Where the Ice Breaks

The hangar roared like a living thing. Engines coughed, metal clanked, wind stalked through the loose seams in the corrugated walls. The air tasted of fuel and snow. Elara stood with her back to a stack of crates, her clipboard balanced on one gloved palm and her pen pressed hard enough to ache in her fingers. She read her itinerary again, though she already knew it by heart—the timings, the equipment list, the backup plans for the backup plans. Everything had an order. Today was supposed to obey it.

“Dr. Vance?” The station manager’s voice rose over the din. Anders was a broad-shouldered man with a frost-reddened face and a knit cap that had seen better years. He approached with careful, apologetic steps, and Elara felt a trickle of dread slide down her spine.

She didn’t look up right away. “If this is about cargo weight, I already adjusted my samples. We’re under by twelve kilos.” She flipped to the second page. The plane’s tail number sat there like a promise.

Anders shifted. “It’s not the weight.”

Her jaw tightened. She made herself lift her eyes. He wore the expression she hated most, the one people used when they were about to apologize for breaking something important. “What is it.”

“We’ve had a call.” He scratched at his beard. “The pilot is fine. Weather’s moving in early, but he thinks he can beat it. There’s just—”

Anders trailed off, glancing past her toward the open hangar doors where the small ski-plane gleamed white against the blue shadow of the day. Elara let her gaze flick to the plane and back. “There’s just…?”

“A last-minute passenger,” he said quickly, as if the speed would soften it. “He’s going out to the same region. Photography assignment. He’s contracted through the agency, clearance just came through. We’re putting him on your flight.”

The words fell like stones. Elara’s pen hovered over her column of timestamps, then landed in a neat dot beside 13:40. She could feel the wind sliding under her coat collar, the skin at her neck prickling. “No.” It came out flat, more breath than voice. “No, Anders. That plane is chartered for research. I have thermal cores to recover and time-sensitive—”

“I know.” His hands rose, placating. “I know you’re on a tight schedule. But this one’s… it’s above me. They called from Tromsø. We’re down a flight this week and if he doesn’t get out now, he won’t get out for days.”

She stared at him. Somewhere behind her, a laugh broke off in a cough. A wrench clanged. She exhaled slowly and deliberately, counting. “This is not a tourist trip,” she said, keeping her voice even. “I don’t have time to babysit someone with a lens and an inflated sense of adventure.”

Anders winced, then tried a smile that didn’t fit his face. “He’s professional. Name’s Liam Sterling.”

Her grip on the pen loosened enough that it clicked against the clipboard. The name meant nothing. She imagined footprints where she needed silence and footprints where there should be none. Uncontrolled variables. “He will not touch my samples. He will stay out of the way.”

“Of course.” Anders’s relief was visible—his shoulders dropped a fraction. “I’ll make sure he knows the rules.”

She wanted to argue more, but the cold had a way of making your stubbornness feel foolish. The storm shift, the pilot’s judgment—those were the things that mattered. She looked back down at her itinerary and drew a small line beside the note for fuel load, an unnecessary mark to make the page feel like hers again. “How much gear does he have?”

Anders hesitated, then gave her a look that said: more than you’ll like. “Enough.”

She closed her eyes for a heartbeat. When she opened them, she shuttered everything else—annoyance, the stab of disappointment at the clean line of her day being smudged. “Fine,” she said. “But we depart on time. If he’s late, he stays behind.”

Anders nodded like a man offered a rope. “He’s already here.”

Elara turned toward the open mouth of the hangar, blinking into the pale spill of light. Snowflakes drifted in sideways, riding the wind. Men moved around the plane, securing straps, shouting over noise. She drew her scarf up higher and tucked it into her collar, then lifted her clipboard like a shield. Her flight checklist waited—the simple, satisfying litany of numbers and tasks she could control. She focused on the data. Air temperature, wind speed, cloud base, pressure trend. She noted the pilot’s walk—a slight hitch before a step, the knee compensating for packed snow. The propeller’s rhythm was smooth, consistent.

“Dr. Vance,” Anders said softly, as if she might bolt. “He’ll meet you by the cargo scale. Five minutes.”

She nodded without looking at him. “I’ll be there in four.”

