The Arctic Code (7 page)

She could freeze or suffocate long before they even reached Barrow.

A
FTER TAXIING FOR A SHORT DISTANCE
,
THE PLANE CAME
to a halt. Eleanor wondered why they weren't taking off, and she worried that it might even have something to do with her. Had security stopped the plane? Then the hydraulics engaged with the same whine as before, and a frame of light appeared around the ramp as it descended. Luke was opening the hold.

Eleanor scrambled deeper into the stacks of G.E.T. cargo, but there wasn't enough space for her to completely hide herself. She looked up, made a lightning decision, and climbed up the webbing as if it were a ladder, which wasn't easy. The straps moved and gave under her feet like the rope ladders on her old
elementary school playground. But she managed to reach the top and dive over and inside the webbing, onto the stack of cargo. There she nestled down, now safely out of sight.

Just then, voices entered the cargo hold, followed by the sound of heavy boots on the metal ramp. Eleanor held as still as she could, listening.

“I was just about to take off,” Luke said. “This delay is—”

“Pardon my intrusion.” That sounded like an old man, with a voice that creaked like leather. “But the nature of this shipment is such that I had to make certain. When did you take delivery?”

“Late last night. Loaded it myself.”

“It is all accounted for?” the old man asked.

“I told you, it's all in order.” Luke sounded even more irritated with this guy than he had with Eleanor.

“This hold is pressurized? Temperature controlled?”

“Of course.”

Well, at least Eleanor wouldn't have to worry about suffocation or freezing to death.

“And now that you've seen it,” Luke said, “I'll be on my way. There'll be a major polar storm moving in over Barrow in the next twenty-four hours. I need to be unloaded and gone before it hits.”

“When do you expect to land?” the old voice asked.

“Depending on how long my stop in Fairbanks takes—”

“Does your business in Fairbanks involve humanitarian aid?”

“What? No.”

“Then by order of article six of the International Conservation of Energy Treaty, I authorize you to proceed directly to Barrow.”

“Dr. Watkins,” Luke said, “I don't need your authorization to do anything.”

“Let me rephrase. I
order
you to go straight to Barrow.”

Luke's voice turned angry. “Excuse me? Yours ain't the only cargo on this plane. I've got buyers lined up for the rest of this stuff! I gotta make a profit—”

“I have the power, granted by the UN, to override all but humanitarian missions. You run afoul of me, young man, and I'll make sure this . . . plane is grounded for good. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly,” Luke said, bringing a different kind of ice into the plane.

“Good. I'll let our Barrow facility know to expect you.”

“We done here?” Luke asked.

“You may depart,” the old voice said.

The sound of the men's footsteps left the plane, and
a few minutes later, the cargo door lifted and groaned shut. When the engines kicked back up and the plane moved, the tower of cargo beneath Eleanor shifted as if it might collapse. Her hands and feet shot outward instinctively, to steady herself, but the netting kept it all in place.

The plane taxied for only a short time. Then the engines rose to a wail, and the aircraft lurched forward. Everything around Eleanor rattled so hard, she imagined pieces of the plane shaking off on the runway. The escalating g forces rolled her up against the netting and pressed it into her back as the plane finally heaved itself into the sky. Once the aircraft lost contact with the ground, the rattling ceased and things settled down, as if the plane had let out a sigh. It was still noisy but felt more calm and steady. They were in the air.

Eleanor had made it. Officially an Arctic stowaway. She imagined the city of Phoenix growing small and distant behind her, with its refugees and Ice Castles and her school and her home and . . .

She sighed. “Poor Uncle Jack,” she said aloud.

O
nce they'd been airborne for a while, Eleanor climbed down and felt comfortable pulling out one of the flashlights from her pack to get a better look at the
cargo around her. She wondered what the G.E.T. might be sending to the Arctic and hoped it would give her some clue about what her mother had been working on in Barrow. She cast the flashlight's narrow spotlight over the crates and containers, the white circle of cold light a moon moving through the hold, landing on uneven surfaces.

