Now Nigel was strutting out of the building, with Bitsy and Alex on either side. “My good man,” Nigel said, holding out a business card. “Does this look like a joking face?”
“Wait, who are you?”
“Dr. Cesar Untermeyer,” Nigel said. “Perhaps I may have a word with you both . . .”
At the sound of that name, the two young workers snapped to attention. Nigel walked them back to the building, blabbering on about inspections and proper behavior.
“What was that about?” Bitsy mouthed.
Alex shrugged.
But Max’s eyes were trained off into the field. Ingrid was heading across the flat, icy plain toward the horizon. There wouldn’t be much time before she was out of sight. “We have to get her, now!”
He eyed the sled. One foot on each runner. That was how it was done. He had seen it.
Max ran to it and got himself in position, gripping the wooden crossbar.
“Whoa—are you kidding, Max?” Alex hissed. “You think you’re going to operate this thing?”
“It’s easier than a balloon,” Max said. “I saw them. Get on! She’s getting away.”
Bitsy sat on the sled, and Alex reluctantly followed. The dogs seemed to sense something, and they began whining and wagging their tails.
A door slammed to Max’s right, and Nigel came bolting out of the building, giggling. He was carrying a small rucksack. “The game is afoot!”
He leaped across the snow, did a turn in midair, and scampered onto the sled. “No seat belts?”
“Who’s Dr. Cesar Untermeyer?” Bitsy asked.
Nigel shrugged. “I saw the name at the top of the plaque as we walked in. I figured he was important. I sent those two off on an errand so we would have freedom to steal this sled. I brought goggles for us all. Under the circumstances, I thought them prudent.”
As Max took a pair and slipped them on, Nigel slipped in behind Alex and Bitsy. “Hike!” he shouted to the dogs. “Hike like crazy and follow her!”
The dogs dug in hard, and the sled lurched forward. Max nearly fell off, and Nigel let out a little scream.
Max’s legs were stiff. He bent them. He had to stay loose. The dogs were doing their job, pulling with a smooth forward motion. “Hi-i-i-i-ke!”
The wind bit against his cheeks. Flecks of ice flew up from the runners onto his goggles. From where he stood, the rise and fall of the huskies’ backs was like one churning mass of fur. It felt like they would take off into the sky. He thought about the sounds of their trip—the jet’s whine, the echo of the Greek cave, the chug of the railroad, and churn of the Kozhim, the grunting of Nepali yaks, and the balloon’s buffeting winds—but nothing compared to this. The ropes’ rhythmic slap, the footfalls and chuffing breaths of each dog, the steady ssss of the runners were like a song of whispers.
The dogs didn’t seem to be seeing Ingrid anymore, but Max could make out a trace of her shadow in the distance. He steered them as best he could. “Gee! No, not that much gee! A little to the haw! That’s it!”
They were picking up speed now. Ingrid seemed to have stopped. Behind her, a wall of white was rising like a curtain. What little was left of the sun had dimmed, as if someone had flicked a switch. She was turning toward him, Max could tell. He wished he had his binoculars because she seemed to be gesturing.
In a moment, a wash of whiteness wiped her out of sight like an eraser. In the sudden blast of wind, it seemed to be snowing upward. “Hike!” Max shouted. “Hike!”
“Did anyone look at a weather forecast?” Nigel called from the sled.
Max could barely even see him. He gripped tighter to the bar. Either Bitsy or Alex screamed. Or maybe it was Nigel.
The dogs were barking now. A not-too-distant barking answered them. Max could see a shadow up ahead, flickering in and out of the whiteness. Maybe twenty feet away. “Good work!” he yelled. “Whoa!”
As the sled came to a stop, Max jumped off. “Hold hands!” he shouted. “Or we’ll lose each other!”
He gripped Alex’s hand, she gripped Bitsy’s, and she gripped Nigel’s. Max trudged forward, guessing as best he could where Ingrid was standing.
“Ingrid!” Max shouted. “Ingrid, where are you?”
From behind, Ingrid’s voice said, “Whoops, passed you right by. I recommend you turn. Slowly.”