She moved through the organized chaos, dodging a coil of hose, stepping around a crate stamped with Cyrillic script. Her mind ticked through contingencies. If the storm came earlier, they would cut the landing window short. She would need to prioritize the recording equipment over the spare core tubes. The pilot would want a faster approach; she would have to argue for the low pass to assess the ice runway. She pressed her lips together and checked her watch. The minute hand crawled.

At the cargo scale, a neat pyramid of her labeled boxes waited, the bold black numbers she’d painted on them crisp despite the scuffs. She ran her gloved fingers over the top box like a habit, a grounding touch, then set the clipboard down to recheck the weights. Her breath fogged the air. A shout went up near the doors, a voice carried on the wind, and she knew before she turned that her day had shifted in a way she couldn’t quantify.

She wrote the letters EXTRA PAX in the margin of her page and underlined them twice. The ink bled a little. She capped the pen and lifted her chin, ready to endure whatever was coming with the steady frown that had carried her across a dozen field seasons. The plane’s engine whined, then settled. Somewhere, someone laughed again.

Elara adjusted her hat, squared her shoulders, and kept her eyes hard on the scale. She could meet the passenger in a moment. For now, she held to her numbers and the sharp edge of her plan, the only warm thing in the hangar that she trusted.

“Liam Sterling?” a voice called from the doors, and the answer arrived before she could brace for it.

He came in with the wind at his back, head ducked, cheeks flushed with cold. The first thing she noticed was the smile—it landed easily, like it had a place here. The second was the avalanche of cases slung across him: two camera bodies strapped to his chest, a long lens in a padded sleeve knocking his hip, a backpack that could swallow a person, and another bag rolling behind him that jumped over the grooves in the concrete. He left a messy line of snow in his wake.

“Sorry—hi—sorry,” he said, breathless but unbothered, as if apologies were just part of his rhythm. He stopped a few feet from her pyramid of boxes and pushed back the hood of his parka. Dark hair, sun-browned skin that didn’t belong to this latitude, eyes that skimmed the room and landed on her with alert interest. “Liam Sterling. Leo, if you like. You must be Dr. Vance.”

Elara felt the reflexive tick of correction at the nickname. She kept her face neutral and glanced behind him at Anders, who lifted his hands: I warned you. She turned back to the man and nodded once. “We have a schedule.” She gestured toward the scale. “Everything has to be weighed.”

He blinked as if surprised by the sound of her voice, then grinned again. “Right. Of course.” He maneuvered the rolling bag onto the scale in an awkward dance, one camera bumping his sternum, the long lens swaying dangerously. He steadied it with a gloved hand. “They said I’m hitching a ride since we’re headed the same way.” He glanced at the plane, then at her stacked boxes. “You’re the brains of the operation.”

“Something like that.” Elara wrote down the bag’s weight without looking up. The number was higher than she liked. “How many more?”

“Uh.” He looked down at himself. “This one. The backpack.” He shrugged off the pack and set it gently beside the rolling case, then unbuckled the strap that held the telephoto lens to his side. “And the gear on me. The cameras go with me; they don’t leave my person.”

“They will for takeoff and landing,” she said, noting the second number. “The pilot won’t have loose equipment in the cabin.”

He took the chiding without flinching. “Got it.” His eyes flicked to her clipboard. “You do this a lot.”

She marked down the lens. “Yes.”

He smiled again—the kind that invited a retort like a hand extended. “This is my first time going out this far north. Closest I’ve been was Svalbard in spring. Felt like summer camp compared to this.” He lifted his chin toward the open hangar doors and the pale slice of sky. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s a storm,” she said. “And we’re on the edge of it.”

He followed her gaze to the low, fast clouds. For a moment the smile softened into something focused, like a lens snapping into place. “Then we’ll make it quick.”

We, she thought, bristling. “You’ll sit where the pilot tells you and you’ll not interfere. This is a research flight.” She capped her pen and looked up, letting him feel the weight of her attention. “We are not detouring to ‘chase light’ or look for animals.”

He laughed, startled. “Understood. No detours. I’m contracted to shoot glacial retreat and ice morphology for an editorial spread. I’m not here to feed polar bears Oreos.”

She didn’t return the laugh. “Good.”

He studied her for a beat, not in the way men sometimes did to test boundaries, but with curiosity, as if she were part of the landscape he needed to learn to move through. He unbuckled one of the camera bodies and cradled it in his palm, then brought up the display with a tap of his thumb. “For what it’s worth, I’m not trying to get in your way. I—can I show you something?”

