Страница 44 из 57
Meaningless. Pointless. Hollow.
Sleepy Hollow.
Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.
She tossed the spare aerial onto the sediment heap, then thought better and retrieved it. What could she possibly use it for? A depth measure? An ice gouge? She didn't know, but she hated to throw it away. In truth, she hated to throw anything away. She had been accumulating u
There was no sign that Puckett and Joyce had made it as far as the rookery – no abandoned equipment, no sledge tracks. She doubted she would see them again. But then she had guessed as much long ago.
She set the tent up on a patch of hard ice, unloading the sleeping bag, the Primus stove, and the rest of her cooking supplies. Her hands were so numb that she was unable to drive the stakes into the ground. Instead, she used four rocks she found lying in a pile at the base of the cliff, weighing down the tent's inside corners.
She couldn't help thinking of the secret fortress she had played in the summer she was ten years old. That was what she had called it, "the secret fortress," though it was really just a free-standing public restroom in a section of the riverfront that had been fenced off and sold to developers. For a few months, though, until it was demolished to make way for an office complex, she and her best friend, Mi
But before the fortress was knocked down, she and Mi
"Which do you like better: summer or winter?" Mi
"I don't know. Winter, I guess. If you ask me in the winter, I'll say summer, and if you ask me in the summer, I'll say winter."
"I choose winter, too," Mi
"That one's tough. It's like winter and summer, I guess. I like whichever one isn't around at the time." Laura boosted herself onto the rim of the sink. "I can tell you one thing, I like your mom better than your dad."
"Me, too," Mi
"Hear what?"
"Listen."
Laura shifted her attention to the upper end of her hearing register. She heard it – a fine droning hum that beat rapidly at the air. She hopped down from the sink. The sound was coming from the skylight in the center of the room. She stood beneath it looking up, and Mi
"You're never going to get out through there," Laura said. She supposed she was talking to the wasp, though she knew better than to think that the wasp was listening. To Mi
"No way. I am not touching a wasp."
"You don't have to touch it. You don't have to get anywhere near it. Just hold the door open, and I'll do the rest."
Mi
"Chicken," Laura said.
"Fine by me," said Mi
"Neither will I," Laura said. "I'm trying to help him." She knew she was being foolish, but she couldn't help herself. It was just that she felt so bad for the wasp: all it wanted was a way out, a way back into the sunlight, but the only thing it knew how to do was keep banging into the glass. She had to coax it away from the skylight. That was the first step. The problem was that it was too high for her to reach. She considered snapping at it with her T-shirt, but she was afraid that if she took the shirt off, the white skin of her chest and stomach would offer the wasp a target it couldn't resist. Instead, she took a paper towel from the bundle beneath the sink, worked it into a ball, and threw it at the wasp as gently as she could. Its wings buzzed, and its stinger curved angrily under its waist. She threw a second time, and then a third, aiming for the center of the glass.
After a few more tries, she managed to drive the wasp out of the skylight. It landed halfway across the room on the ceiling, dropped a few inches, and landed in the same spot again. She tried to reason with it. "Listen, I'm trying to help you. Just trust me and I'll let you outside."