“Absolutely not.”
Alistair didn’t even look up from the calibration chart he was annotating. The words were flat, final, a granite wall erected in the middle of the common room.
Kenji, however, was a cheerful, persistent river, and simply flowed around the obstacle.
“Come on, Finch. The air quality sensors at Delta-7 are due for a data swap.” He continued.
“You’re going anyway. Taking Vivi is just… efficient.”
He beamed at Vivi, who was nursing a cup of tea, trying to make herself as small as possible in the corner armchair.
“It’ll do you good! Get some fresh air. See the sights.”
Vivi suppressed a grimace. The “sights,” as far as she could tell, consisted of infinite variations of white and grey.
The “fresh air” was a razor blade to the lungs.
Still, the thought of being trapped inside for another day, staring at the walls of her room and the gaping void where her talent used to be, was even less appealing.
“It’s a five-hour round trip in optimal conditions, which we never have,” Alistair countered, his pen scratching aggressively on the paper.
“She’s not trained for off-station excursions. It’s a liability.”
“I won’t touch anything,” Vivi said, her voice quiet but firm. “I’ll just sit in the vehicle.”
Alistair finally looked at her, his gaze sweeping over her cashmere sweater and dark jeans as if they were evidence of her fundamental unsuitability for survival.
“The vehicle is not a tour bus, Dubois. It’s a mobile lab. Every ounce of weight, every cubic inch of space, is a calculated resource.”
“She weighs, what, fifty-five kilos?” Kenji clapped his hands together. “The data drive weighs two. It’s a rounding error, man.” He continued.
“Let her see the glacier fields. Show her what we’re actually fighting for out here.”
That last line landed.
Alistair’s shoulders tightened. He hated the idea, she could see it in the rigid set of his jaw.
He hated the intrusion, the disruption to his routine.
But Kenji had reframed it not as a favor to her, but as an extension of his work—a mission.
His proprietary passion warred with his ingrained irritation.
He let out a long, suffering sigh.
“Fine. Be ready in twenty. And if you’re not wearing the station-issue outer layers, the deal is off.”
He pinned her with a final, warning glare before stalking out of the room.
Kenji gave her a triumphant wink. “His bark is way worse than his bite. Have fun!”
An hour later, “fun” felt like a gross misrepresentation.
Vivi was encased in so many layers of thermal gear and goose down that she felt like a poorly packaged parcel.
She sat in the passenger seat of the Sno-Cat, a tracked vehicle that rumbled over the frozen landscape with the grace of a dyspeptic tank.
Alistair drove in silence, his entire focus on the seemingly featureless expanse ahead.
The world outside was brutally, incomprehensibly vast. Snow and sky bled into one another, a disorienting panorama of pale immensity.
Occasionally, Alistair would point a gloved finger. “Pingo field to the east,” he’d grunt.
Or, “That’s the terminus of the Aput glacier. Losing about three meters a year.”
He spoke of the land in terms of data and loss.
Vivi, a woman who had built her life on interpreting the ephemeral and the unseen, tried to find a different language for it.
She saw the subtle blue shadows in the snowdrifts, the fine crystalline dust kicked up by their tracks, the way the low-hanging sun painted the ice formations in hues of apricot and lavender.
It was a silent, scentless beauty, stark and absolute. It was lonely, but it was also magnificent.
They had been driving for nearly two hours when the change began.
It was subtle at first. The light flattened, the delicate shadows vanished, and the horizon, already a tenuous concept, dissolved completely.
Alistair swore under his breath. “There it is.”
“What is it?” Vivi asked, peering through the windshield. It looked like they were driving into a bottle of milk.
“Whiteout. A ground blizzard.” He said.
“Wasn’t on the forecast, but the katabatic winds can be unpredictable.” His voice had shed its irritable edge, replaced by a sharp, focused calm that was far more unsettling.
He slowed the Sno-Cat to a crawl, his eyes scanning instruments on the dash. The world outside was no longer visible.
There was no up, no down, no forward, only a swirling, luminous void.
The vehicle lurched, then stopped.
Alistair cut the engine.
The sudden silence was absolute, broken only by a low, mournful howl that seemed to come from everywhere at once. The wind.
“We wait,” he said. It wasn’t a suggestion.
“Could be twenty minutes. Could be eight hours. Trying to move in this is suicide.”
He went through a methodical checklist, his movements economical and precise.
He radioed their position back to the station, checked their emergency supplies, and noted their fuel levels.
Vivi watched him, a knot of anxiety tightening in her stomach.
He was in his element here—a man of systems and protocols, facing a quantifiable crisis. She was just… cargo.
Useless, as he’d always believed.
The first hour passed in near silence.
