The Icarus Project (19 page)

“You are such a pain.” I felt the blue line under my glove. But maybe he had a point.

“I know. But I’m also right here, and I won’t let anything happen to you.” He held out his hand. “I promise.”

I dropped the rope and took a tentative step toward him. “There. Are you happy now?”

Kyle pulled down his mask for a second and winked at me. “Something is wrong with your book.” He dropped to his knees in the snow and the book fell to the ground in front of him.

I sighed. What was he up to now?

“It’s moving. It’s fighting me, Maya!” He was trying to hold on to the book, which did appear to be fighting him, dragging him across the snow on his knees.

I ran to his side and tried to grab the book, but he hopped forward, the book stretched out in his hands. I scrambled to get a hold of his sleeve, but he was quicker and jumped up, holding the book higher in the air.

“Maya, I think your book wants to fly. It wants to be free!” He yelled and leaped around the compound with the book in his arms, trying madly to contain it. He looked so crazy that I had to laugh.

“No! Don’t let it go. I need it!” I yelled, chasing after him, joining in his game.

He dramatically pulled the book down to his ear, as if listening to what the book had to say. “It hates being inside the stuffy library. It wants to experience life. Have fun. Get out into the world.” His arms shot out; the book was back in the air.

“But it’s a book. It can’t fly.” I followed him, unable to stop smiling under my face mask.

“I can’t hold on to it. It’s going … It’s going … It’s gone!” With that, Kyle hurled the book up into the sky. It came crashing down to the icy ground with an explosion of pages. The spine cracked and a chunk of pages went flying into the air.

“Kyle!” I yelled. “You broke it.”

His eyes went wide and the two of us raced around the compound, trying to snatch up the loose pages that were blowing everywhere. We grabbed as many as we could, but a large swath of pages fluttered across the snowy compound, blending with the white landscape, almost invisible.

Finally, we collapsed on the snow, exhausted from running around, our arms filled with pages. “Well, at least
some of them made it to freedom,” he said, motioning toward the horizon.

“I think that was the last chapter,” I said. “I’ll never know how the book ends.”

“That’s the point!” Kyle elbowed me. “Now the Arctic can read about itself.”

I smiled. Maybe he was right. Maybe flying off toward the horizon wasn’t such a bad thing—as long as you didn’t go out by yourself, with no way of getting back to safety.

Kyle picked up the books he had dropped and walked me to the main building.

“You really have a thing for flying, don’t you?” I said, remembering how he had wanted to help Justice with the helicopter.

“Yeah, it’s cool. And I’ve never had this kind of access to a pilot and helicopter before.”

“You could get your license and be a pilot one day,” I said.

“Maybe.” He got quiet and stared down at his boots.

“What’s wrong?” I asked as we made our way inside. I started pulling off my gloves and hat.

“It’s nothing,” he said, stripping off his face mask.

“It doesn’t sound like nothing.” I hung my coat on a hook.

He sighed. “It’s just this wild dream I had last night, but…”

“But what? Tell me about it,” I prodded, my interest piqued.

Kyle sat down on the bench in the changing room. “It
was great. The best dream ever.” His face lit up. “When the dream started, I was flying in the helicopter and something went wrong. Justice and I had to eject—which I don’t think is even possible in a helicopter.”

“In a dream helicopter, maybe,” I said. “Um … so far this doesn’t sound like a great dream.”

“Wait—it gets good. See, I saw Justice float to the ground in his parachute, but I didn’t have one and I panicked. Then I did the only thing I could—I flailed my arms. And suddenly I was flying!”

“Cool. I love flying dreams.” I sat down next to him on the bench.

“But that’s what was weird. It felt so real—like it was more than a dream. And it got even better.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I grew wings! And flew even higher and faster. I was soaring like a bird.”

“You had wings…” I said enviously. That
was
a great dream.

“Really big white ones. Just like Charlie’s.”

“Sounds magical.”

