The Arctic Code (20 page)

More than anyone or anything Eleanor had ever encountered, Kixi did not belong. She shouldn't be here. None of this should be here. And when Skinner and his scientists found what they were looking
for down here, what then? She didn't know what the G.E.T. would do with the Concentrator once they found it, but felt she could safely assume it would mean the end of Kixi, and Amarok, and his whole tribe. Their home and way of life would be taken from them, and who knew what the loss of the energy from the Concentrator would mean for them?

“Good girl,” Eleanor said. “You magnificent girl, Kixi. I won't let them do it. I promise.” Then she turned away and resumed her trek across the tundra.

“Where are we going?” Finn asked.

“What did I say about asking that question?”

“Sorry. It just . . . seems like we're heading to the Concentrator.”

“We are,” Eleanor said.

“Why?”

“Because that's where this all started.”

They reached that same hill, climbed it, and looked down at the crater. The humming in Eleanor's mind had become deafening again, the black structure almost quivering with its energy.

She sat down on the turf and stared at the Concentrator, trying to fix it in place in her mind and truly see it. She stopped fighting the humming and just let it pass through her, imagining it reaching down to her marrow. She closed her eyes, slowed her breathing,
and relaxed. As she did, the humming acquired a definite direction, a movement. She felt it sweeping through her, around her, from all directions.

She let her mind get swept up by it, and it carried her down the hill, into the crater, to the structure at its heart. The Concentrator's branches gathered her up, rolling her like a spider wrapping its prey, folding her tighter and tighter around herself until she broke apart, dissolving into something gossamer and insubstantial, then shuttled her up, up, up to its peak.

From there, the Concentrator launched her skyward at blinding speed. She shot up through the cavern, toward its ceiling, but instead of crashing into it, she passed through, tunneling to the surface of the ice sheet, and blasted into the sky. The earth's horizon gained curvature as she left it behind, flying a prescribed path into the vacuum of space.

That was when she saw her destination.

A black planet, pulling her in.

Immense. Dark. Impossible for Eleanor to fully take in or comprehend. If the Concentrator in the cavern had been built for eyes adapted to a different world, then
this
was a world that would make such sight necessary. Its twisted surface, encrusted with baffling and hideous towers and monuments, repelled Eleanor, and when she attempted to contemplate what
kind of life might exist on this rogue world, a suffocating horror seized her, digging its dirty fingers into her mind, reaching inward for the deepest part of her.

She screamed.

“Eleanor, wake up!”

She opened her eyes, back on the tundra, sitting above the Concentrator. Finn knelt in front of her, holding her by the shoulders.

“Finn?” she said.

“What
was
that?” He looked down with a forceful sigh. “The Concentrator was making all kinds of sounds, and you were . . . just gone.”

For a moment, she thought the humming had stopped, but then she realized she could still feel it, if she tuned in. It was just that now she found she could filter it out when she wanted. “Yes, I was gone,” she said.

“Gone where?”

She looked up at the cavern's ceiling high above. “I know how the Concentrator and the rogue planet are connected.”

W
HEN SHE TOLD HER MOM AND
D
R
. P
OWERS WHAT SHE
had seen, they listened with concern but didn't seem ready to accept it. Visions, it seemed, fell fairly low in reliability on the scale of empirical evidence.

“It was real, Mom,” Eleanor said. “I know it.”

“Dreams can be that way,” her mother said. “I have no doubt it felt real to you. But—”

“It didn't
feel
real, it
was
real. I can't explain it.”

“Try,” Finn said. He had been there with her and seemed the most ready to believe.

Eleanor thought about it a moment. “It's like the rogue planet is harvesting telluric currents through the
Concentrator, which is converting it to dark energy. Almost like it's a vampire or something. I think that's why they're both here.” And if the Concentrator had really been there for as long as Amarok said it had, that meant the alien beings who had created it had planned this a very, very long time ago. Tens of thousands of years.

Something boomed above them, a distant thunder that reverberated through the cavern walls. Eleanor looked up, as did everyone else in the hut.

Eleanor's mother covered her mouth. “It's Skinner,” she said. “He's here.”

When the second peal sounded, voices cried out elsewhere in the village. This was something Amarok's people had not yet adapted to, the sounds of modern machinery tearing into the ice sheet overhead.

Eleanor's mother and Dr. Powers left the hut, and Eleanor followed after them with Julian and Finn. They found Amarok at the center of the village, next to the communal fire still burning low. In the next few moments, his people gathered to him, and he lifted his hands high.

His voice rumbled over his villagers, quieting them. Then he began smoothly pointing his fingers, calling out certain men and women. It looked like he
was assigning tasks, a force for calm and order.

Dr. Powers spoke in a murmur. “We need to see what's up there.”

