The icebreaker we stole was a piece of junk called the Winter’s Ghost. It smelled like diesel and old fish guts. Every time the ice shifted, the whole boat groaned like it was gonna come apart. But it moved. That’s all that mattered. We’d been stuck inside for three days. Watched the world go from grey water to just… white. Nothing else.
Caiman was staring at the radar screen. Green light on his face. “Land,” he said. “Or ice. Something solid. Five miles.”
“That’s it,” Borealis whispered. He was drawing in the fog on the window. Circles and lines. He did that when he was nervous. “Heat matches the base. It’s bigger than the blueprints said.”
Kenji was working on his knife. The scraping sound was steady. He hadn’t said much since that warehouse. Since he saw that face. I knew it was stuc
