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268 42 When Rosie woke up, she was alone. There was the briefest moment when she looked for him, wondered if he’d left already, before she remembered that he hadn’t come. It was late, past ten. Either her watch alarm hadn’t gone off or she’d slept through it. She had missed the flight to McMurdo, the first leg of her journey home. Rosie dressed slowly. She knew she ought to start the Coleman stove to heat some soup for breakfast. At the very least, she should toss back some nuts. It was only a mile to the station, but she had been too keyed up to eat dinner last night, and an infusion of calories would be wise. She didn’t feel like eating, though. She put on her final layers, hoisted her pack, and stepped out of the hut. Bad weather. Really bad weather. Which meant her flight would have been postponed. She still had a chance to make it. She stood on the threshold of Hotel South Pole and considered her options. Stay or leave. Rosie walked. The sky was lightening by the minute, and the flight would leave as soon as it cleared. She wanted to go home. A shock of sunlight stabbed through an opening in the cloud cover, reminding Rosie of that similar moment on the plane, when the sun had come in the porthole, just before the crash landing. This window of blue sky was just as temporary as that one had been, and three minutes later the clouds closed up again. She was swathed in white. The snowflakes were tiny desert bits, more like snow dust blown from the surface of the ice than new precipitation coming from the sky, but still thick in their bitterly cold fury. She couldn’t see more than a couple of yards ahead of her. Even so, the route, scored by the tracks of dozens of pairs of boots, was easy enough to follow. Rosie kept walking. He hadn’t come. The words looped through her brain, over and over again, as if looking for a place to burrow into the inner folds. It hadn’t occurred to her that he wouldn’t come. His longing had been so present, so obvious, just hours earlier, when they talked in the galley. Something must have prevented him. Last night she’d lain awake until three in the morning, waiting and worrying. She’d gotten up and looked out the door maybe a dozen times, thinking she heard someone. The sky had been clear the last time she looked. Only now, walking back, did she consider the bleak possibility that he might have decided to not come. She trudged on, alone, through the shitty weather. At least she was on a path, a way forward. In spite of the no-show, Rosie still felt that fresh core of sureness in herself. Her land, her family, her new friends, Alice and Mikala, all that. Still. And definitely. Today she needed only footsteps. Tomorrow she was leaving the Ice for good. Next month she’d see Jed and her mother. Rosie picked up her pace. It was wicked cold. 269 ...
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