“Yeah. I’m worried about fuel.” Unlike other places in the world, you couldn’t just make a pit stop to refuel. Any pilot knew that after a certain distance, there was a point of no return whereyou could not fly back because your fuel only took you as far as your destination.
“Nobody is going to be able to come out to me and refuel me out there, so I need extra fuel. This is a smaller chopper.” I pointed at my bird. “The tanks can’t hold extra.”
“Hmm. So how much are we talking? Flying in and out, plus some extra as backup?” he asked.
Daniel came and stood by me. I had to stop myself from instinctively reaching for him.
“Not just that. I have to keep her running the whole time we’re on site. I don’t want to risk shutting down the engine and not being able to restart it. Here at the station, I have backup batteries and your engineers and tech staff who could help me, but out there on the ice, I have nothing.”
August nodded. “Right. So, keeping her running the entire time. Okay, I think we are looking at…” He looked at the iPad in his hand. Together, he and I ran through some calculations for the amount of extra fuel I would need. Like all research stations, Waypoint had its own fuel reservoir tank. Soon after, August left us to retrieve fuel for me.
“All set?” I asked Daniel. He was dressed in a flight suit like me, with a parka on top, aviation goggles on, and a warm cap on his head.
“Yes.” He took out a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Garrett wants us to deliver this message to Nate.”
I took the piece of paper and unfolded it.
I challenge you to a duel, Nate Braddock. Meet me at Waypoint Station. We fight until death.
“Eh?” I frowned and re-read it. It wasn’t signed.
Daniel lifted his goggles onto his cap and shrugged. “No idea. I didn’t ask. We are to deliver it.”
Huh. Okay. I folded the note and gave it back to him. Our eyes met, and for a moment, I forgot all about the mission.The sky above us was awash in the pale Antarctic twilight, the sun sitting low on the horizon even at this hour, casting long shadows across the ice, but the light also made his skin glow, almost as if he were carved from gold and ivory. Desire flared in my belly.
“Can’t wait to finish what we started earlier,” I said, my voice husky without even trying.
He bit his lip and looked away, avoiding my gaze, but the pink in his cheeks was a giveaway. “Just don’t try anything in the cockpit,” he murmured.
“Can’t promise. The name isn’t helping. Whycock?”
He flushed deeper but joined in my laughter.
***
It was one in the morning when we finally lifted off. The advantage of being in Antarctica was that I could fly at night—despite it being past midnight, the sun never set during the summer here.
Our flight plan took us toward the interior of the continent, which meant that as we got closer to the South Pole, the light actually got brighter. I was not used to this mind-bending erasure of day and night. I had been told it gets easier the more time you spend on the continent, but I had only arrived one week ago, and my brain kept trying to tell me it was daytime.
I was glad Daniel had forced me to sleep earlier. I would not have been cleared to fly otherwise. After fifteen minutes of flying, we settled into a familiar and comfortable rhythm.
The windshield framed a world like nothing I had ever seen. Near Waypoint, the water had been fractured, with chunks of ice floating loose in the shoreline. Out here, the ocean had settled into itself: dark blue, deep, unbroken for miles in every direction except where the bergs rose out of it.
I had not been prepared for the size of them.
The first one we passed, I looked at in awe. It rose from the water, its face carved in horizontal layers of white and a blue so dense it was almost black in the deeper crevices. We passed close enough that I could see the surface texture.
“I’ve flown everywhere,” I said. “Seen Everest at dawn, the Sahara in a sandstorm, the North Sea in winter with waves forty feet high. I have seen things from a cockpit that most people only see in photographs, and I had always felt, privately, that I had a reasonably complete picture of what this planet looked like.”
Daniel was looking at me with soft eyes.
“It doesn’t look like this anywhere else.”
“No,” he said, smiling. “It doesn’t.”
“Best part is, I get to see it with you this time,” I said.
Our eyes met again, and I held his gaze as long as I safely could before going back to checking my instrument panel.
