(eng) Michael Armstrong by Agviq (v5.0)

Author:Agviq (v5.0) [Agviq (v5.0)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The wind howled from the northwest, a fall storm out of the North Pole, Odin’s hand, Claudia thought, pushing dark and cold and ice upon them. That’s how it would have seemed in Scandinavia, but in Utqiagvik the ice was the ice, not God or gods, just a great and horrible force howling in the night.

False winter’s dark clouds hovered over the northern hemisphere still: the encompassing and covering clouds of dust and smoke, the microscopic remnants of cities and forests. They could still see the clouds in the brief twilight that passed for day, the sun rising low in the south, the black hood covering the sky. The sun never rose into the false winter, never rose above the clouds, but the cold that the clouds sent down chilled the Arctic that much faster.

Earlier that morning Malgi had walked along the beach with Claudia, asking her seemingly naive questions, but pumping her for knowledge as she pumped him. A chill wind blew down from the north, and to Claudia it felt like any other wind, but Malgi stopped her, and sniffed the air.

“Ai,” he said. “Smell that?”

She made a show of breathing in the air deeply, then shook her head. Honor him, make him feel important, she thought, but she truly smelled nothing unusual. “What should I smell?”

Malgi smiled, tapped his right nostril. “Storm smell,” he said, “the smell in the calm. An electrical smell, do you not know it? The smell televisions used to give off?”

Used to give off? she asked herself. Ah. “Ozone?” At the word a memory from high school came to her: slipping a glowing stick into a bottle, a long piece of wood with an ember at the end, and inside the bottle sulfuric acid bubbling away zinc. The classic chemistry experiment, making hydrogen. The air popped as hydrogen exploded, and left behind was ozone and water. She remembered that faint smell of ozone, a burnt smell, almost. Claudia sniffed again, and the smell of the arctic air meshed with the smell of her childhood.

“Yes, that’s it,” said Malgi. “Ozone. It is the smell of a storm.” He sniffed again. “A big storm.”

A big storm, Claudia thought later as she crawled down the entrance tunnel to the outside door. Snow snuck through cracks around the edges of the door, and the wind puffed in and out, threatening to take the door off its hinges. Like a freight train, she thought. That’s how tornado survivors always described the sound of twisters: like a freight train. This wind, though, was more like a night of freight trains, like the hurricane she remembered from early childhood, wind that kept on and on and would seem to never end.

She imagined the wind sweeping around the side of the qaregi, imagined it sloping over its curved walls. The roof of their guard tower might not be there in the morning, she thought, but that would be okay: no need for such protection anymore. Many things might not be there in the morning.

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