“Char for dinner?” he said with a wink, and she made a high-pitched squeal he’d never heard from her, hopping from one foot to the other as if the ground had become too hot and the boat was her only refuge. It had been a long time since they’d eaten anything so fresh. The rod was strung; he had an orange spinner in his pocket, and a sharp hunting knife on his belt. He went inside to grab a container for the fish and scooped up some of the candled ice from the shore to put in the bottom. Iris was already waiting in the boat, alert with excitement. Augie gave the dinghy a good push, then leaped in as it floated away from the shore.
Augustine rowed while Iris sat in the bow, facing the island and running her hands through the water. Had she ever been in a boat before? he wondered. She seemed so small, dwarfed by the scale of the mountains before her, the island, the lake itself. Her shoulders seemed too narrow to hold a human together. When they’d rowed far enough out, he put down the oars and took up the rod. He’d fished before, as a boy, but now he felt clumsy and uncertain. He toyed with the reel for a moment and the mechanics of casting came rushing back to him. His first cast wasn’t very good, but his second went farther and landed with a soft plop. He began to slowly reel it in, just enough to keep the spinner dancing at the end of the line. Iris watched him closely to see how he did it. After he’d reeled it in, he cast again, then handed her the rod. She took it without hesitation and began reeling. They passed the rod back and forth, Augie casting, Iris reeling, but they didn’t have to wait long. There was a jerk on the line and the tip of the rod bent toward the water, softly at first, then sharply, until the rod was inches from the surface of the lake. Iris’s eyes widened and her grip tightened. She looked to him for instruction.
“Hold tight and keep reeling it in. Looks like you hooked a good one.”
The fish fought harder the closer she dragged it to their little boat. At first Augie thought he should take the rod from her and reel it in himself, but she was doing well. Soon the fish was splashing against the side of the boat, churning up white froth. He got out the net and scooped it up, guessing it to be a five-pound Arctic char, longer than one of Iris’s arms and twice as thick. It flopped in the bottom of the dinghy, exhausted but determined to fling itself back into the water. Augustine got out his knife and was about to plunge the tip into the char’s brain in order to sever its spinal cord. He paused and looked up at Iris, remembering her tenderness toward the wolf that night at the hangar.
“You might not want to watch,” he said.
She shook her head gallantly and kept her eyes trained on the fish.
He severed the char’s spine with the knife, slid the hook out of its mouth, then ran his knife through the gills, a short cut on either side. He held the fish over the side of the boat while it bled out, dark, thick streams running down the length of the tail fin and into the clear, cold lake water. He looked up at Iris and caught her wrinkling her nose.
He laughed at her expression. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “Can’t eat live fish.”
“I’ll do the next one,” she said in defiance.
Augie laid the char down in the container he’d prepared, a pink stain spreading across the ice. He rinsed his hands and his knife in the lake and folded the blade back into the handle.
“All right,” he said. “How about you cast this time?”
He passed her the rod and showed her how to hold the line with her pointer finger and release it at the last minute.
She nodded impatiently. “I know,” she said, and waved him off. “Give me some room.”
AFTER A FEAST of baked char and canned peas and powdered mashed potatoes with plenty of powdered garlic mixed in, Iris and Augie sat outside their tent and watched the ripples on the lake, curling across the surface like ribbons of light. When Augustine woke in his Adirondack chair later, it was impossible to tell how long he’d been out—the water continued to ripple, the sun still blazed down on his bare feet. Across the lake he saw a small herd of musk oxen drinking at the shore. He tugged the broad-brimmed hat he’d found in the cook tent down over his eyes and squinted across the water. There were eight of them, and almost hidden in the great shaggy layers of their half-shed winter coats was a ninth, a tiny calf pressed against the side of its mother as she drank from the lake. He turned to Iris, but her chair was empty and she was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she was asleep. Augie struggled to his feet, pulling himself up by the rough plywood arms of the chair, and went down to the edge of the water.
The musk oxen continued to bury their noses in the shallows. He watched the little calf become impatient, braying and scuffing its hoof on the soft earth, nudging its head against the hindquarters of its thirsty mother.
“Umingmak,” he murmured under his breath. It was the Inuit word for musk oxen; he couldn’t say where he’d learned it or how he’d remembered it. The bearded ones.
He raised his hands to his face and felt the clumps of wiry hair on his chin and neck, the long tufts on his head—still thick after all these years. He smiled, and felt the corners of his mouth with his fingertips, just to be sure he was doing it right.
FOURTEEN
THE WORK WAS a relief. Sully didn’t want to take a break and lose the single-minded concentration that was keeping her thoughts corralled, but she was so exhausted that her concentration was slipping anyway. Thebes had been working alongside her in the comm. pod for much of the morning. They hadn’t spoken about the spacewalk—they hadn’t spoken about anything except the task at hand. Sully was grateful for the silence. Getting the new comm. system online was all she could manage. She feared that the slightest empathetic gesture would undo her and she’d wind up back in her bunk, the curtain drawn, staring at her hands but seeing Devi, hidden beneath the bulk of her white suit, becoming smaller, smaller, and vanishing. Thebes was the one to suggest they break for lunch.
She watched him slip down the entry node ahead of her. For the first time she noticed that even in zero G the shape had gone out of his shoulders. Thebes seemed half-empty, like a tube of toothpaste that’s almost used up, and she realized she hadn’t given any thought to the rest of the crew. It wasn’t just her tragedy, it was theirs too. All of them had watched Devi float away: Sully might have been there in person, but the rest of them had seen it all through the helmet cams. The same moment was stuck on replay in everyone’s head, not just in hers. She had to remind herself that she wasn’t alone. She went down the entry node after Thebes and landed on Little Earth, feeling the weight of her body return to her.
The rest of the crew—Thebes and Harper, Tal and Ivanov—were sitting around the table waiting for her. She saw tears sliding down Ivanov’s cheeks and realized she was crying too—silently releasing the water that had been building behind her eyes since she woke up that morning. She licked a salty tear from her lip and sat down with them. They passed around the last tinfoil dish of shepherd’s pie, one of the premade meals they’d been saving for a special occasion. They ate in silence, passed the dish again, ate some more. When it was empty and the trays had been scraped clean, Ivanov took Tal’s and Harper’s hands, and the others followed his example. They bowed their heads together, chins tucked into their chests.