Whiteout by Sage Walker

Author:Sage Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

NINETEEN

Signy punched in the codes to access Jared in a frenzy of frantic caution. Her hands trembled, afraid of the idiosyncrasies of an unfamiliar system. The keys beneath her fingers were dusty. Campbell, if he had pulled any data at all, hadn’t accessed it here. Faint, blurred sensations came to Signy’s awareness. The screen reversed fields and went to total black.

Signy entered:

—a world with no voice, no vision. Jared’s muscular body signaled to her in patterns of singular and unmistakable familiarity. Signy knew his signature in the sensations of pressure on his shoulders and in the particular spacing of the bony prominences marching down his back, the stretch of his skinthin over his thighs. He lay on his back somewhere and he seemed to be without hands.

Signy felt a knot of anger burn in her belly, outrage and fear at the partial sensations of a mutilated body, and then realized, no. Jared is sending just with his suit, he’s not wearing his gloves, his mike, or his lenses.

The patterns of pressure transmitted to her skinthin’s sensors told her that Jared shifted his weight to his left side and curled up in a fetal position, stretched his arm to reach for—

Gone.

* * *

Jared heard something nearby, some rhythmic sound that came from his right, muffled thuds in a walking cadence. Padded boots on thick snow? He tried shifting his weight and couldn’t get his arms free of what felt like a soft straitjacket.

Irritation rose through what had been a good sleep, a deep sleep. He hated mummy bags. The damned things were well named.

Jared flexed his hands and found them wrapped in layers of soft wadding. They hurt terribly and distantly and he realized he’d been drugged, that his disinterest in the pain must be a result of some opiate or other.

His hands were frostbitten, that’s what was wrong. Frostbite was so difficult to treat. He hated frostbite. He moved his clumsy, clumsy hands and found the battery pack, but he couldn’t remember if he was recording. He pushed at the switches and wondered why they were made so damned small.

Signy would worry if he didn’t talk to her soon. Soft Signy, she was so soft for a thin girl. She made it so hard for him to talk sometimes. Jared loved her. Love, that was a hard word to say to Signy. Love. Jared could see, so clearly, the way Signy’s eyebrows arched, so that she always looked surprised; he could see the fine high lines of her cheekbones and the seashell curve of her ears. He loved Signy’s ears. He wanted to tell her that, soon.

A continuous line of pressure circled Jared’s eyes and traced the ridge of his frontal bone. He wore goggles, he realized; not his camera headband. The goggles were tinted for snow. Through their lenses Jared saw a series of curved arches above him and beyond that a painfully bright sky, transparent blue.

Jared closed his eyes against the glare. There were some positive things about a thick down mummy bag, warm and soft.

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