Read Chapter 36: The Crossing

The ice sang beneath them—a high, keening note that vibrated up through the soles of Harlow’s boots and into his teeth. He had heard that sound only once before, off the coast of Greenland, moments before a floe the size of a church had split in two and swallowed three men whole.

“Spread out!” he shouted, the wind tearing the words from his lips. “Sixty feet between each sledge! Don’t bunch up!”

Behind him, the column staggered into motion. Jenkins and Macready lay lashed to their respective sledges, faces half-buried under canvas and fur, their moans lost in the shriek of the blizzard. The ice underfoot was young, barely a hand’s breadth thick, and through the blown snow Harlow could see the dark, swallowing water where the tide had already cracked it open in long, jagged wounds.

He pulled Ethan’s sledge himself, the rope biting into his shoulder through three layers of wool. The boy had gone silent an hour ago, and Harlow did not have the strength to check if he was still breathing. Forward. That was all. Forward or dead.

“Captain!” Davies’s voice came from somewhere to his left, thin and desperate. “The floe behind us—she’s going!”

Harlow did not turn. He knew what he would see. The ground he had walked on moments ago was no longer ground but a mosaic of shifting pans, grinding and tipping as the tide dragged them apart. Men were running—or trying to—leaping from one dissolving slab to the next.

“Keep moving!” he roared. “Do not look back!”

The ice lurched. A crack shot through the pan beneath his feet, splitting from the channel’s edge and tearing toward the center of their column. It passed within five feet of Harlow, racing past him like a living thing, and he heard a scream—high and sudden—cut off by the splash of frigid water.

“Man overboard!” someone shouted. “It’s Walsh!”

Harlow dropped the rope and ran. He skidded to the edge of the fissure, which had widened to six feet of black, churning water. Walsh thrashed in it, his mittens already gone, his face a mask of white shock. The cold would kill him in minutes. The current was already pulling him under the ice.

“Give me your hand!” Harlow dropped to his belly, reaching out. The wind screamed around him, and he felt the pan tilt beneath his weight, shifting as the water gnawed at its underside.

Walsh’s fingers found his. They were already numb, useless. Harlow gripped the man’s wrist with both hands and hauled. For a moment, nothing. Then Walsh’s upper body came free of the water, his drenched furs an impossible weight, and Harlow felt the ice beneath him begin to crack again.

Then hands seized his ankles. Davies and another man—Robinson—were behind him, leaning back, pulling in unison. The ice protested with a long, grinding groan, but held. Walsh slid out of the water like a seal onto the pan, coughing and shivering, his lips already blue.

“Get him up!” Harlow shouted. “Keep him moving or he’s dead!”

They dragged Walsh to his feet. His legs buckled, but Robinson threw an arm around him and half-carried, half-dragged him toward the sledge that Ethan lay on. There was no room. No warmth to spare. But they would make room. They would find a way. They always did.

The ice broke again, this time behind them. A sound like cannon fire, rolling across the channel. Harlow finally allowed himself a glance over his shoulder. Where their column had been—where the supplies and the second sledge with the medicines had been—there was only water, streaked with white foam where the broken pans were already being swallowed by the current. A crate of salted beef bobbed briefly, then vanished beneath the surface.

“Petty!” Harlow’s voice cracked. “Petty, where are you?”

Silence. Only the wind.

The remaining men gathered around him, their faces ghostlike under layers of frost and rime. Eleven of them. Thirty-two had left the ship. He counted them again. Eleven.

“We cannot stop,” Harlow said, and he was surprised by the steadiness of his own voice. “We’re less than a mile from the shore ice. I saw the sheen of open water before the storm closed in. There is land beyond that water. There is life beyond that land. And we are going to reach it.”

Nobody answered. They didn’t have to. They all knew what lay behind them was worse.

Harlow took up the rope again. Ethan’s sledge had not moved. He leaned down and touched the boy’s face. Warm. Alive. The relief was a physical blow to his chest.

“Stay with me, Liam,” he muttered, though he was not sure the boy could hear him. “I gave your mother my word.”

He pulled. The sledge resisted, the runners sticking to the ice, the snow packing itself against the wooden frame. But it moved, and the others moved with him, a ragged line of dark shapes against a white eternity.

The storm had not released them. It was only changing its tactic—the wind had dropped slightly, but the snow was thicker now, so dense that Harlow could not see the man ten feet in front of him. He navigated by feel, by the subtle slope of the ice under his feet, by the distant roar of the tide through the channel.

Time lost meaning. An hour. Two. His legs were gone; his arms were gone; he was a fragment of fatigue dragging a burden of cold through an endless white. He thought of Eleanor Mercer, dying in a Portsmouth bed. He thought of the captain, somewhere ahead of them on this same hellish ice, carrying his own charts and his own cold calculations. He thought of the men behind him, the ones who had already fallen through the world and been taken by the dark water.

And then the ice beneath him changed.

It was subtle at first—a different quality to the crunch of his boots, a resistance to the sledge’s runners. Then, suddenly, the snow stopped. Not faded, but ceased, as if a curtain had been drawn. The wind dropped. And Harlow looked up to see a black cliff of crumbling permafrost rising out of the ground a hundred feet ahead.

Shore. Real shore. Rocks and dirt and frozen tundra that did not move, did not sing, did not threaten to swallow him whole.

He did not whoop. He did not collapse. He simply turned and walked back down the line of his men, touching each one on the shoulder as he passed.

“We’ve made it,” he said, his voice hoarse and quiet. “We’ve made it.”

Davies let out something that was half a laugh, half a sob. Robinson fell to his knees in the snow and bowed his head. The men hauled the sledges up the last bank of pressure ice, and when they finally set foot on solid ground, Macready stirred from his lashing and lifted one hand weakly, his eyes open and wet.

“Good lad,” he rasped, looking at Harlow. “Good lad.”

Harlow looked back across the channel they had crossed. The water was black, churning, studded with the splintered remains of the floe. There was no sign of the ship, no sign of their supplies, no sign of the men who had not made it.

And there, far away across the water, barely visible through the shredded veil of the retreating storm, a single point of orange light flickered on the distant shore.

A campfire. Mercer.