stars to come out, and then she would go back inside.
It was during one of these outings that she decided to explore the terrain around the station. The wind was blowing so hard that her scarf flapped around her like a pennant, and she had to use a hiking stick to keep her balance among the drifts. The ground leveled out as soon as she reached the back of the building. She turned the corner and paused to catch her breath. That was when she found the bulges in the snow. They were packed hard, like outcroppings of stone. She climbed on top of one, looking out over the shelf toward the ocean. She could see a broken line of water in the distance, a trail of black dots and dashes at the very edge of the ice. It was like a message tapped out in Morse code. Certain patches of ice had been buffed to a mirrorlike polish by the wind, and they shone with the same red-veined blue as the sky. When the sun fell and the ice lost its color, she hopped down from the bulge and continued her journey around the building.
She was always shivering by the time she got back inside, which was curious to her. She had shivered so rarely on her trek across the ice field, and surely she had been much colder then than she was now. Maybe her body only shivered when she could anticipate being warm again: she knew there was a heated room waiting for her on the other side of the station door, and shivering was simply her body's way of reacting to that knowledge. Under such circumstances, it could even be considered a sign of hope. That was her theory, anyway. When she was trying to make her way through the blizzard, she had not exactly lost hope, but she had certainly not allowed herself to anticipate being warm again, and so her body had settled peacefully into its coldness, like a coin sinking to the bottom of a fountain, dropped by a little girl in a red cotton jumper who was only trying to make a wish.
She had been at the station for almost a week when she found the sheet of paper tucked under her mattress, a single folded leaf from a yellow legal pad. She opened and read it. It was a list, handwritten, of the twenty members of the emperor penguin party. There were notes scribbled in different shades of ink beside their names:
~ at least three a day
~ one in the morning, with breakfast, without fail
~ sporadically: 'one every couple of days or so'
~ in the afternoon during radio sessions
~ at lunch – usually dinner, too
~ hates it, but might have a bit when there's nothing else around
~ no more than one or two a week
It looked as though the notes had something to do with the party's dining habits, but beyond that, Laura had little idea what they could mean.
In the printing margin on the left side of the page was a column of red X's, twelve of them, one beside each of twelve names. A thirteenth X had been partially completed, with one leg drawn and an apostrophe-shaped accent at the top that must have been the beginning of a second. The rest of the names were unmarked.
There was something about those X's. Laura stared at them, clenching her teeth in concentration. What could they mean? They reminded her of the crossbones that are supposed to be printed beneath the skulls on bottles of poison, or the sharpened tines on strands of barbed wire, or the vacant marks that cartoonists draw over the eyes of the dead. She was feeling sick to her stomach, though she didn't know why.
She ran her finger down the column and felt the impressions that the pen had bitten into the paper. It was at that moment, as she looked at the X's written alongside the list of twenty names, that she first began to suspect that something terrible had happened to them. And it was a short leap from there to her realization that the bulges behind the station were graves. X's. Exes. Excess. Wisdom.
She put on her boots and the rest of her winter gear and made the hike to the back side of the station. She had to see the bulges again. She had to look at them with her own two eyes now that she had guessed what they were. Sure enough, they were exactly the right size, just long enough and just wide enough to cover a human body. For the first time, she counted them to see how many of them there were. Then she counted a second time to make sure. There were twenty graves. She touched each one with her hand before she went back inside.
She examined the note again and set it on the stand beside the bed, weighing it down with a coffee mug so
