The Sign

faster than forecasts had predicted. Even the data we have from last year is now considered too optimistic. In terms of disaster scenarios due to climate change, Antarctica was considered a sleeping giant. Well, the giant’s now awake. And, by the looks of it, he’s really grumpy.”

Roxberry quipped, “I’m trying real hard to avoid saying this could just be the tip of the iceberg—”

“A wise choice, Jack,” she interjected. She could just picture the smug, self-satisfied grin lighting up his perma-tanned face and groaned inwardly at the thought. “A grateful audience salutes you.”

“But that’s what we’re talking about here, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely. Once these glaciers slide into the sea, it’ll be too late to do anything about it, and . . .”

Her voice suddenly trailed off and dried up, as something distracted her: a ripple of sudden commotion, shrieks and gasps of shock and outstretched arms pointing out at the ice shelf. The words still caught in her throat as she saw Dalton’s head rise from behind the viewfinder of the camera and look beyond her. Gracie spun around, facing away from the camera. And that’s when she saw it.

In the sky. A couple of hundred feet above the collapsing ice shelf.

A bright, shimmering sphere of light.

It just appeared there, and wasn’t moving.

Gracie concentrated her gaze on it and inched over to the railing. She didn’t understand what she was looking at, but whatever it was, she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

The object—no, she wasn’t even sure it was an object. It had a spherical shape, but somehow, it didn’t seem . . . physical. It had an ethereal lightness to it, as if the air itself was glowing. And its brightness wasn’t uniform. It was more subtle, graded, intense at its core then gradually thinning out, as in a close-up of an eye. It had an unstable, fragile quality to it. Like melting ice, or, rather, just water, suspended in midair and lit up, if that were possible, only Gracie knew it wasn’t.

She darted a look at Dalton, who was angling the camera toward the sighting. “Are you getting this?” she blurted.

“Yeah, but,” he shot back, looking over at her, his face scrunched up in sheer confusion, “what the hell is it?”

Chapter 2

Gracie’s eyes were locked onto it. It was just there, suspended in the pallid sky over the edge of the ice shelf. Mesmerizing in an otherworldly, surreal way.

“What is that?” Finch asked. His hands went up to his glasses, fidgeting slightly with their position, as if it would help clarify things.

“I don’t know.” A surge of adrenaline spiked through her as she struggled to process what she was seeing. A quick, almost instinctive trawl through the possibilities of what it could be didn’t get any hits.

This was unlike anything she was even vaguely familiar with.

She glanced across at the knot of scientists crowding the railings. They were talking and gesticulating excitedly, trying to make sense of it too.

“Gracie? What is that behind you?” Roxberry’s voice came booming back through her earpiece.

For a second, she’d forgotten this was going out live. “You’re seeing this?”

A couple of seconds for her question and his reply to bounce off a satellite or two, then he came back. “It’s not perfectly clear, but yeah, we’re getting it—what is it?”

She composed herself and faced the camera squarely, trying to keep any quiver out of her voice. “I don’t know, Jack. It just suddenly appeared. It seems to be some kind of corona, a halo of some sort . . . Hang on.”

She looked around, scanning the sky, checking to see if anything else was around, noting the sun’s veiled position, unconsciously logging her surroundings. Nothing had changed. Nothing else was out there apart from their ship and the . . . what was it? She couldn’t even think of an appropriate name for it. It was still shimmering brightly, half-transparent, its texture reminding her of a gargantuan, deep-sea jellyfish, floating in midair. And it seemed to be rotating, ever so slowly, giving it a real sense of depth.

And, oddly, she thought, a sense of being somehow . . . alive.

She stared at it, resisting all kinds of competing, outlandish thoughts, and focused her mind on getting a handle on its size. As big as a large hot air balloon, she first thought, then adjusted her thinking upward. Bigger. Maybe as big as a fireball in a fireworks display. It was huge. It was hard to judge without a point of reference for scale. She ran a visual comparison to the height of the cliff face below, which she knew to be roughly a hundred and fifty feet tall. It seemed to be around the same size, maybe a hundred and fifty feet in diameter, maybe more.

Dalton looked up from behind the camera and asked, “You think it’s some freaky aurora borealis thing?”

She’d been thinking the same thing, wondering if it was a trick of the light, an illusion caused by a reflection off the ice. In Antarctica, the sun never set during the austral summer. It just circled around at the horizon, a little higher during the “day,” a little lower—almost a sunset—during the “night.” It had taken some getting used to and it played tricks on you, but somehow Gracie didn’t think it explained what she was seeing. The sighting seemed more substantial than that.

“Maybe,” she replied, almost to herself, lost in her thoughts, “but I don’t think it’s the time of year for them . . . and I’m pretty sure they only appear when it’s dark.”

“Gracie?” Roxberry again, waiting for an answer. Reminding her that she was going out live.

To a world audience.

Christ almighty.

She tried to relax and put on a genial smile for the camera, despite the tiny alarms buzzing through her. “This is just . . . It’s pretty amazing, Jack. I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe someone else on this ship knows what it is, we’ve got quite a few experts on board.”

Dalton lifted his tripod and tracked along with Gracie as she edged over to the scientists and crew members on deck with her, keeping the apparition in frame.

The others were discussing it in excited, heated tones, but something about their body language worried Gracie. If it was a rare, but natural, phenomenon, they’d be reacting differently. Somehow, she got the impression that they weren’t comfortable with what they were seeing. Not just uncomfortable, but . . . rattled.

They don’t know what it is.

One of them, who’d been watching it through binoculars, turned and met her gaze. He was an older man, a paleoclimatologist she’d met on arrival named Jeb Simmons. She read the same confusion, the same unease, on his face that had to be radiating from hers. It only confirmed her feeling.

She was about to speak up when another wave of gasps broke out across the deck. She turned in time to see the shimmering shape suddenly pulse, brightening up to a blazing radiance for a heartbeat before dimming back to its original pearlescent glare.

Gracie glanced at Simmons as Roxberry’s excited voice crackled back. “Did it just flare up?”

She knew the image on the screen he was looking at would be grainy, maybe even a bit jumpy. The live video uplink back to the studio was always compromised, nowhere near as clear as the original, high-definition footage on Dalton’s cameras.

“Jack, I don’t know how clearly it’s coming through to you, but from out here, I can tell you, it’s not like anything I’ve seen before.” She tried hard to hang onto her unflustered expression, but her heart was racing now. This didn’t feel right.

She suddenly remembered something, and turned to Finch and Dalton. “How quickly can you get the bird up?”

Finch nodded and turned to Dalton. “Let’s do it.”

“We’re sending the skycam up for a closer look,” Gracie confirmed into her mike, then turned to Simmons, breathless, and clicked her mike off. “Tell me you know what this is,” she said with a tense smile.

Simmons shook his head. “I wish I could. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“You’ve been here before, right?”

“Oh yes. This is my fourth winter out here.”

“And your specialty’s paleoclimatology, right?”