“No.” The answer came out too fast. She softened it by lifting her pen. “We’re pressed for time.”

He took the no with a small nod and a flicker of something in his eyes—disappointment, not wounded pride. He slipped the camera back against his chest. “Okay. Tell me where you want me during loading.”

Elara exhaled, a measured release. “Over there.” She pointed to a strip of floor beside the plane’s open door. “Your gear goes on last. The cameras will go beneath your seat. No batteries loose. No straps dangling. If you forget something, we will not go back for it.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He moved where she indicated, his movements efficient despite the bulk. He stowed the rolling case and the pack exactly where the ground crewman told him to. When he crouched to secure a strap, his hat slid back and a scar at the edge of his hairline caught the light—thin and pale as thread. He noticed her looking and touched it without self-consciousness. “Ugly surf break in Oaxaca,” he said lightly. “The ocean won that round.”

She didn’t ask. She went back to her boxes, checking the ties herself, pushing when the knot didn’t meet her standard. A few feet away, he stripped off one glove with his teeth and checked a battery indicator on one of his bodies, the raw skin of his knuckles cracked and reddened against the cold. He blew on his fingers and refit the glove. His presence was a hum at the edge of her focus, a steady intrusion that wasn’t loud, exactly, but insistent.

“Dr. Vance,” the pilot called from the wing. She looked up; he held up two fingers. “Two minutes.”

She nodded and turned to find Leo watching her. He was close enough now that she could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the small, focused frown that replaced his smile when he concentrated. He lifted his brows, an unspoken question: ready?

Elara drew her scarf up again and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “Stay behind me when we board,” she said. “Watch your head. It’s tight.”

“Yes, boss,” he said, and the words could have been mocking from someone else. From him, they were easy, almost warm. He stepped back to let her pass.

She ignored the warmth. She gathered the clipboard, checked the boxes one more time, and led the way across the concrete. The air outside knifed at any skin it could find. The plane’s prop wash flung her scarf against her cheek. She mounted the steps with practiced care, the metal cold through the soles of her boots, and felt more than heard him behind her—his careful placement of feet, the soft clatter of something against the doorframe, the low apology he murmured to the metal.

Inside, the cabin was as tight as she’d warned. Two rows, narrow aisle. She slid into her seat, placing the clipboard down with reverence, and buckled in. He followed, negotiating his gear into the space beneath his knees like someone who had played this game in too many ports. One of his cameras brushed her boot and he pulled it back quickly. “Sorry.”

She didn’t look at him. “Keep it clear.”

He did, his hands steady, his mouth set. When the pilot swung the door shut and the engine’s pitch climbed, Elara fixed her eyes on the pale rectangle of the window. Out there, the sky was almost the color of metal, unyielding and quick. In here, heat began to leak into the tight space, and beside her, a stranger shifted into place. He radiated energy like a small, contained storm, and she resented him for it.

The plane lurched as the pilot tested the throttle. Leo braced instinctively, then flashed her that small, reachable smile again, as if they hadn’t started badly, as if she might take a second chance if he offered it. She kept her hands tight in her lap and set her jaw, a barrier she could control while the rest of her day tilted irrevocably into someone else’s orbit.

The pilot’s voice crackled over his shoulder. “Final checks.”

Elara unbuckled again without a sigh, because sighs wasted air and time. She leaned forward, twisting in the narrow seat to see the cockpit instruments. “What’s the dew point spread at current altitude?” she asked. “And confirm outside air temp at two thousand. Your last reading was minus twelve, but the wind shear’s changed.”

The pilot, Anders, glanced back. “Minus fourteen now. Dew point at minus sixteen.” His hands moved over switches with relaxed precision. “We’ll climb to forty-five hundred to get clean of low scud, then step to six. Light rime possible on the climb.”

“Which heading after we clear?” Elara’s finger made a small motion toward the map clipped to the panel. “Direct to the station or detour east around the worst of the cell?”

“Direct with a five-degree dogleg to skirt radar returns. Saves fuel.” He flicked a toggle. “We’ll keep eyes on the wings. De-ice is working.”

Leo, who had been watching the exchange like a spectator at a tennis match, blew out an appreciative breath. “I understood… two words of that.”

Elara ignored him. “What’s the latest on the ceiling past the fjord? And visibility on approach if we need to switch to dead reckoning?”