Max felt Alex’s hand tighten, then let go. They all did as she said and clasped hands again. Ingrid stood facing them, finally visible at only six feet away. The backpack was hooked around her shoulders.
In her right hand she held a gun.
“By the ghost of Gaston . . .” Nigel said.
Ingrid flashed a smile. “Do you know what leopard seals do? They swim in channels under the ice, coming up for air in strategic blowholes. When they see a shadow moving overhead, they follow it from underneath. If the prey approaches the hole—surprise! They leap up at the last moment, jaws wide, ready for dinner.”
“So . . . you’re the leopard seal in this story,” Nigel said, “and we’re—”
She moved the gun toward him. Nigel swallowed the rest of his sentence in a choked yeep. “I brought this gun for protection against predators like the leopard seal, not you! This continent is brutal and unforgiving, full of traps and fissures and murderous tricks of nature. Just as it was at the turn of the twentieth century for those who first set foot here—Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, Mawson. Imagine their surprise to find that someone had been here before them. A man who had not only lived to return home, but who had never taken any credit for the discovery. Not a hardy explorer but a science fiction writer, a French ex–stock broker named Verne! The embarrassment was overwhelming. These men agreed to suppress the secret, and after they died it was forgotten—but for a small, secret group of researchers employed by a powerful private company.”
“Don’t tell me,” Max said. “Niemand Enterprises?”
“Oh, dear Lord,” Nigel said. “You’ve been in touch with Gloria Bentham, haven’t you? This was a trap.”
A noisy rush of frigid wind blasted, but Ingrid stood solid. “Most rational people scoffed that an amateur explorer like Jules Verne could have reached this impossible place. But some, like Gloria, persisted. You see, Verne left clues, if you knew how to look for them. Clues in the ice.” Ingrid smiled. “She is a visionary woman, Mr. Hanscombe, wouldn’t you say? And you, Bitsy, she always wished you had followed in her footsteps. Have you discussed this with these friends of yours? Have you told them who you really are?”
“Just give us the pack, you blowhard!” Bitsy said.
She flew at Ingrid. They both fell to the snow and rolled. In the blowing snow, the two women flashed in and out of sight.
“Get the gun!” Alex said, jumping on top of them. Max moved closer, looking for signs of the weapon, afraid it might go off in his direction.
There. A flash of steel.
As he reached down, Bitsy bit hard into Ingrid’s wrist. With a scream, Ingrid let go of the gun. It sailed into the whiteness. Max dove after it, flailing in the snow to find it, but it was buried. Lost.
Now Ingrid was jumping to her feet, backing away. “I came here to do some good in this world. To find secrets from a time when the world had no disease. This has been my life, and you greedy little thieves are not about to—”
Her sentence ended there, and so did she.
Max had to blink. She was gone.
“Ingrid?” he called out, stepping forward.
He tried to pull his foot back. But there was nothing under it. As his body fell forward, Max stared down into a bottomless black crevasse.
41
HE was panting. Sweating. Achy. He could hear his own ragged breaths. Dreams faded in and out. He was home, early in the morning, and it was time to wake up. His mattress was lumpy and uncomfortable, and it made him twist and turn.
The sound of his name, soft and faraway, made his eyes flutter open.
“Morning,” he drawled. “It is time for school?”
“Hrm,” his mattress responded.
Max jumped. It was so the wrong move. Every muscle in his body screamed in protest. He felt like a head-to-toe bruise. He stood, letting the pain wash over him and his eyes adjust to the surrounding brightness. Then he looked down.
His mattress was Ingrid.
“Whoa,” he said, jostling her with his foot. “Hey, sorry I landed on you. Are you OK?”
She rolled to her back without a reaction, but he could see her chest heaving. His backpack lay on the ice about a foot away. He scooped it up and yanked open the zipper. Pulling out the container, he reached inside and carefully pulled out the vials.
They were all there, unbroken.
“Maaaaax!” came Alex’s voice from above. And then Bitsy’s and Nigel’s.
He looked up into the falling snow. His goggles had snapped off in the fall, so he shielded his eyes, but he saw nothing but white. “I’m down here!” he yelled. “But I guess you know that!”