“It was the best feeling ever,” he said.

That day, the battle over Charlie was in full force. Katsu and Ivan wanted to break the ice and get a sample of real solid flesh and bone, but Dad and Karen wanted to wait until more research could be done. They wanted to transport
Charlie, ice and all, back to the States. Randal was in the middle. He saw both sides, but he had a contract with Katsu, so it wasn’t looking too good for Dad and Karen. Plus, Randal didn’t want anyone taking Charlie away from him, so getting samples was the obvious solution to the problem.

In the afternoon, everyone took a break and Kyle went to check out the hangar, so I was alone in the lab when a burst of static filled the room. It started as a low humming sound, like someone had left a radio on. I looked around the room, but I couldn’t find a radio. Was it coming from an intercom system? I couldn’t tell. The longer I listened, the more it sounded almost like a muffled voice, a scratchy one on an old radio. I searched the lab for a stereo system, or for a computer that had been left on, but I found nothing. It was starting to grate on my nerves.

“Maybe it’s a ghost. Maybe the station is haunted,” I said aloud.

It was probably nothing.

I don’t know why, but I opened the heavy door to the freezer. The seal broke and a wave of frosty air floated out. I wasn’t wearing my coat, so I stayed in the doorway, rubbing my arms and peering inside. No change with Charlie. No glowing light.

The noise got louder and turned into a buzzing sound, like a swarm of electric wasps. Overcome with dizziness, I leaned on the door frame. The buzzing noise kept getting
louder and louder. I put my hands over my ears. The annoying buzz was too much to handle—I had to leave the lab. So I tried to shut the door to the freezer. I pushed hard on it, but before it closed completely, the ice encasing Charlie cracked.

As I stared, mesmerized, an enormous fissure appeared, and then the crack spidered out over the entire surface of the frozen block. The buzzing sound grew louder and then changed, shifting like a radio changing frequency. Huge chunks of ice broke off, fell to the floor, and shattered. What was left of the block began to melt rapidly. Water beaded up and dripped down the surface, pooling on the table. But the room was still cold. I stepped inside to get a better look. This couldn’t be happening! But the ice kept melting, and the puddle on the floor kept growing and spreading.

After the ice shattered, the noise receded. I stood there, stunned. It had happened so fast, I didn’t know how to react. Had I done something to cause the ice to break? But I hadn’t even touched it or been anywhere near it.

Water continued to spill off the table in a wave that rushed toward me. Within seconds, I was standing in a foot of cold water. The ice had melted in a huge rush of water.

This was impossible! Ice didn’t melt that fast, and it didn’t just crack and break apart, especially in a climate-controlled freezer.

I had no idea where all the water was coming from. There couldn’t be that much, unless a pipe had broken. I looked around, trying to rationalize what I was seeing. But if a pipe had broken in the freezer, the water would be frozen, or at least would have started to freeze. I backed up, bracing myself against a table. I had to stop the melting. I just didn’t know how. Fear washed over me. The water was rising higher and higher.

I raced out of the freezer toward the door leading out of the lab.

As I got near it, I turned around, taking in one last glance of the ruin left behind. The freezer door was wide open. The ice block had completely melted, and there on the table was the body of the boy we called Charlie.

His arm twitched. His fingers stretched. His torso shifted. I tripped, bumping my hip against some shelves. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My heart pounded in my chest.

Charlie sat up on the table and stared at me with huge black eyes. He opened his wings wide into the air. They were white and enormous, and they arched over his head. His mouth opened wide like a fish’s and he gasped, taking in huge breaths of air. A glowing bluish-green light bloomed inside his chest, exactly like the flicker of light I had seen inside the ice before. He lifted his chin and looked right into my eyes, pleading with me. He needed me. I could feel it. I could feel the glowing warmth in his chest. It was life.

Charlie was alive, and he was trapped in the ice.

