Page 54 of Under Story

Please tell my mom and Maisie that they shouldn’t worry. And neither should you. Eli is here—that’s part of what’s happening. Someday I’ll explain it. Or maybe you’ll figure it out before then.

All my love—

But the message feels incomplete. She must give Gloria a hint. If it weren’t winter, and she could send a letter, Laurel would enclose the drawing that she made for Eli—the one of the Arc and the basin, labeled like the Duoverse.

Miles drums his fingers on his knees.

Laurel thinks rapidly. Then, below her name, she adds two links. The first is one of Eli’s articles. The second is a picture from Google Images: the Arc, green as a neon sign in the winter night.

—

By August, whales have left for warmer water. Weddell seals—the only mammals, aside from humans, to winter over on the continent—spend their days below the ice. Emperor penguins huddle for heat, rotating to give each bird a turn in the middle.

Snow seeps into McMurdo’s buildings. Sometimes the galley doors open to a solid wall of white. Matty forgets the chili recipe he’s used for years. Laurel feels it, too, the pull of oblivion: without sun and decent sleep and novel stimuli, it’s easy to drift from the poles of your personhood. When her watch stops working, it feels like the punch line of a joke.

“Remember,” says Jules, at galley rally, “keeping a schedule keeps you sane.”

Laurel obeys this maxim. She wakes early to work out and shower. The regimen Nita recommended has already made her stronger: it’s easier to carry heavy buffet trays through the galley, and she doesn’t tire as easily after hours on her feet. But any change in routine disturbs the balance of her psyche. One day, she sleeps through her alarm. By the time she returns from the gym, the first-floor showers are full. She climbs to the second floor in her towel and flip-flops. Three women wait in line outside the bathroom with their arms crossed.

Laurel stalks to the galley. Memories of Silas intrude throughout her shift: the soft hair she didn’t cut until he asked for it, the hands she held across a thousand streets. Laurel is carrying a vat of minestrone when she hears his voice in her head—When I was an egg in your stomach, did I eat egg salad?—and trips. Soup scalds her legs and pools beneath the hot dog roller station.

“What’s wrong with you?” asks Ingrid, storming toward her with a mop.

Charlie squeezes Laurel’s shoulder. “Everyone’s on edge.”

“And it isn’t even Stabby September,” says Louis.

When Laurel finishes her shift, all she wants to do is stand under hot water, but the showers are occupied again. She screeches—“Cool it!” someone barks—and returns to her room, where she paces. Residents are forbidden to leave the base without a buddy and a radio, but she feels like she’ll implode without fresh air. Laurel grabs her Big Red and walks outside.

Along the road, streetlamps cast pools of orange light. They recede as she veers toward the ice shelf. The cold is a violation. Laurel scrabbles in her pockets for gloves before she realizes that she left them in the dorm. Still, she continues toward the Arc. In constant darkness, it is a brilliant green. The color swirls with a psychedelic quality. Video footage has made its way to YouTube. The more I look at it, someone wrote, the more I feel like I’m gonna fall in. In July, members of a fringe religious sect died by suicide in Elko, Nevada, believing the Arc to be a sign of end-times.

She might have kept walking if not for the sound: a useless roar, a rasping croak. A seal is jerking toward her. It must be lost. She’s never seen one come this close to the station. The small flippers are useless; its neck reaches like an arm.

How can Laurel not be a mother? Arms outstretched, she rushes forward—but something rams into her, hard.

“What the fuck are you doing?” asks Louis.

“What are you doing? The seal is dying. I’m trying to help.”

He holds her down. “You aren’t allowed.”

“What do you mean?”

“Anything we see here, any life—we can’t interfere. It’s part of the treaty. Didn’t you read the handbook?”

She forgot. That rule, noble on a global scale, seems senseless when applied to the animal in front of her.

“I can’t—?” Her voice is small.

“No, darling,” says Louis. “You can’t.”

He sits to let her go. The seal pulses on its belly.

“It’s brutal,” says Louis, “I know. Nature is brutal sometimes.” He nods toward the station’s concrete buildings. “Let’s go and get you warm.”

She shudders. “I can’t leave it.”

“But you can,” he says, helping her up. As he guides her toward the dorms, his compassion hurts more than cruelty.