As his voice boomed and echoed against the ice, he caught a glimpse of the goggles on the ground. He went toward them but had to stop in his tracks. Now, looking straight in front of him, he saw the entrance to a deep cavern, like the open mouth of an ice ogre. The chamber beyond it stretched into darkness, but the immediate area glowed. Ice formations like white teeth hung in endless rows from the ceiling and jutted upward from the floor, flashing pinpricks of green, blue, silver, and white. He walked slowly, stepping high over fresh snow that drifted to his knees, passing pillars of ice, daggers of ice, and webs that seemed spun from sugar. It was as if the Cave of Vlihada had been transported here and then flash frozen.
As he made his way around a bend in the cave, the surface became flatter, harder. Sweat dripped down his torso. The jacket was too warm, so he unzipped it. And that fact made him stop in his tracks.
He had felt too cold in Greece. Here in the Frozen Continent, encased in ice, he was sweating.
Here, in a hot cave.
“It’s hot!” he yelled. “It’s really hot! Woooo! Guys, I found it!”
He didn’t know if they heard him. He was far from the crevasse now, but he didn’t want to go back. Not just yet. On the other side of a thick ice column, wisps of steam fogged the air. They curled toward him like beckoning fingers.
He walked toward a quiet bubbling sound. A tiny brook, sliding silently over a deep groove in the icy surface, led him deeper into the cave. There, embedded in a giant fist of ice, was the water’s source. It was a hole about a foot wide and ringed in solid greenish blue.
Greenish blue meant algae. Algae was life. Life meant heat. He took off his glove, dipped a finger, and yanked it back. It was hot to the touch.
A water source rescued from a hot cave in the world’s coldest land mass. That was Jules Verne’s last clue.
Max swung his pack around. His hands were shaking with excitement. This was Verne’s fifth stop, his final ingredient. Max didn’t know how Verne had gotten here. Was it on Captain Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus? The novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea described a stop in Antarctica. Everything in that novel seemed too far ahead of its time. But it had happened. Verne had lived it. Maybe this too. Maybe he actually had reached Antarctica before the great explorers.
“I love my family . . . .” Max said.
Max opened the last, empty vial and filled it with the water from the brook. His face felt hot and wet, and as he wiped it dry, he realized he was crying. The ice seemed to wink back at him, forming shapes before his eyes.
For a brief second, he could swear he saw his mom’s face. It was a trick of the mind, he knew. It was wishful thinking. But when he stood, he couldn’t feel a single bruise.
He wanted to run back but he stopped himself. One bad fall on the ice, one broken bone, and he’d have no chance of getting back. Getting back without an injury was going to take a lot of creative thinking. Hooking the pack over his shoulder again, he headed out of the cavern and into the crevasse. Ingrid was lying exactly as he’d left her. From this angle he could see that one of her legs was twisted into an unnatural position. That, he knew, was going to hurt.
“Max, can you hear me?” echoed Alex’s voice from above.
“Yes!” he shouted.
“Nigel and Bitsy are trying to figure out how to work the sled! They’re going to get you some help!”
“Bass . . .” Ingrid was writhing on the ice, trying to speak. Her face was twisted with pain. “Bass . . . ket.”
“Hey, Ingrid, it’s me, Max. I fell on you.” Max knelt beside her. “Did you say ‘basket’? What do you mean?”
She nodded, her eyes squeezed shut and her teeth gritted. “On . . . sled . . .”
“Basket on sled. Got it.” He looked up and shouted: “Alex, get the basket from Ingrid’s sled!”
“OK!”
“Yes . . . good . . .” Ingrid said.
“What’s in it?” Max asked.
But Ingrid was gazing toward the cave with the vaulted ceiling. “Refugio . . .” she whispered.
“Ref-who-hio?” Max replied.
“It means . . . ‘refuge.’ These places . . . refuges for forms of life . . . for biodiversity . . . in the ice.” She grimaced and took a deep breath.
“You said ‘places,’” Max said. “There’s more than one?”
Her eyes flickered as she faded in and out of consciousness. “Under the continent . . . active volcanoes. Heat rises. Through miles of ice . . . through seams, crevasses . . . It carves out openings. Caves. Refugia. There’s a whole system . . . like a big . . . ice subway.”