I tried not to panic, but the water had covered my shoes and soaked my jeans, and it was still rising fast. A sharp, tingling pain raced up my body from where the icy water soaked through to skin. I ran the last few steps to the door of the lab, but the water flooded the room, pushing so hard against the door that I couldn’t open it inward.

I was trapped. I banged my clenched fists against the door. My throat was raw from screaming, but no one could hear me. No one knew I was in trouble. Hot tears streamed down my face as the water lifted me off my feet, throwing me against the door.

The water was up to my neck now, and I tasted salt. I kicked with my legs and the water lifted me up. I tried to swim, grabbing on to anything I could find to keep my head up, but I couldn’t hold on. I went under, sliding below the surface as I watched, helpless. Panic exploded in my chest. I was drowning in the middle of the day, in the lab, in Randal’s million-dollar research station. It made no sense. It couldn’t be real.

It became harder to move my legs. The water felt thick, like gelatin, and it was hardening. And then the water surrounding me froze solid, and I was encased inside an icy block, suspended.

My arms were outstretched and my legs were captured in a bent, kicking pose. My hair floated out in thin white wires, each strand trapped in the ice in a brittle web. It
would have been a pretty thing to see, like a tragic fairy tale, a scene of a girl frozen forever.

Was that how it would end? Would I die like this, like a baby mammoth swallowed by the melting ice? Would my father excavate my frozen body like the woolly mammoth that had always eluded him? I was the ice girl, the old girl, and I was trapped.

But I was still alive. My heart still raced in my chest and air still filled my lungs. I was still aware of everything around me. I could see the lab and hear the faint buzzing sound. A computer blinked from the workstation where it sat. The lights still shone brightly from the bank of overhead fluorescent fixtures. Why was I not dead? It was too real to be a dream. I had to think of something,
do
something to help me get free. I was frozen, just like Charlie.

If I could turn my head, I would look back at him, but I was stuck.

Was Charlie somehow doing this? Was he sending me a message?

And if he was, could I send him one back? Could he hear me or sense me?

I had to try to do something, even if it didn’t work. I focused my thoughts. I called out to Charlie silently.
Please hear me. Please let me go.
I screamed in my mind.

Charlie, stop!

For a few moments nothing happened. Loneliness overwhelmed me. The stillness was terrible. My mind raced
and then bumped around in my head like a trapped insect looking for a way out.

Then slowly the buzzing sound receded, and the ice softened its grasp on me. I could move my body a little—a finger and then my foot. The ice groaned. It was breaking up, melting, disappearing as quickly as it had come.

I slumped to the floor, and within just a few minutes the water had receded like a mysterious tide that had never been there. The floor was completely dry, and I lay shivering on the cold tile. I wanted to get up and run away, run back to my room and pack my bags and leave the station.

But I struggled to my feet and walked over to the open freezer door, and I saw what I knew I would see. Charlie hadn’t gone anywhere. He was still trapped in the block of ice. I leaned against the door frame. The block hadn’t miraculously melted at all, filling the lab with water, drowning me, and freezing me into a human ice cube. It had been an illusion, some trick played on my mind.

I didn’t know how it had happened, but I think it was Charlie, and I think he was trying to send me a message, and that message was,
Help me.

I couldn’t explain any of it scientifically. The only thing I knew for sure was that I understood how Charlie felt: alone, trapped, helpless, but aware of everything going on around him. I had to do something to help him. Longing bubbled up inside me, pushing against my heart. It ached for the boy trapped in the ice. I wanted to tell Dad—but
he was so busy, so excited to have found Charlie. Everyone was.

Anyway, what would I tell him? I felt like I was slipping. I knew what I had seen. I had felt everything, and I knew it wasn’t a dream. Was the weather affecting me, or was I just going crazy? Maybe Dr. Kernel was right and I was delusional, seeing things. No one would believe me, especially after the incident with the snow ghost. But still, no matter how hard I told myself to be logical, the sense I had about Charlie wouldn’t go away.