Most of the crates were too heavy or large for her to lift, but she managed to pull down one of the smaller ones, labeled
TELLURIC SCANNER
. It was made of plastic, with a hinged latch on each side of the lid. She popped them and pulled the lid away.

Inside, she found an electronic device wedged in cutaway foam. It reminded her of the bar-code scanner guns that grocery store employees carried around on their hips. But this looked a lot more complicated, with a couple of blank LCD screens, dials, and buttons. Eleanor had no idea what it might be used for.
Telluric?

She closed the lid to the case and hoisted it back where it came from. The nearby crates bore labels that made about the same amount of sense to her. There were
TELLURIC TRANSISTORS
and
FIELD PERIMETER RODS
and
TELLURIC CONDUCTION RODS
. She pulled out her Sync, looked up
telluric
, and found it was just a word for something related to the earth.

Great.
Earth.

Given that her mom was a geologist, and the G.E.T. drilled for oil, this wasn't exactly an astounding discovery.

She sighed and switched off her flashlight to save power. Then she looked around for a comfortable place to sit and couldn't find one. On top of that, the unremitting engine noise had already started to feel like a pressure on her ears.

Eight hours.

This was going to be a long flight.

A
fter an hour of doing nothing, Eleanor turned her attention back to the crates. She forced herself to look at each one, just in case there was something interesting. That took up another hour or so but didn't result in anything new or useful.

She pulled out her Sync, intending to reread her mom's texts, but decided that perhaps she should conserve the device's power. She didn't know when she would next have the opportunity to charge it. But that thought caused a new worry. What if the battery died and she had no way to read the messages? The last message in particular, with the numbers, that code . . . She decided to memorize them, just in case. It didn't take too long.
Just like memorizing a couple
of phone numbers.
To test herself, she covered up the screen with her hand and recited the series out loud, checking herself along the way. She got them all right.

She was now over two hours into the flight, with a good five or six to go, and she still had nothing to do.

She ended up unpacking all her gear—the mask, the crampons, the coats, all of it—and then practiced putting it on and taking it off, repeatedly, until the actions became quick and smooth. She timed herself and got to the point where she could suit up completely in under a minute. Even though she had no idea whether that meant anything, it made her feel more ready for the Arctic.

Another hour had gone by.

She walked to one of the two windows and peered outside. Everything just looked white. She turned away from the window—what she thought was a sky full of clouds—but then stopped. She returned to the window and looked down.

White
. It wasn't just the sky. It was all white.

The ground had disappeared, as if someone had pulled a white sheet tight over a bed. Eleanor blinked.

The ice sheet.

They'd reached the great glacier's border, the edge of life and civilization, then flown right over it without her realizing it. She'd heard so much about the
menace of the ice from school and the news, she'd half expected it to have claws and teeth. But from up here, it appeared quiet and still. Tranquil, even. Somehow, that made it more frightening, because that meant the ice could lie.

She watched the endless white for some time—the ice that had taken her mom—but after a while, its image became distorted. She started seeing things down there. Was that a river? A road? A town? In the same way her eyes imagined shapes and shadows in pitch darkness, she saw signs of life on the ice where there couldn't be any, as though her mind simply refused to accept a void.

She forced herself from the window, back to her gear. Her eyes watered and burned from staring too long. She rubbed them and realized they wanted to stay closed, so she made herself a bed with her coats and her sleeping bag and lay down. They weren't quite halfway yet. Maybe she could sleep for some of the flight.

E
leanor awoke to a sudden jolt. It bounced her hard enough to bang her head on the floor. The whole plane rattled and shook.

They'd landed.

She quickly gathered all her gear and shoved it into
her pack. How long had she slept? Four hours? She hadn't realized she was so exhausted. But her level of stress and fear over the last day had been intense.

The plane lumbered along and eventually settled to a stop with a giant sigh. Eleanor decided it would probably be better to stay out of sight at first. She climbed back up the webbing to her previous perch and settled in to wait.

