TWENTY-SEVEN

WE’RE SEVEN DAYS out when Stan finds a note hidden somewhere on the boat. It is typed. It isn’t signed. It says, Good luck. And it took us a week to find it.

“What the hell?” says Stan, holding it up. It’s the first time he’s spoken in five days.

“This is so creepy,” says Emily. “Do you think . . . did someone know we were coming?”

“Maybe someone knew someone was coming,” Stan says. “But that doesn’t mean that we were the ones they were expecting.”

“But they were expecting somebody,” I say.

“So can we even trust any of this?” Emily says. “And who is ‘they’? And where did you even find that thing?”

“Does it matter who they are? And I found it in Ted’s blanket. We put him in there first thing, because he looked so awful, and then I didn’t see it until today when I was changing his blanket and it fell out.”

“Stan,” I start, and he shoots me a look, and I change the subject pronto. If this gets him talking, this is what we’ll talk about. I turn to speak directly to Emily. “If whoever wrote the note is with the same people who did all of this . . . if it’s the government . . . they could track us. They tracked us before. Bobby told me that I already know where we need to go. Which is nonsense, but . . . if Bobby thought that, then maybe they did too. Maybe they already know exactly where we are at all times and can find us no matter where we go. Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

“What do you mean?” Emily says. “We go through all of this, and then suddenly it doesn’t matter?”

“She means that we’re just kids,” Stan says. “We’re not terrorists or revolutionaries. We don’t have military training, and we don’t know how to outsmart the government. We can try. But if trying slows us down from getting wherever Ted and Tara and Callie and Greta need to go? Then why bother?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I mean that maybe we’re screwed, but we’re alive. Maybe this boat is bugged. Maybe we’ll all die. But right now, we’re here, and we’re not dead. And neither are the Icelings. And it doesn’t matter how smart we are or how much we care, because that won’t keep a boat running forever. But we can try to take it where we need to go.”

“And where’s that, Lorna?” Emily says. “Where do we need to go?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and I can tell Emily’s about to jump down my throat, so I do what I can to calm her. “But I’ll know soon. I’m working on it. I’m close.”

EMILY AND STAN leave me alone to finish my turn on watch duty. I lean against the deck, thinking about everything I don’t know, and the world feels like it’s slipping out from under me. I told Emily I was on the brink of a breakthrough, but the truth is I’m so far from the brink that I don’t even know which direction it’s in.

I’m so tired, and all I want to do is sleep, and then, all of a sudden, there is Callie. She’s standing right next to me, somehow having made it over to me silently, and her hand is on my shoulder. She smiles, and I choose to believe she’s smiling at me. She takes my binoculars and leans against the deck next to me, and I lean against her. I lean against her because if I don’t I will collapse. I rest the side of my head against the side of hers, and then I squeeze her around the middle, and then I leave her to take over on watch. I go down below deck and get some sleep. It’s not any good, the sleep. But I get it anyway.

WHILE I WAS sleeping, Stan sketched out a map of the ship and diagrammed the steering board with instructions. He’s opening up a bit again—I hope, at least. He’s still not sleeping, but I guess I can live with that if it means he’s back to talking. I know his talking again is a gesture he’s making for me and Emily, and I’m glad for it.

For a while, I study the diagram, which was beside me in my bunk when I woke up. But after a couple of minutes, I can no longer see or make sense of the images in front of me. All I can see is that bear. How it looked so eager to kill us. And then I see Ted killing it. And I see the soldiers. And their rifles are raised and spitting sparks that are actually bullets at the already-dead pods, just making them more dead than they already were. How did they not know they were already dead? Maybe they didn’t even take the time to notice, because they were there to kill them, and then once they were satisfied that they had, they shot them up until they were literally nothing anymore, and then they burnt them up. Then they died too. They died when those drones spun around each other, like it was a dance, and then collided, everything exploding and on fire. And then I have a terrible thought, which is that all of that happened because Ted, who was so furious that the pods came up dead, flung all that fury at the drones, those instruments of death hovering above us.