“Are you sure we should risk it?” her mother asked. “If we're spotted, if we reveal the crevasse . . .”

“The cover of night should keep us hidden. We have to know what to expect, Sam.”

“You're right. The kids can stay—”

“No way,” Eleanor said.

“Honey, it could be dangerous,” her mom said. “We don't know what Skinner is planning.”

“I traveled all the way to the Arctic, and I am
not
letting you out of my sight. No. Way.”

Her mom opened her mouth as if to protest again, but closed it and nodded. They returned to their hut as the rest of the villagers dispersed. The periodic booming continued to penetrate the cavern, still somewhat dull and remote. They gathered their polar masks from among the mammoth bones, listening to it. Eleanor tried counting the seconds between blasts, which seemed to occur every three to five minutes.

After they had all suited up, they left the hut and headed through the village, in the opposite direction from the Concentrator. On the way, Amarok found them. He had dressed in additional layers of fur and once again carried his spear.

“We go up,” he said, and fell in with them.

They left the village behind and crossed another stretch of rolling ground, heading toward the cavern wall. As they drew near it, Eleanor noticed a narrow slot of a canyon and, next to its entrance, a couple of sleds. Amarok let out a shrill whistle, and from across the tundra, his wolves came streaking toward them, blurs of gray, brown, and black.

Their speed took Eleanor's breath, as did their size when they got closer. Their broad heads reached as high as her chest, and she didn't think she could even wrap her arms around their thick necks. Not that she was in a hurry to try. They circled Amarok, tongues out, ears partly back, each waiting for him to acknowledge them, which he did with a pat on the head or a rub behind the ear. There were ten of them.

“You are looking at some of the first domesticated dogs in the world,” her mother said.

“
Dogs?
” Finn said.

“The difference between a dog and a wolf is more behavioral than genetic,” Dr. Powers said. “These animals are still a long way from Lassie, but they're tame.”

Amarok called each of the wolves by name and harnessed them to one of the sleds. They pawed the ground, panting, bristling with energy. When they were all in place, Amarok mounted the back of the
sled and motioned for Eleanor and the others to climb on.

“They can pull all of us?” she asked.

“And more,” her mother said.

They settled down on the flatbed of the sled, which was made from wood and bone, bound together by leather cords, and covered in furs. Amarok shouted a command to the wolves, and they surged as a single, sudden wave. The sled leaped forward.

Amarok took them into the canyon, its sheer ice walls rising up, layer upon layer, striations of impenetrable depth in shades of blue and white. The changing angles of the walls blocked any view of the canyon's upper limits. Eleanor could barely see more than a few turns ahead as Amarok guided them inward.

The panting of the wolves and the hiss of the sled's passage echoed back to them. The animals' shoulders and haunches undulated in a wave of frosty fur as the floor of the canyon inclined upward, and the sled climbed.

Up they rose, from the glacier's deepest bones and ligaments, through its muscles, toward its skin. Eleanor's eyes teared up in the icy rush of air, and the higher the sled reached, the colder it became.

The canyon turned and bent back on itself, cutting a jagged path, but Amarok took the sled along its
course with ease, the communication between him and his wolves natural and subtle, a language of primal utterances that sounded as if it emerged from a shared consciousness.

“You'll need to put your masks on soon,” Dr. Powers said. “We're nearing the surface.”

“The power is out in our suits,” Finn said.

“Ours, too,” his father said. “But they'll still offer you some protection for the brief exposure.”

Eleanor put her mask on, and so did the others. A few minutes later, Amarok brought the sled to a graceful stop. A sharp wedge of night sky sliced the canyon open above them, filled with stars. Eleanor felt the cold like a waterfall pouring over the lip of the canyon, crashing down on her, and a wind howled in like air blown over a bottle.

The wolves huffed, and a few of them yawned with high-pitched whines. Eleanor wondered how they could survive up here. Or Amarok, for that matter. She decided it must be another effect of the Concentrator's energy. In addition to reviving people and animals, it made them more robust, somehow.

“We'll leave the dogs here,” Dr. Powers said. “Let's stay quiet.”

Amarok nodded and gave an order to his wolves, and they lay down as one. Dr. Powers then led their
party in the final ascent of the crevasse, slowing to a crawl as they reached the surface.

Dr. Powers and Amarok stuck their heads up first, an inch at a time. “My God,” Dr. Powers whispered.

“What is it?” Eleanor's mother asked.

He motioned them up.

Eleanor climbed until she, too, could see over the edge, across the surface. The storm had departed from the ice sheet, as predicted, and curtains of aurora waved across the sky. The glacier's expanse spread even farther to the horizon than before. Flat, desolate, pale in the moonlight, and unbroken.

Except for the spheres.