Before long, the door to the cargo hold opened up, and first light, then wind, and finally snow poured in. The cold hit Eleanor's face like an unexpected slap, and she realized instantly that this was Alaska.

“Your stuff is there,” she heard Luke say. His voice had a metallic, muffled quality. “Behind all the G.E.T. cargo.”

“You're running shipments for the G.E.T.?” It was a woman's voice, also metallic and muffled.

“Don't have much of a choice, according to the law. They even ordered me to skip your delivery, so if anyone asks, this is all for ‘humanitarian purposes.' Article something or other from the International Conservation of Energy Treaty.”

Eleanor thought back to the earlier conversation she'd overheard. If she understood Luke correctly, they weren't in Barrow yet. He'd stopped in Fairbanks after all. Her cheeks and nose were already starting to
hurt from the cold, and each breath stabbed the inside of her chest with an icicle.

“Well, I appreciate you violating a UN treaty,” the woman said.

“Anything for you, doll.”

Eleanor could hear them getting closer.

“Any trouble, otherwise?” the woman asked.

“Nope. But I have to hustle the rest of this to Barrow before the storm hits.”

“Forecast is saying it's going to be a bruiser.” She paused. “What's that?”

“What?”

“That pack.”

Oh no.
Eleanor closed her eyes. Her pack. She had left it on the floor. Luke knew she was here.

He raised his voice. “Come on out, kid!”

“Kid?” the woman asked.

Eleanor sighed, rose to her hands and knees, and peered over the top of her crate tower. She saw now why their voices had sounded odd. They were both wearing masks—full plates of plastic and metal, with dark lenses over the eyes and a breathing apparatus over the mouth—which was what Eleanor wished she was wearing with each moment her skin was exposed to the Alaskan cold blowing into the cargo bay.

“Get over here,” Luke said. “Now.”

Eleanor scrambled down the webbing, nervousness making her feel especially clumsy. But what could Luke do at this point? It wasn't like he could just leave her there in Fairbanks, and with his deadline, he wouldn't be turning back to Phoenix, either. He'd be mad, for sure, but she would get to Barrow, which was all that mattered.

Luke folded his arms, and with his mask, he looked a bit more threatening than before. “What do you think you're doing, kid?”

She folded her arms, too. “My name isn't
kid
. It's Eleanor.”

“I don't care,” Luke said. “You shouldn't be here.”

“Oh, Luke, go easy on her,” the woman said. “It looks like she had a long flight. Eleanor, I'm Betty.”

“Nice to meet you.” Eleanor turned to Luke. “I didn't mean any harm. Your plane was the only way.”

“The only way to what?” Betty asked.

“The only way to get to Barrow.”

“Barrow?” Eleanor could imagine the shock on Betty's face behind her mask. “Why on earth would you want to go—”

“It doesn't matter,” Luke said. “Betty, your drilling cores are stacked over there. Be careful—they're heavy.”

Betty snorted. “Always a gentleman.”

“You know me.”

A moment passed, and when it became clear Luke didn't intend to help, Betty went to the crates he'd indicated. She lifted one, and with a backward glance that would probably have been a glare, she marched out of the plane.

Eleanor felt a sudden, violent shiver. Back in Phoenix, she thought she knew cold. But this Alaskan cold had moved its assault from her face to the rest of her body, as if determined to make sure she knew it was something else entirely.

“You need a mask,” Luke said. “Did you bring one?”

Eleanor nodded.

“Well, don't just stand there like a fool. Go get it.”

Eleanor hurried to her pack, pulled out the mask, and put it on, just as she'd practiced. Her face warmed a little, which felt better, but the biggest difference was the air. It no longer bit on its way into her lungs.

“Better?” Luke asked.

“Better.” Her voice had taken on that same metallic muffle.

“Good,” he said. “Now get off my plane. This is as far as you go.”

“What?” Eleanor almost laughed. He couldn't be serious.