more concentrated in the tiny space. The different snow layers made stripes of light: pale powder blue where it hadn’t compacted, vivid neon where it had.
‘It’s a time machine,’ said Pierre. ‘The darker bands are summer snowfall. The lighter ones are winter. Wind blows more air into them so they’re less dense.’
I sat there and traced the layers, winter and summer, year after year. I counted back: the summer Luke was born; my winter wedding with Louise; the September I started my PhD. I’d gone back as far as the summer I finished primary school before the layers got too thin for me to tell them apart. My life didn’t feel like much compared with the vastness of the snow quietly piling up here.
A rap on the wooden board told me someone else wanted to admire the view. We lifted it up and scrambled out of the hole, being careful not to touch the thin wall. The sun outside dazzled me; I fumbled with my sunglasses before I went blind. The wind cut through my jumper like a razor.
I put on my coat and went to join the others. They were taking a break over by a folding table. Pierre snapped me off a piece of chocolate and gave me a hot cup of tea. It went stone cold in the time I took to drink it.
‘At fifty below, you can throw boiling water in the air and it freezes before it lands,’ said one of the students.
‘We should try it,’ said Pierre. ‘It’s supposed to get cold by the weekend. Big storm coming in.’
‘Send me a link to the video,’ I said. ‘I’ll be gone by then.’
Hard to imagine I’d be watching
Dr Who
with Luke in the living room. I looked over at our snow pit and thought of the light inside, the blue cathedral of the crevasse. I’d miss that. Other things, not so much.
There’d been a snow pit where Hagger died, I remembered. Except—
The idea hit me so hard I started to tremble. I grabbed Pierre’s arm.
‘Is that how you always dig snow pits? One covered, one open?’
‘Pretty much. Why?’
Some of the others had started to drift back to work. I ran to the coring rig and found Annabel. ‘The place where Hagger died – the Helbreen. How far is it from here?’
‘About thirty kilometres.’
‘I need to go there. Now.’
‘You don’t know the way.’
I could see she didn’t think I was serious. I ran over to a snowmobile and yanked on the starter cord. It was harder than it looked.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘I’m going to the Helbreen.’
‘You’ll kill yourself.’
‘Then you’d better come with me.’
Or else …
‘You don’t want someone else going off there without a buddy.’
The glacier was exactly as we’d left it: the jerrycans marking out the safe area, the yawning blue crevasse beyond. And the snow pit, half filled now with drifting snow. I jumped in and kicked against the walls. One stubbed my toe, so did the next, but the third disintegrated in a blizzard of collapsing snow. A ceiling appeared, a wooden board that had been covered by the drifts, making a small square cave. A red backpack lay on the ground.
I pulled off my mittens and unzipped the bag. There wasn’t much inside: a bar of chocolate, a Thermos (frozen solid), a topographic map, a pen and a green notebook.
I opened the notebook. My hands were already going numb – the thin liners were no match for the icy wind – but this was too important. I turned the pages, searching for any clue to what Hagger had been doing.
It looked like any other lab notebook. Neat columns of figures, measurements, interspersed with scrawled calculations and cryptic half-sentences.
Sulphite calibration
(double underlined);
Ratkowsky growth rate profile
;
Concentration of X.
Without careful reading, I couldn’t guess what it all meant. I could barely read the handwriting.
‘I need a wee,’ said Annabel. She went off behind a pile of moraine boulders at the edge of the glacier. I turned my back and kept reading.
A loose sheet of paper stuck out between the pages. I
M McInerney
J. S. Scott
Elizabeth Lee
Olivia Gaines
Craig Davidson
Sarah Ellis
Erik Scott de Bie
Kate Sedley
Lori Copeland
Ann Cook