In front of Averill was a cart with two rows of bagged lunches on it. They were for the higher-level scientists to take to their private laboratories, where they performed more sophisticated work than identifying plant samples using pictures on a screen: monitoring and maintaining the environments of the storage facilities to maximize species survival.
“It’s everyone’s favorite time,” Averill said with a grin. “Lunch-delivery time. Today’s contestants are Brendan, Alice, and Sam.”
Samantha pulled away from the eyepiece of the microscope and crossed the room to the cart. Brendan, boyish and sturdy, and Alice, her shiny black hair pushed behind her ears, were already standing there. Averill stuck out her fist, which had three straws in it. Brendan picked first, then Alice, and then Samantha.
Samantha’s was the shortest. She sighed. Almost all the higher-ups were in the same building, their offices in a long row, but there was one that required trudging in full arctic regalia out to the remote greenhouse belonging to Dr. Nils Hagen. The man himself was inoffensive, but the walk was brutal, and the trip took over an hour.
Averill handed her the only insulated bag, the one with “Hagen” written on it in blocky letters, and Samantha lifted it up in a toast to the laboratory peons. They hooted in response, and she went out to retrieve her coat.
The first breath of wind made her aware of all the places she hadn’t covered—a line of skin above her cheeks and below the goggles, a narrow channel on one side of her hood that wasn’t drawn as tightly. She tugged her coat sleeve down to cover a patch of wrist skin not shielded by her glove and started the hike.
Hagen spent his mornings in the greenhouse with his orchids. Everyone from the peons to the head of the entire Ark Project had tried to convince him to move into the facility with the rest of the scientists, but he had refused. And because scientists who qualified for his position had been scarce—and were gone now, since everyone except them had evacuated Earth—he had to be catered to. He got all his work done anyway, so there wasn’t much to complain about except the inconvenience.
All around her was white. Even the sharp-edged hills in the distance showed only the faintest brown of earth through the snow and ice. Samantha had first arrived in Svalbard by helicopter, in the evening, so the settlement had shown itself in orange ropes of light, the paths that connected the low buildings. The land had glowed blue—beautiful in the way that a Rothko painting was beautiful, because it was empty enough to shrink a person and then swallow them.
There wasn’t a soul in sight. It wasn’t difficult to believe, in Svalbard, that the world was about to end.
She made it to the greenhouse, the glass reflecting white back to her, simultaneously glaring and invisible. Hagen’s little cabin was right next to the structure, a brown smudge set at the base of one of the hills that hugged their little settlement close. She pulled the first door open with a crunch and searched the steamy greenhouse for a sign of Hagen. Most of the time he came out to retrieve his lunch, so she didn’t even have to take off her goggles. She doubted he knew her face, though she had been there once a week for the last several months. But today there was no sign of him.
Samantha took off her gloves, her goggles, her hood. She tugged her scarf down, tasting wet wool, and unzipped her coat. She left everything on the ground in the entryway and opened the door to the greenhouse.
Humidity clung to her cheeks and eyelashes. There were three rows of plants, with two aisles between them. Everywhere she looked, there were leaves and stems and flowers of almost every color. A bloodred Cymbidium with half a dozen flowers was on one of the low shelves, the lips between the lower sepals touched with white. Beside it was some kind of pink Oncidium with delicate branches that unfolded into tiny flowers, no larger than her fingernails. And beyond them both were increasingly stranger and more colorful orchids that looked almost monstrous, their labella bulging, their petals thinning to needles.
“They grow in every color except blue and black.” Through the leaves and flowers she saw the slope of a shoulder and Nils Hagen’s pale hand cupping one of the flowers near him.
“But…” Samantha stepped into the greenhouse, forgetting the sack in her hand, to point to one of the nearest flowers, another Cymbidium with a fuchsia central column. The petals looked black to her.
“Just a very deep purple-red,” Hagen said, shaking his head. He tilted one of the flowers up toward the light, and she saw that it was dark burgundy, the color of a glass of Barolo. “It’s the same with the so-called black Paphiopedilum.”
“And the glistening sun orchid,” Samantha added with a smile of triumph when Hagen looked taken aback. “My mom loved them, always had them in the house. I guess she primed me to study horticulture.”
“And your mother is now…”
“Dead,” Samantha supplied. “Everybody’s family is dead around here, you know.”
“Yes.” Hagen’s brow furrowed. “I keep forgetting.”
Samantha held up the bag that held Hagen’s lunch. “Your tuna sandwich.”
“I don’t suppose you would help me with something first.” Hagen looked her over, and she returned the favor. He was older but not quite elderly, his hair threaded with silver and his face deeply lined. He was tall, with rounded shoulders, and trim, though there was a bubble of a belly reined in by his leather belt. “You look strong enough for the task. It requires more than one set of hands.”
“Sure,” Samantha said. “Beats clicking a bunch of pictures on a screen all afternoon.”
“Ah, so you work in species identification,” Hagen said. “You must have good color vision, then, or they would have shoved you into the Ark Flora’s storage area to play a highly sophisticated game of Tetris with all the identified samples.”
Samantha laughed. “All the better, since I was never any good at puzzles. But I’m good at detail, generally. And tedium. Highly tolerant of tedium.”
“Bodes well for a scientist.”
“I’m not a scientist,” she said, smiling. “I’m a horticulturist.”
“You have a master’s of science, like everyone else left on Earth right now,” Hagen said. “And you’re working on the very last scientific endeavor ever to take place on this planet. You are indeed a scientist. Now, come and help me with this shelf.”
An old wooden desk stood at the back of the greenhouse, wedged against the wall. There were two shelves just above it, one full of books and the other empty, sagging on one side where the bracket had broken. The small pots that had once been on the shelf, evidently, were now stacked on the desk itself, on top of notebooks and papers and books. A mug with vines painted on it stood right near the back. It was lopsided—clearly handmade, with the indents of fingers baked into its surface.
“Now, if you could hold the wood up—it’s solid wood, heavier than it looks,” Hagen said. “I will put up a new bracket. I’d rather not have to detach the shelf entirely, as it was quite difficult to get straight in the first place.”
He spoke with only a faint accent, but in the slower, halting way that Samantha was used to from non-native English speakers.
She leaned over the desk and braced herself against the shelf, pushing it into the wall and lifting it from beneath at the same time. Hagen took a screwdriver to the bracket, and once it was free, she realized the shelf was, indeed, heavier than she had expected. She gave a surprised grunt, and pushed closer to the wall, her arms shaking.
“You know,” she said, her voice strained from the effort, “it may not be worth fixing a shelf you’re just going to abandon in two months.”