Polaris Station marched toward them out of the night. The towering pods thundered across the ice sheet on their hydraulic legs, seeming unstoppable, one slow and heavy footfall at a time, spotlights flooding their path, their many windows like the glowing eyes of a monolithic insect. Eleanor fought the urge to duck from their sight.

“I've never seen them mobile,” Eleanor's mother whispered.

“The G.E.T. doesn't mess around,” Dr. Powers said. “It looks like they're almost in position over the Concentrator.”

“How long after they start drilling until they breach
the cavern?” her mother asked.

“Depends on the equipment they've got—I've never seen the station's drills operational. They won't start until morning, at any rate.”

Eleanor noticed Amarok, the expression on his face one of awe and horror. What could he be thinking? Were the spheres like magic to him? Demons? She thought about his village below, their world about to end for the second time, destroyed by something perhaps more inexplicable to them than the ice age had been.

They couldn't let that happen. “We have to stop them,” Eleanor said.

“How're we going to do that?” Julian asked.

“I don't know. There's got to be someone we can contact. Someone—”

“There isn't,” Dr. Powers said. “The G.E.T. and Skinner are too powerful. They've got the UN behind them.”

“Then we evacuate the village,” her mother asked. “Like we talked about.”

“No,” Amarok said.

Everyone turned to look at him. The earlier fear on his face had been replaced by a ferocious resolve, and Eleanor glimpsed the Stone Age warrior he had once been and still was. The way he gripped his spear, she
could imagine him facing down a polar bear.

“No?” Eleanor's mother said. “Amarok, these—”

“No,” Amarok said again, baring his teeth like one of his wolves. “Our home. We
fight
.”

H
er mother paced around the mammoth-bone hut. “This is suicide! When Amarok and his warriors attack Polaris Station, they will do so with arrows.
Sticks
and stones.
Skinner and his hired security will have guns.”

She was right. Amarok had no hope. This was the Stone Age versus the twenty-first century, and history had already decided the victor. Amarok just didn't know it yet.

“We should just evacuate the cavern,” her mother said.

“You're asking them to abandon their home,” Dr. Powers said. “Their
world
. Where would they go?”

“I don't know! But a slim chance is better than no chance.”

Amarok and his warriors were somewhere in the village, preparing for their assault. Since he had first announced his intentions up at the surface, a cold dread had been growing in Eleanor's chest. The futility of the attack wasn't even a question, and the nobility or poetry or whatever did nothing to assuage the tragedy of it.

Dr. Powers shook his head. “This isn't your choice, Sam. You aren't in charge of these people. They have the right to decide for themselves how they want to face this.”

“They are cavemen, Simon! They haven't adapted to the modern world. They aren't ready to decide something like this. You may think it arrogant, but I know better than they do.”

“Can you hear yourself?” Dr. Powers asked. “Let Amarok worry about his people, Sam. The only thing
we
need to worry about is what Skinner will do with the Concentrator.”

“Maybe we can reason with him,” her mother said. “Now that we know more about it, maybe he'll finally listen.”

Eleanor had met Skinner, and even she knew that didn't seem likely. “What are you going to say, Mom? ‘Hey, Skinner, this Concentrator thing is, like, ten thousand years old, and it's turning the earth's energy into dark energy, and oh, by the way, it was made by aliens, so leave it alone.' Because I think I can tell you what he'll say to that.”

Her mother gave her a don't-be-ridiculous look. “I still don't know if
I
believe half of what you just said.”

“But she has a point,” Dr. Powers said. “You and I both know Skinner. How he is once he's made up his
mind. And remember, now we know this is a man who has apparently participated in a lie to the entire world. He may even be the architect of it.”

Eleanor's mother shook her head but spoke no word against that.

“But for the sake of argument,” Dr. Powers said, “what
would
you say to him?”

“I . . .” Her mother spread her hands for a moment, as if waiting for the words to flock to her, but a few moments later, she let them drop with a sigh. “I guess I'd say what I said before. We don't understand the energy here nearly well enough to use it. It's too dangerous.”

“And why would he listen this time?” Dr. Powers asked.

Her mother clenched her jaw.

“Sam?” Dr. Powers said.

“I don't know, Simon!” She was almost shaking. “I can barely accept what I've seen with my own eyes! I don't know if that . . . thing is our salvation or our destruction or what! All I do know is we have to do something to stop Skinner from getting his hands on it!”

Eleanor sidled closer to her mom and put an arm around her. “Mom, it's okay. We'll figure something out.”

Dr. Powers softened. “I agree with you, Sam. We have to keep Skinner from getting into this cavern. He's facing the end of the world, and I think he's trying to hoard all the energy he can. From any source. I think he's desperate, and that makes him dangerous. Maybe as dangerous as the Concentrator.”