Read Chapter 35: The Last Lead

The wind had teeth again. Harlow stood at the head of the column, Macready's chart case pressed under his arm, and watched the ice ahead fracture into a web of dark cracks. Beyond those cracks, maybe half a mile, lay a thread of black water—open, moving, alive. Macklin shaded his eyes and swore softly.

"That's it," he said. "That's the channel."

Harlow didn't answer. He was counting the steps between them and that dark water. Two thousand, maybe less. But between those steps lay young ice, pressure ridges, and the kind of freeze that didn't hold a man's weight for more than a heartbeat. He looked back at the crew strung out behind him. Twenty-two men. Three sledges. Jenkins on a travois, pale as the snow under him, his bandaged shoulder seeping red through the linen. Macready limping beside him, one arm braced against the sledge frame, doing his best not to wince with every step.

"Sir." Liam had come up silently on Harlow's left. The boy's cheeks were windburned raw, and his eyes had that hollow, hungry look that Harlow had seen on too many faces in the past weeks. "The ice is singing."

Harlow listened. A low, mournful hum vibrated through the soles of his boots. The sound a frozen sea makes when it's about to move. He'd heard it once before, on a whaling ship off Greenland, and watched the entire floe split open in the space of a prayer.

"Aye," he said. "It's singing."

He unfolded Mercer's tide chart, the paper stiff with cold, and traced the line of the channel with one finger. The open water ahead matched the markings precisely. What the chart didn't show was how long the ice between them would last. The tide was turning. He could feel it in the pressure beneath his feet, the slow groan of the floe shifting its weight.

"Can we cross?" Macklin asked.

Harlow didn't answer. He was watching the dark water. A sheet of young ice was forming across its surface, thin as a knife blade, black and slick. It would take a man's weight for a few minutes, perhaps less. But the floe they stood on was already talking, cracking in long, whispering fractures that ran outward from their boots like the roots of a dying tree.

"Two hours until full dark," Harlow said. "The temperature's already dropping. In another hour, that channel freezes solid enough to walk across."

"And in another hour," Macklin said, "this floe may not be here."

Harlow looked at him. Macklin met his gaze, steady, unafraid. The men were watching them, waiting. They had stopped, sledges grounded, breaths fogging the air in ragged bursts. They were done. Exhausted past the point of orders, held together only by the thin thread of hope that Harlow had fed them for the past twenty miles.

"Sir." Liam again, quieter this time. "There's something moving on the channel."

Harlow turned. Far out on the dark water, a shape was crossing—small and dark, too small for a ship. A boat. A whaleboat, single sail raised, cutting against the tide.

Mercer.

Harlow felt the rage rise in his throat like bile. The captain had found his way around, had circled wide and come down the channel itself, riding the current with his stolen provisions and his cold, perfect charts. He wasn't running. He was showing them what they couldn't have.

"He'll be through the lead before we're halfway across," Macklin said quietly. "He's not waiting for us."

"No," Harlow said. "He's not."

The wind shifted, and with it came a wall of white. Harlow saw it before the others did—a curtain of snow rolling across the ice toward them, swallowing the horizon, eating the light. The temperature dropped ten degrees in as many seconds. The singing under their feet changed pitch, becoming a high, thin keen.

"Blizzard!" Macklin shouted. "Everyone down! Anchor the sledges!"

Men threw themselves over the loads, driving ice axes into the floe, lashing lines to anything that would hold. Harlow grabbed Liam by the shoulder and pulled him down behind the second sledge, bracing his own weight against the wind. The snow hit like a wall of sand, fine and hard and blinding, scouring the exposed skin of his face within seconds.

He pulled his scarf up over his nose and squinted into the white. The channel was gone. Mercer was gone. The only thing left in the world was the wind and the cold and the groan of the ice beneath them, shifting with the tide.

"How long?" Liam shouted, barely audible over the storm.

Harlow shook his head. He didn't know. He couldn't know. Blizzards in the Arctic didn't blow through and clear. They settled in for days, sometimes weeks, burying everything under drifts that hardened to blue iron. If they stayed here, they'd freeze. If they moved, they'd walk off the edge of the floe into open water and drown in the dark.

They were caught between the two, exactly where Mercer had planned for them to be.

Macklin crawled over to him, face white with frost, lips already cracking. "We can't stay here," he said. "The wind's too strong. We'll be buried or blown off the ice."

"The channel will freeze," Harlow said. "If it freezes solid, we can cross."

"Or it won't. Or it will, and we'll be dead before we reach it." Macklin grabbed his arm with a grip that was surprisingly strong. "We have to move now. While the ice is still beneath us."

Harlow looked at him, then at the men huddled behind the sledges. He could see their faces, what little of them was visible through the snow. They were waiting for him to decide. To be the man who pointed a direction and made it true.

He reached into his coat and pulled out Mercer's chart. The paper was already warping with moisture, the ink bleeding at the edges. He looked at the line that marked the channel. It ended at the sea. It ended at a place where the ice broke up and the water ran free and a ship might find passage south.

Or it ended at a drawing. A promise made on paper by a man who had abandoned his own son to die.

Harlow folded the chart and put it back in his coat.

"We move," he said. "We move toward the channel. We cross on the young ice before the storm strips this floe out from under us."

Macklin nodded. He didn't argue. He didn't ask if the ice would hold. The question was pointless. The only thing that mattered was that they moved, and that they kept moving until they reached the other side or the sea took them.

Harlow turned to face the wind. He could not see the channel. He could not see anything but white, and the shapes of his men rising around him, and the line he would have to walk to lead them across.

The ice screamed beneath his feet.

He took the first step.