“Ceiling eight hundred and rising. Vis is garbage in the gusts.” Anders’ mouth tugged. “We’ll be fine.”

Leo leaned into the aisle to catch the eye of a ground crewman closing the hatch from outside. “Hey, can I bribe you to make sure my stuff doesn’t migrate to Siberia?” he called through the crack, grinning. The crewman rolled his eyes and thumbed up. Leo flashed a thumbs-up back like they’d agreed on a private joke.

“Elbows in,” Elara murmured, low and precise.

He tucked his arms close, smile undented.

The engine idled back. Anders unbuckled long enough to half-rise and twist around to address them both. “Okay, we’re starting up again in two minutes,” he said. “Last chance for questions, bathroom, and life-altering decisions.”

Elara was already there. “Are you watching the pressure falls along the north edge?” She pointed. “The gradient is steepening faster than forecast.”

Anders’s eyes warmed with respect. “I am. If it looks ugly, we turn back.”

Leo glanced between them, a little awed and a little left out. “So… you two could probably fly this thing with your minds, and I’m here like, look, a shiny button.”

She didn’t smile. “This is not the place for jokes.”

“Noted.” He wriggled his shoulders like he was shaking off an itch and then aimed a softer tone at her. “You always like this before flights?”

“Like what?” She didn’t look up from the map Anders had handed her.

“Plugged into the matrix,” he said. “Downloading the entire atmosphere.”

He was trying. She recognized the olive branch and let it land nowhere. “I need information.”

“Me too,” he said, mock earnest. “For instance, your favorite snack. In case we run out and I need to trade you interpretive dance in exchange for a granola bar.”

The corner of Anders’s mouth twitched. Elara didn’t give him the satisfaction. “I prefer not to barter for basic survival.”

“Right,” Leo said, lifting his palms. “No bartering. Straight capitalism. I can work with that.”

“Seatbelts,” Anders said, amusement threading through his voice. “We’re rolling.”

Elara buckled in, the harness snug across her chest. The straps settled with solid familiarity. She checked the latch, then checked Leo’s without touching it. “You need to tuck that strap. It’ll catch.”

He looked down, startled, and slipped the rogue webbing back into place. “Thanks,” he said. “My mother would be grateful you didn’t let me be that guy.”

“You’re about to be that guy if you don’t stow your camera strap,” she said, nodding at the loop peeking from under his thigh.

He did, obedient and quick. “You’re kind of the patron saint of not dying, huh?”

Elara didn’t reply. She craned forward again, voice pitched forward. “If we hit icing at three thousand, I want to know your exit strategy. Descend? Climb? We’ll lose climb rate with rime.”

Anders’s hands were steady on the yoke. “We climb through if we can. If not, we turn and descend back into clear air. No heroics.”

Leo turned his head toward the small window, then back to her. “So, Dr. Vance.” He tried again. “Elara. What’s the first thing you do when you land at a station? Like, what’s your ritual?”

“Calibrate instruments. Check meltwater channels. Start spectral readings. Secure the food against foxes.” She paused as the engine whined higher. “And make tea.”

He seized on that. “What kind?”

“Black,” she said. “Strong.”

“Good. We have common ground.” He adjusted his hat and gave the ground crew outside a salute as they moved away. Snowflakes skittered in the prop wash. “And if I manage not to offend you before we get airborne, I’ll consider this a successful morning.”

“You haven’t offended me,” she said, surprised at her own honesty. “You’re just inefficient.”

He laughed, low and a little delighted. “Inefficient is my middle name.”

“Your paperwork had you as Liam,” she said.

He tipped his head. “You read my paperwork?”

“I read everything,” she said. The habit had saved her more times than she could count.

“Good to know.” He drummed his gloved fingers once on his knee, then forced them still, aware of her watching. “So when you’re not quantifying the sky, what do you do for fun?”

“Work,” she said.

He made a small, dramatic wince that could have been irritating if it weren’t so genuine. “You walked right into that one.”

“It was not a joke.”

“I know.” He sobered. “I’m not trying to get in your way, Elara. I’m here to do my job and hopefully not drive you crazy while we do it.”

Her name in his mouth surprised her. She looked at him fully for the first time since they’d strapped in. There was no glibness in his expression now, just an earnest focus that mirrored the way he’d handled his gear. For a fraction of a second, the din swallowed into a bubble of quieter sound—his breathing, hers, the soft click as Anders set a switch.

