Chapter 1 Terra Australis #5
To her mortification, she realizes that she might cry. She didn’t tell Eli about Antarctica. After all, their lives are separate now. Laurel keeps her memories of him—like those of Silas—in a closed box deep inside her body.
Louis kisses her cheek.
“No tears in Antarctica,” he says. “They’ll freeze.”
Laurel leaves soon after Louis drags them to the dance floor: her body feels sluggish, and her heart isn’t in it.
Ahead is a footbridge, constructed over pipes.
At the top, she pauses, thinking of Nita’s ice wife and her land husband.
Laurel wonders whether meeting Sam felt, to Nita, the way that Maisie once described having a second child: You go in thinking that the first is your entire world, that you can’t possibly love anyone else as much. And then your world doubles.
A tall figure approaches from the opposite direction: Jules. They’ve spoken briefly in the galley, but not with any privacy.
“You made it,” he says when he reaches her.
Laurel spreads her arms. “In one piece.”
“Eighteen years later,” says Jules, “and we’re neighbors again.”
Jules Javurek was Laurel’s first friend. At school, they sifted into different social groups—but they spent summers together, searching for fireflies and giant puffballs.
“Do you remember the limestone quarry?” asks Laurel. “The fossils we found?”
Their families owned adjacent land, the Salters’ apple farm pressing up against the Javureks’ dairy operation.
In ancient times, a sea covered part of both properties.
It decayed into a limestone reef that provided calcium to the Salters’ soil and left the Javureks with a small quarry, not used in their lifetimes.
Shapes were etched in the rock. Her father called them earth’s first photographs.
Laurel thought of the imprints as ghosts: not life, but the shape of it.
Some could be pried with tiny fingers from the edges of the quarry.
Afterward, she and Jules paged through books, making identifications.
“Of course.” Jules grins. “Cephalopods, right?”
Spirals, segmented, curling into themselves. Laurel brought one back to her bedroom, but she couldn’t shake the sense that she had stolen it. Distressed, she returned to the pit, where she slipped the stone back like a book to the library.
“And brachiopods,” she says. “With all those wavy lines.”
“Never did find a trilobite.”
The search had consumed them during the summer before sixth grade. They’re quiet, now, in a way that reminds Laurel of that time, looking down in unselfconscious study. Then Jules turns to her, as if daring himself.
“Were you surprised when you saw me?”
His expression is brave and delicate, searching. Laurel has an urge to reach out, put a gloved hand on his arm, but she stops herself. By high school, they had become distant: Jules was a track star, and Laurel spent most of her time with Maisie.
“Partly,” she says. “I’m happy for you; it must have taken real courage. I’m sorry I didn’t know. Your mom—well, she didn’t mention it.”
“She tends not to,” Jules says. “I should have told you myself when you emailed, but I’m not very good at putting it in writing yet.”
Two women pass them on the bridge, linked at the arms and swaying. Jules waits until they totter toward the dorms before he speaks again.
“Laurel, my mom told me what happened. I’m so sorry. It isn’t something that anyone should have to bear.”
Laurel’s throat swells. She nods in acknowledgment but finds she cannot speak, afraid of what might come out. To steady herself, she looks across the ice. At almost midnight, the sun has finally set. All week, McMurdo has been murky, the sky a dull gray, but tonight the fog has thinned to mist.
Laurel squints. “Is that—?”
Laid over the ice is the dome she saw on her first day, now the blue-green of a photo negative. In darkness, its light is even more apparent: a self-made, inner glow akin to bioluminescence.
Jules nods. “The Arc.”
Laurel is unprepared for the depth of her relief. The dome’s reappearance feels like confirmation of her sanity.
“The Arc,” she says, feeling the word in her mouth. She understands that it should be capitalized, that it describes something singular. “What is it?”
“Nobody knows. It’s fifteen miles away, at a place called Cape Evans.
At night, it looks green, like this, but in sunlight, it turns pink,” Jules explains.
“Back in January, when it first appeared, atmospheric scientists investigated. They thought that it was caused by light reflecting off ice, and that the color was tied to climate change: aerosols, pollutants. But that was disproven, so they left. A team of physicists came down instead.”
The Arc glows behind power lines and streetlights, coy. Laurel rises onto the balls of her feet. “What’s their theory?”
“They’re flying an instrument over it, some kind of particle detector. No word on what they’ve found, but keep an eye on the bulletin board in the galley. Every Sunday night at eight, scientists present their work. Everyone is waiting to hear about the Arc.”