RAYEL TRIED to explain to Nunu why they needed to go south, but more than ever she felt the limits of language. Nunu clicked and whistled, and Rayel explained, for days on end, the water and air around them slowly growing colder. She told Nunu, again, about her gift for the cold and how she had to follow it to the end, to see how much she could withstand and how far she could explore. She owed it to the gift. But her words upset Nunu.
The dolphin was desperate to go to warmer waters. She grew thinner in the cold water, her whistles sounding almost like sneezes. Rayel couldn’t bring herself to go north—but couldn’t leave her friend, either. They were stuck. The weight rested on Rayel’s chest, pressing down on her heart. No matter what she decided, it would be the wrong decision.
Then one morning, Nunu was gone.
She’d made the choice that Rayel couldn’t and had left in the night. Rayel waited all day to see if she’d return. But she didn’t.
Two mornings after that, Rayel headed south.
Alone. Again.
RAYEL WAS UPSET. Of course she was. She missed Nunu terribly. But she was also grateful; by leaving, the dolphin had given her permission to head south.
Rayel had never been special before, not at anything, not ever. She was the opposite of special, except to her brother, and maybe to Nunu, who had never seen a human before and therefore thought she was magical.
But here it was: with this gift for cold, she suddenly was special . . . but only if she stayed in cold parts of the world. She could survive where no one else could. She wore the same summer shift she’d started her voyage in, and she used the blankets to provide more cushion to her bed but not to cover herself up. She was warm all the time. Or maybe, more to the point, she wasn’t cold. Ever.
WEEKS LATER, when Rayel saw her first icebergs, she didn’t know what they were. All of a sudden, the horizon broke up into jagged humps: elbows and sharp corners. And as she sailed among them and dove and swam around them, she learned that some were just slabs of floating ice, and others—more worrisome for a boat—were giant craggy chunks that descended like mountains well below the surface, showing only their icy peaks above water. She pulled in her sails and began to row, winding between them. Soon she found a current that took her slowly southward, leaving her free to steer, with her paddle like a rudder. Icebergs rose like towers above her. She looked around in awe.
Yet she wasn’t cold. Not a single shiver. The ice towers creaked. The birds had long since disappeared, and she couldn’t see any fish in the water, but she felt . . . fine.
Rayel couldn’t feel the cold; but maybe it was more correct to say that the cold couldn’t feel her. That was what it seemed like, anyway: the cold was out there, searching for something warm and alive to torment, and it walked right past her, not even realizing that she was there. It didn’t find her and freeze her, and she slipped through it safely.
She missed Nunu all the time. If she hadn’t been so toughened by now, she would have cried.
OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, alone on the craft and steering into worse and worse weather, she wondered how smart her logic was. What if, for example, she had never discovered her gift? Would she still have a duty to follow it? And what if (to return to her earlier daydream) her gift had been something crazy: to survive on the surface of the sun? Would she have the duty to follow that adventure to its end? Did a gift naturally bring with it the duty to use the gift? Or could a person, say, turn the gift down and go north with the dolphins?
But Nunu was long gone, so there was no reason to go back. And there was something exciting about being the first explorer to ever find the true south. Rayel kept going.
When she finally reached land, she wasn’t even sure at first that it was land. There was by now so much ice everywhere that she was constantly navigating through it. She moved mostly by latching onto slow currents and steering between icebergs. The water was deeper than she’d ever known water could be, so deep that she couldn’t see to the bottom, where it grew black. Food was scarce; she was eating her dried stores, which was a worry.
She’d see what there was here to see, then turn back north and find food. She anchored, roughly, to a giant shard of ice and dove into the water, swimming the short distance to shore, where she shook off as much water as she could before it froze into her clothes. Glad for her light boots because of the sharp ice, she climbed a long, low hill and stared in every direction. The land was empty of anything but snow and ice. It was beautiful—and more colorful than she would have imagined. Under the bright blue sky, the land rolled out in dunes. The snow, crusted by time and wind into small regular waves, glinted blue with purple shadows. Far off, a patch of clear ice glowed green.
Distance was impossible to judge.
And—what was that? Near the horizon was . . . something. A mound of snow containing a lighted circle, like the opening to a cave, except bright. It glimmered for just a moment as the sun hit it, then disappeared into the dimming and purpling snow. She wanted to know what it was, but the day was quickly waning. A goal for tomorrow. She shivered with excitement (not cold) and headed back to the boat.
The next morning, however, she woke to loud cracking. The boat, as if it had simply given up upon reaching shore, creaked and boomed and finally broke apart around her, crushed by the ice. While it was still groaning, she scrambled and brought out her food stores and everything she thought might be necessary. Then she stood on the ice and watched the boat crumple and sink.
It didn’t strike her, until all the excitement was over, that she was now stuck in the far south. She had no way to get back home. There was only forward into the snow.
So she picked up her sacks of food and walked toward the interesting lighted mound from yesterday, the glint of light that might be something or nothing.
THE SNOW WAS COLD, she knew, but she wasn’t bothered by it. The wind, though—it blew sharp snowflakes into her face like pins and whipped her icy clothing against her in slaps. And underfoot, the snow’s top layer of crust, ridged and sharpened by the wind, cut into her boots and feet. Every few dozen steps, she’d break through the crust to the soft fluffy snow underneath, plunging as far as her knee or even her thigh before catching herself with her other foot or her hands. She was sure there was ground somewhere underneath all this snow, but she only really knew this because she could see, at the top of some of the hills, bleak gray-brown rock, blown clean and bare. She hoped she could find the cave opening; she hoped it was a cave. She really, really hoped she could find trees. Something to build a new boat with, now that the sea had devoured her first one. Finding wood didn’t seem likely, at least not anywhere near here. But who knew how far the land went?
Anyway, sulking wouldn’t help anything. First things first. Find somewhere to get out of the wind. Somewhere to rest and store any food she might find (but what?).
Still running all these thoughts through her head, she struggled through the snow toward the lighted mound. As she got closer, it looked even more like a cave. She tried not to let her hopes get too high.
The sun was already setting. It had barely even risen above the rim of the horizon, and it was already going down. She hurried. She didn’t want to sit out in the dark through the long night. Maybe she could build a snow fort. That might not be a bad idea. She’d look at the lighted hill and then build a snow shelter to crawl into and store her food. Sleep until morning.
She finally reached the lighted hill. And when she got to it, she saw that she’d hit some good luck. It was a cave—but a very strange cave.
Glowing faintly, a tunnel led into the hill and down. She peered as far as she could, but she couldn’t see to the end of the passageway as it curved around. The source of the light was somewhere far ahead.
What was down there?
Rayel could see only two real options: the tunnel led to something good or to something dangerous. And if it was good, why not rush in? And if dangerous, why not rush as well? It had been weeks since Nunu left, months since she’d lost Solomon. She’d been alone for so long now that it was hard to comprehend what the danger might be. But surely—surely light meant something intelligent? Maybe even human?
Rayel stooped to enter the tunnel, which gradually descended. She walked a long time. The light source was always ahead of her, its glimmers refracting on the ice around her. The walls were made of ice, but the air seemed warm, and beneath her booted feet, the floor felt smooth like well-worn rock. She walked until she could no longer see her breath, and then the tunnel turned a sharp corner and opened. It opened out and out.
And it was glorious.