Max heard a thump behind him and turned around. A rope ladder had smacked against the wall and dropped to the ice floor.
Ingrid smiled. “That rope,” she said softly, “is what’s in my basket.”
The wind screeched like a thousand wounded animals as Max pushed Ingrid up the rungs of the ladder. Her right leg hung at a grotesque, broken-doll angle, and she choked back cries of pain as she hoisted herself with the power of her arms and one good leg.
“I got you!” Alex shouted, reaching down to clasp Ingrid’s arms and pull her the rest of the way.
The scientist rolled onto the snow, groaning. Alex’s face was deeply red, and Bitsy and Nigel were grayish shadows in the raging white storm, lit dimly by a sun that seemed stuck on the horizon. “The weather’s gotten worse!” Max shouted.
“Worse than you think!” Alex shouted back. “The dogs are gone!”
“What?” Ingrid cried out.
“I said the dogs are gone!” Alex said.
“Mine too?” Ingrid asked.
“Nigel spooked them!” Alex shouted. “He wanted to go back, to get you help! But he forgot the words! He just started shouting random stuff! When he got to ‘Hike!’ the sleds took off without him! Both of them.”
“Fool!” Ingrid shouted.
Now Bitsy was rushing toward them. “He’s awfully upset. Why don’t we climb down the ladder and wait down there until the storm blows over?”
“No way! Can’t . . . in my condition.” Ingrid struggled to sit up. “Please tell me you have the pack from my basket.”
“We do,” Alex said.
“I have flares in there,” Ingrid said. “Set some off. Back at base they’ll be looking for us.”
Alex disappeared into the storm. Moments later a line of red light flashed briefly. Max could hear it whistling overhead, but it was invisible in the whiteness.
“Help me up,” Ingrid said. “The dogs must be nearby. We just can’t see them. I know my babies. They wouldn’t just bolt, no matter what you tell them.”
As Max and Alex hooked her arms around their shoulders, she called out: “Roald! Ernest! Robert Falcon!”
“Those are dogs’ names?” Max said.
“After polar explorers,” Ingrid explained. “Come on. Let’s move. Grab the GPS from my coat pocket and show it to me. I’ll get us back to base if you keep me upright.”
As they stepped forward, she le
t out a scream. “Your leg!” Max said.
“I can do this,” she said through clenched teeth. “We’ll die if we stay here. Douglas! Frederica! Where are you?”
Max struggled to keep his balance while Ingrid leaned on him to keep the weight off her bad leg. The snow was caking on his goggles, the ice clinging to his hood. Nigel was with them now, apologizing like crazy. But Ingrid ignored him, summoning up all her strength, calling out names.
They walked for what felt like hours, Ingrid constantly checking the GPS, until finally she shouted, “Stop!”
She was pulling Max downward, sinking to her knees. “A minute . . . give me a minute . . . . My dogs abandoned me . . . . I was sure they wouldn’t go far . . . .”
“Lift her up, Max!” Alex shouted.
“I can’t!” Max said. “She’s too heavy!”
Bitsy ran to his side and tried to lift Ingrid, but she was pretty much dead weight now, muttering to herself.
“I don’t know what to do!” Nigel was yelling.
Max let go of Ingrid and ran to his side. He yanked open the pack and looked inside. “There are packs of flares, Nigel! Let’s get to work! Activate and toss!”
He glanced at Ingrid, whose face was now the same color as the snow. With a silent prayer for help, he began launching the last of the flares.
42
AFTER Max’s near-death experience by snowmobile in Greenland, even the sound of a lawn mower had made him scream. But now, wrapped in a blanket like a human burrito, he thought the snowmobile’s deafening whine beneath him was the sweetest ugly noise in the world. He couldn’t see a thing as it flew through the snow, but that was fine with him. Being rescued felt awesome.
It seemed like it had taken them hours to reach the refugio, but the trip back was quick. He, Alex, and Bitsy were squeezed onto one snowmobile, Ingrid and Nigel, the other.
As they stopped at the base, the driver helped Max unwrap himself. His name was Pablo, and his thick beard looked like a hedgehog clinging to his face. “Thanks,” Max said.