“Checklist complete,” the pilot called, breaking it. “Sterling, keep your hands and feet to yourself. Vance, if you have any more meteorology exams for me, save them for the climb. We’ll be fine.”

Elara nodded, sitting back. “Understood.” She kept her eyes on the window, the clouds dragging low and fast like a closing fist. Her pulse steadied. She had asked every question that mattered. She was ready to take the uncertainty she couldn’t control and bolt it down the only way she knew—by naming it.

Beside her, Leo tilted his head close enough that she felt the brush of air as he spoke, private in the roar. “If you ever feel like translating the sky again midair,” he said, “I’ll be very quiet and try to learn something.”

She didn’t answer. But she didn’t need to. The plane began to roll, and the world outside turned from concrete to white. His knee sat a careful inch from hers, his energy contained at last. The ground crew shrank to dots in the mirror. Anders’s voice came soft and certain through the cabin, counting down to takeoff, and Elara held herself still, a line drawn clean through the noise.

Anders eased the throttle forward. The skis hissed over packed snow, then bumped as they found ruts. “Wind has backed five knots,” he called. “Storm line moving faster than forecast, but we’ll get out ahead of it.” His tone made it sound like he was discussing lunch, not the dense wall of weather pressing in from the west.

Elara marked the change with a small pencil note on the folded map in her lap, then slipped the pencil behind her ear and pulled out a stapled packet from her bag. The pages were covered in tidy columns, a chart of ice core sampling schedules and instrument calibration routines. She anchored herself there as the plane surged, reading the same line twice until the familiar numbers took shape again.

Beside her, Leo angled for the window as the skis left earth. The stomach-light drop of lift pressed them all back, and the outpost slid away into strips of white and dark. He let out a breath that was half laugh, half relief, then remembered himself and went quiet. He pressed his camera bag closer to his boots like that would make him smaller.

The climb was steady at first. Sunlight poured thinly through high cloud, turning the world into a soft glare. Then the wind began to lean on them—nothing dramatic, just soft shoves that made the wings tilt and level, tilt and level. Elara’s eyes flicked up only to track the rhythm, then dropped. Her thumb pressed to the margin of a page, smudging a line of graphite.

“Little bit of chop,” Anders said. “Normal stuff. Hang tight.”

Leo’s knee bounced once. He caught it with his hand and glanced at Elara, maybe expecting a quip, maybe only wanting to meet eyes with another human. She didn’t give him either. Her brow was set, lashes lowered over the exacting lines of her notes. The neat, precise world in her lap didn’t move; the plane moved around it.

He tried again for connection in the only language he understood. He slid his camera out, careful of the strap she had warned him about, and powered it on. The screen lit his face. He angled it toward the window and caught a stark, beautiful sweep of ridges like the spine of some buried creature, then risked a glance at her. “You ever get over how big it is?” he asked softly, voice pitched to thread under the engine.

She didn’t raise her head. “No,” she said, and the single syllable could have been about the landscape or about something else entirely. She flipped to the next page.

A tremor rippled through the fuselage as they hit a streak of colder air. Anders adjusted power, the pitch changing like a breath being held, then exhaled. “We’ve got rime forming,” he said, businesslike. “De-ice is on. We’re clear above at six thousand. We’ll be there soon.”

Leo angled the camera toward the wing, intrigued despite himself by the thin, white fuzz feathering the leading edge. It was delicate from here, almost pretty. He thought about pointing it out, but the word rime seemed like it belonged to Elara and Anders more than to him. He turned the camera off and set it aside, feeling, for the first time that morning, useless.

Outside, the horizon had softened into a seam of gray. The definition bled out of the world as they pushed toward it. Inside, everything sharpened—every rattle in the panels, every tick of plastic as it settled. Elara traced a finger down her list of instruments, checking off what she would do within the first hour of arrival. She reached the bottom, flipped back to the top, and began again.

“Sterling,” Anders said after a beat. “If you’re feeling off, look at the fixed points in the cabin, not the horizon.”

“I’m good,” Leo said, though he wasn’t sure. He looked at the screw heads in the wall and the scuffed edge of the seat in front of him. He looked at Elara’s hands. They were still, composed, as if the plane steadied itself around them.