The cab of the Sno-Cat, which had felt spacious enough on the journey out, began to shrink.
The temperature inside plummeted without the engine running.
Alistair switched it on for ten minutes every half hour, a noisy, vibrating respite from the encroaching cold.
During one of the silent, freezing intervals, Vivi found herself shivering uncontrollably. Her teeth chattered, a humiliatingly audible sign of weakness.
Alistair noticed. Of course he did. He noticed everything.
“We need to conserve body heat,” he said, his tone that of a lecturer stating a physical law.
He reached into the back and pulled out a foil-lined survival blanket. It crinkled loudly in the suffocating quiet.
“Here,” he said, unfolding it. “We’ll need to share.”
Vivi’s breath hitched.
The idea of being in close proximity to him, of sharing a space so intimate, felt more dangerous than the storm outside.
But the cold was a physical, undeniable thing, seeping through her expensive, station-issue layers and into her bones.
She nodded, unable to form words.
He shifted in his seat, turning toward her. The space was impossibly small.
To get under the blanket, he had to move so close that his knee brushed hers. A jolt, sharp and unexpected, shot through her.
He draped the rustling blanket over both of them, tucking it in around their shoulders.
The world shrank to the space of a single bench seat.
The howling wind was a distant thing now, the storm a theoretical problem.
The immediate reality was the solid wall of Alistair’s body against hers.
The rough texture of his parka, the heat radiating from him, the sheer physical fact of his presence.
Her shivering began to subside, replaced by a thrumming awareness that had nothing to do with the cold.
She could hear him breathing, a slow, steady rhythm next to her ear.
She was hyper-aware of the slightest movement: the shift of his weight, the clink of his watch against a zipper.
Her own world, once defined by a symphony of scents, had become a universe of tactile information.
The press of his shoulder against hers, the warmth of his thigh a mere inch from her own. It was overwhelming. Grounding.
For a long time, neither of them spoke.
The professional animosity, the arguments over data and frivolity—it all seemed absurd, a flimsy construct from another lifetime.
Out here, erased by the white, they weren’t a scientist and a perfumer.
They were just two people, a pocket of warmth and life in a world of ice.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through her.
“Yes,” she whispered, surprised to find it was true. “It’s… quiet.”
He made a sound that might have been a humorless laugh. “The wind is gusting to sixty knots. It’s anything but quiet.”
“No, I mean… in here.” She tilted her head back slightly, her cheek brushing the cold-weather fabric covering his shoulder. “It’s still.”
He didn’t answer. She chanced a look at him.
In the dim, ambient glow filtering through the snow-blasted windshield, his face was all sharp angles and shadows.
The perpetual scowl was gone, replaced by a look of unguarded intensity. His eyes, the color of a stormy sea, were fixed on her.
He saw her watching him. She saw the flicker in his gaze, a spark of something that wasn’t irritation or scientific curiosity. It was something more fundamental. Human.
Her heart hammered against her ribs.
The air in the cab grew thick, heavy with unspoken things.
He was so close. The faint scent she was beginning to associate with him—clean cold, wool, and coffee—was a phantom memory in her mind, a ghost limb she could almost feel.
All she had was the sight of him, the sound of his breathing, the solid warmth of his body.
Slowly, as if moving against some immense pressure, he raised a hand.
His glove was bulky, but his touch was surprisingly gentle as he brushed a stray strand of hair from her forehead, tucking it back into her beanie.
The gesture was small, almost nothing, but it shattered the stillness between them.
His fingers lingered for a second against her temple. His gaze dropped to her lips.
This was it. A moment suspended in time, outside of logic, outside of reason.
The world had been reduced to this tiny, charged space.
He leaned in, his expression unreadable, his intention undeniable.
Vivi’s breath caught in her throat. She didn’t move, didn’t breathe.
She felt a strange sense of inevitability, of rightness, like a formula finally solving for x.
His face was inches from hers. She could see the faint stubble on his jaw, the chapped texture of his lips.
The kiss was a certainty, a conclusion waiting to be written.
And then, he stopped.
A muscle in his jaw clenched. He pulled back as if he’d touched a live wire, his hand dropping away.
He turned his head sharply, staring out into the blinding, featureless white. The motion was so abrupt it felt violent.
The connection shattered, leaving a vacuum in its wake.
The unspoken attraction, now acknowledged and rejected in one swift movement, hung between them, thick and suffocating.
They remained huddled together under the blanket, their bodies still touching, but the quality of the contact had changed.
Before, it had been a shared necessity. Now, it was a source of excruciating tension.
The cold seeping back into the cab was nothing compared to the chill that emanated from the man beside her.
He had built his wall back up, higher and colder than ever.
And Vivi was left on the other side, shivering for an entirely different reason.