Chapter 2
LUKE
Another day on the ice floe.
Dear diary: extremely sick of fish.
Luke dragged a large fish out on the ice with his massive polar bear jaws.
He was getting very good at catching them, leaning into his bear instincts, which somehow, against all odds, he seemed to have.
At first he had worried about catching so many fish he would affect the local supply, but as it turned out, the ocean was (like the old saying) full of fish.
A fishing fleet might impact their numbers, but not a single polar bear.
He was starting to have a bigger concern, which was that as winter turned to spring, the ocean was getting warmer, and the ice floe was slowly but steadily disintegrating around him.
.... Well, okay, he had a lot of concerns. That was only one of them. But it was going to become his biggest problem if the ice floe melted before he got close enough to land to swim for it.
Luke dropped the fish and held it down with one massive paw.
The ice floe stretched in front of him, a long expanse of white-blue, seemingly solid but, as he knew all too well, riddled with crevasses and cracks.
There was no sign of his companion. Luke growled, then let out a loud cough, a sort of low Whoof!
He had a limited number of vocalizations that he could make as a bear.
This particular sound was the loudest one other than his roar, and carried the best. When no answer came immediately, he whoofed again with more force behind it.
Rogue’s head popped up out of a nearby crack in the ice, floppy ears perked.
Luke grunted in relief. Recognizing that food was available, Rogue wriggled his large, black-furred body out of the crevasse.
The dog was simply bored. Luke related to that, but it wasn’t as if an iceberg offered ample enrichment activities.
There wasn’t anywhere to go other than jumping into the water—which Rogue did on a regular basis.
Like all dogs of his breed, a Newfoundland or something like it, he was covered in thick fur and as home in the water as on the land.
Rogue swished his plumy tail and stared hopefully at the fish. At least one of them wasn’t completely sick of fish. Luke crunched their lunch in half and nudged the head end towards his companion.
He had worried at first about Rogue eating fish bones. For that matter, he’d worried about himself eating fish bones. But it seemed that wild animals—which both of them were right now, more or less—could handle it just fine.
He had no idea how he would have made it without Rogue.
Physically, he could have survived by himself; Rogue, as a dog, wasn’t contributing a whole lot to their general preparedness plan.
But mentally, he found that he needed someone to take care of, a companion to make him feel as if he wasn’t the only living thing in this vast, empty ice-and-water world.
Rogue settled down to eating. Suddenly he raised his head, ears pricking forward and then flattening. He let out a deep-voiced bark.
At the same time, that strange, half-sleeping presence within Luke’s brain stirred. Danger, it said.
Luke tried, as usual, to ignore it, but he swiveled his shaggy head in the direction the dog was looking and sniffed the air.
He didn’t smell anything strange, but over the sounds of the ice floe, the soft slapping of waves and the nearly silent whisper of ice through water, he detected a faint thrumming.
A helicopter?
The dog barked again. He was standing, but his ears remained low, his tail down. This was not a dog in eager expectation of rescue.
Luke wished it was possible to ask what Rogue knew that he didn’t.
He had long suspected that Rogue was much more than an ordinary dog.
They had escaped together from the research facility where they were both held, and while he didn’t know what exactly had been done to Rogue, he knew that the dog was as altered as Luke himself.
But while Rogue couldn’t speak in words, any more than Luke could as a bear, the dog was still capable of communicating just fine. With tail down and ears flattened, Rogue moved closer to Luke as the sound of the helicopter grew louder.
As he tried to spot it with his relatively poor ursine vision, Luke became aware that bad weather was moving in, dark clouds eclipsing the horizon.
For the most part, he hadn’t worried too much about winter weather over the last few months.
As a polar bear, he was uniquely suited to endure snow, rain, and severe cold, and Rogue’s heavy fur made him almost as durable.
During the worst of the winter weather, they had huddled together in the most sheltered crevice in the ice that they could find, with Luke curling his huge bear’s body around Rogue’s smaller form.
But spring had brought wetter, more turbulent storms, and with them came the new danger of being washed or blown completely off the iceberg.
Luke had glimpsed land occasionally, but he wasn’t sure if he trusted himself well enough in the open water to swim for it without drowning.
He had no idea where they might have drifted to.
They were probably close to the North American mainland.
But for all he knew, they’d floated clear across the Atlantic.
Or they were lost in the middle of the sea, and they were going to drift around forever until the ice broke up.
Even if they were closer to land than he realized, a helicopter out here in the middle of the ocean had to be operating off some kind of ship as a base. Luke was no pilot, but he knew that helicopters couldn’t make unassisted trans-Atlantic flights.
Finally he saw it.
The helicopter was sleek, dark, and military-looking, skimming low over the sea. Maybe this was a perfectly innocent military exercise. But there weren’t very many reasons that anyone would risk moving around in this northern, iceberg-treacherous world.
There was no way it could fail to spot them on the ice. Luke by himself could easily have passed for a native polar bear. But a bear and a dog were all too obvious.
He still hoped the helicopter might somehow pass them by, but then it swung around to hover above them. The downdraft rippled his fur. Rogue pressed against him, trembling.
A voice barked through a loudspeaker, “We know it’s you. Don’t bother running; there’s nowhere to go. You can come back with us, or we can tranq you and do this the hard way.”
There was no chance he would go in without a fight. If they wanted the hard way, they’d get it. Luke turned and fled across the iceberg. Beside him, Rogue stretched out, running in great bounds.
A tranq dart thumped into the ice near him, but they reached the far edge of the iceberg without being hit.
The weather was worsening by the moment. Luke could already see a line of fog and rain rolling across the end of the iceberg they’d just vacated. Strong crosswinds were causing the helicopter to jerk around from side to side as it pursued them.
This end of the iceberg was considerably higher than the shallower side where Luke had been conducting his fishing expeditions. It was like a small ice cliff. But they had no choice. If they could stay free a little longer, the bad weather would force the helicopter back to its base.
And Luke knew he wasn’t going back. He hadn’t escaped just to be recaptured. And he certainly hadn’t survived this long to lay down and die now.
He leaped into the water. Beside him, Rogue jumped too.
As they hit the water and splashed to the surface again, the first cold, heavy drops of rain began to fall.