Up on the deck, I hear what I think is Stan teaching Emily how to tie knots. And from Stan’s tone and cadence, it sounds like Emily’s a quick learner. I start to make my way up to the deck, and as I go I can hear their conversation more clearly. I guess Emily’s such a quick learner that she’s through talking about knots altogether and is now telling Stan about how she’s seen somewhere between fifty and two hundred dolphins in her lifetime.

“I hope we end up somewhere tropical,” I hear her say. “I’m ready for a complete change of scenery. Cabana boys and everything.”

Right, like a trip like this could ever end with a piña colada and cabana boys.

Oh my God.

Cabana boys.

Oh my God.

I know where we’re going.

I run up the stairs as fast as I can. Stan and Emily look up at me, like “Hi, Lorna, did you figure it out?” Guess what, guys, I totally did.

“We go to the Galápagos.”

They’re still sitting, but they’re staring up at me, as though to ask, “Um, what?” And I’m grinning like a genius who just discovered something I didn’t know I knew, which was that I know where we’re going. I know where to find more Icelings.

“The Galápagos?” says Stan finally.

“The Galápagos,” I say.

Tara and Greta come up from below deck, which I choose to interpret as a heraldic sign of my discovery. I know it isn’t, but still.

“Why?” Emily says. “How do you know?”

“Because that’s where my parents are.”

“Let’s try again,” Emily says. “How do you know?”

“Listen,” I say, and then I tell them.

I tell them about how it was my dad’s research crew that discovered the Arctic Orphans. I tell the story he tells about the boat and the infants, which they’d all heard before, but maybe not exactly like this. I tell them how, just one night after I saw Stan at the hospital the night Callie had her scariest fit yet, my parents took me to dinner to tell me how proud they were of me for taking such good care of Callie. That they were so proud, in fact, that they’d decided to leave Callie home alone with me while they both went off to the Galápagos to investigate a bizarre meteorological/seismic confluence. I tell them how, after that dinner, my dad got all funny, almost trancelike, and told me a story—a memory—about how when he found Callie and the other Icelings, he saw a trembling field of ice. And that the sky was purple and yellow, and it smelled like lightning, but he couldn’t see any. He asked me if I knew what lightning smelled like, and then he told me, “Don’t. Don’t know that.”

“He told me—like he’s always told me—that he found them on a boat. But everything he described—”

“It’s what we just saw,” said Emily. “On that island. That’s . . . that’s what . . . wow.”

Stan’s and Emily’s eyes are wide. Because now we all know. We know that the weird new details my dad slipped into his old story after the restaurant were what actually happened when they found the baby Icelings, and the boat story was just a cover for that. The trembling field of ice, the sky going purple and yellow while the clouds moved with a mind of their own to shine the sun down on a field of baby Icelings. It’s the same thing that happened when we found the baby Icelings, only the ones we found never even had a chance.

“So do you believe me now?” I ask. “That if that’s where they are, then that’s where we should go? Because if the unusual activity that they’re there to study is at all similar to what we just saw . . . then that must mean there are more of them there. Right? If that’s true, then we have to go. That’s where Bobby wants us to go, that’s why he said I knew where to go. I don’t know what will happen when we get there. It’s not like we can save anyone, but . . .”

“No,” Stan says, cutting me off.

“What?” I say, terrified and, frankly, totally shocked that he’s not even going to consider it. “Are you serious?”

“Oh, wait, no,” he says. “No. That’s not what I meant—I didn’t mean no. I meant no, we can’t not go there. But also no, we can’t think that by going there we’re not going to be able to help. Not after seeing what we just saw, going through what we just went through.”

“All right then,” says Emily, her smile wide. “Let’s do it.”

Stan starts charting the course. He asks if I know which island, and I remember my phone. I finally got it to charge, and miraculously it still turns on. But I can't call or text anyone or do much of anything else with it either, because the only apps that open are the ones that don't require access to Wi-Fi or a cellular network, neither of which we have out here. But I do have the address of where they’re staying and where their office is, written down in my notes app. I bring it up to Stan, and he grins at me, then puts his head back down to complete the course.

“We’ve got a plan, kid sister!” I shout triumphantly at Callie. I know she doesn’t understand what I’m saying, but after I say it, she smiles. And I don’t know if it means what I want it to. But right now, I don’t care.

And then, down below deck, a phone rings.