Read Online The Arctic Code by Matthew J. Kirby - Free Book Online Page A

Telluric?
    She closed the lid to the case and hoisted it back where it came from. The nearby crates bore labels that made about the same amount of sense to her. There were TELLURIC TRANSISTORS and FIELD PERIMETER RODS and TELLURIC CONDUCTION RODS . She pulled out her Sync, looked up telluric , and found it was just a word for something related to the earth.
    Great. Earth.
    Given that her mom was a geologist, and the G.E.T. drilled for oil, this wasn’t exactly an astounding discovery.
    She sighed and switched off her flashlight to save power. Then she looked around for a comfortable place to sit and couldn’t find one. On top of that, the unremitting engine noise had already started to feel like a pressure on her ears.
    Eight hours.
    This was going to be a long flight.
    A fter an hour of doing nothing, Eleanor turned her attention back to the crates. She forced herself to look at each one, just in case there was something interesting. That took up another hour or so but didn’t result in anything new or useful.
    She pulled out her Sync, intending to reread her mom’s texts, but decided that perhaps she should conserve the device’s power. She didn’t know when she would next have the opportunity to charge it. But that thought caused a new worry. What if the battery died and she had no way to read the messages? The last message in particular, with the numbers, that code . . . She decided to memorize them, just in case. It didn’t take too long. Just like memorizing a coupleof phone numbers. To test herself, she covered up the screen with her hand and recited the series out loud, checking herself along the way. She got them all right.
    She was now over two hours into the flight, with a good five or six to go, and she still had nothing to do.
    She ended up unpacking all her gear—the mask, the crampons, the coats, all of it—and then practiced putting it on and taking it off, repeatedly, until the actions became quick and smooth. She timed herself and got to the point where she could suit up completely in under a minute. Even though she had no idea whether that meant anything, it made her feel more ready for the Arctic.
    Another hour had gone by.
    She walked to one of the two windows and peered outside. Everything just looked white. She turned away from the window—what she thought was a sky full of clouds—but then stopped. She returned to the window and looked down.
    White . It wasn’t just the sky. It was all white.
    The ground had disappeared, as if someone had pulled a white sheet tight over a bed. Eleanor blinked.
    The ice sheet.
    They’d reached the great glacier’s border, the edge of life and civilization, then flown right over it without her realizing it. She’d heard so much about themenace of the ice from school and the news, she’d half expected it to have claws and teeth. But from up here, it appeared quiet and still. Tranquil, even. Somehow, that made it more frightening, because that meant the ice could lie.
    She watched the endless white for some time—the ice that had taken her mom—but after a while, its image became distorted. She started seeing things down there. Was that a river? A road? A town? In the same way her eyes imagined shapes and shadows in pitch darkness, she saw signs of life on the ice where there couldn’t be any, as though her mind simply refused to accept a void.
    She forced herself from the window, back to her gear. Her eyes watered and burned from staring too long. She rubbed them and realized they wanted to stay closed, so she made herself a bed with her coats and her sleeping bag and lay down. They weren’t quite halfway yet. Maybe she could sleep for some of the flight.
    E leanor awoke to a sudden jolt. It bounced her hard enough to bang her head on the floor. The whole plane rattled and shook.
    They’d landed.
    She quickly gathered all her gear and shoved it intoher pack. How long had she slept? Four