He remembered the polar bear photo and, on impulse, thumbed his screen awake long enough to pull it up. The bear’s fur had been painted blue by the light, its black eyes intelligent and wary. He shifted to give her a view, not too close, just enough that she could see if she chose to. “Caught this two days ago,” he murmured. “Telephoto. I found a track line along the bay.”

She moved her gaze to the window, not the screen. “You were too close,” she said.

“I wasn’t.” His smile was small and defensive. “I respect the line.”

“Good,” she said, a whisper of approval hidden in the word. Then she bent back to the page.

They entered the first thin veil of cloud. It was like passing through breath—visibility narrowed to a bright, shifting milk that erased distance. Leo swallowed, his ears popping. The temperature dipped; a crispness crept into the air he could feel on his skin. The smallest crystals banded on the window’s outside, melting and reforming as the de-ice boot flexed on the wing.

“Hold your questions,” Anders added, as if to himself. “We’re almost above it.”

Elara didn’t have questions anymore. She had a plan for the hour after landing and a revised plan for a delay. She had the exact number of tea bags left in her kit and how many times she could reuse one without wanting to spit. She had numbers and steps and something to hold.

Another push of turbulence rolled the fuselage hard enough that Leo’s shoulder brushed hers. Heat flickered where they touched through layers of fabric. He pulled back quickly and said, “Sorry,” again, quieter. She didn’t answer, but she didn’t move either, as if the contact had been a small, neutral fact, unremarkable and stored.

The engine note climbed. The gray thinned. A clean, pale light slid through the cabin as they broke into a layer of sun, flat and winter-bright. The world below lay blank, soft, and treacherous. Anders leveled them off, a touch of relief in his voice. “Top of the layer. Smooth for a bit.”

Leo let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding and tipped his head back against the seat. He let his eyes fall shut for a count of three. When he opened them, Elara had capped her pencil. Her fingers smoothed the corner of a page. She was watching the window now, but it felt like she was still somewhere else, in the measured landscape of numbers and control that he couldn’t enter.

He wanted her attention and didn’t know why. He wanted to say something that mattered and couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t a joke. So he did what she did, in his way. He wrapped his hand around the camera on his lap and held on, as if it were a tether. Outside, the first thin tendrils of darker cloud gathered on the horizon like ink bleeding into paper. Inside, the quiet kept its shape, and Elara didn’t look at him at all.

The smallness of the plane made even the smallest movements intimate. A shift of a knee, the whisper of fabric, the dull thud of a strap buckle against the floor—all of it lived too close. Leo tipped the camera screen toward her again, a quiet, careful offering. The polar bear filled the display, all muscle and winter light, its paw half-lifted on a blue-white expanse. The shot was crisp, the kind that made editors write three exclamation points in emails. He kept his voice low so it wouldn’t have to travel far. “I waited an hour in a snow hollow. He came along that ridge like he owned the earth.”

Elara’s eyes slid to the screen. She didn’t lean in; she didn’t let the closeness turn into complicity. Her gaze landed on the image, registered it, and moved on as precisely as the sweep of a scanning instrument. “You got lucky with the light,” she said. “And with the wind.” Then she turned her head back toward the window, the blunt line of her jaw a polite barrier.

He held the camera there a second longer, as if it might draw her attention back by its own gravity. The bear’s breath was visible in the cold—he remembered how still he’d been, how he’d felt his heartbeat in the snow. She had not asked. The screen dimmed. He powered it off and let it rest against his thigh, the lens cap warm where his hand had cupped it.

“Yeah,” he said, soft and unembarrassed. “Lucky.” He tipped his head, watching her profile, the way her mouth tightened not with disapproval but with endurance. He caught the pale mark of a healed scar near her eyebrow, something faint and old, and wondered what had made it. He knew better than to ask.

The sky ahead had layered itself, bands of gray over paler gray, a gradation of certainty into something else. The plane eased its nose up a hair, climbing to keep pace with the darkening line. Anders spoke to the tower in clipped phrases, their names and coordinates swallowed in static. Elara pushed the stapled packet into a neat square and tucked it into the side pocket by her knee. She pulled out a small notebook instead, the spine worn soft. She printed a date at the top in orderly numbers and then, with that same steady hand, wrote a single word: approach.

“Barometer’s dropping faster than it was ten minutes ago,” she said, not lifting her eyes from the note. “You can hear it.” The last word wasn’t a boast, just a fact. And she was right—some shift in tone, barely there, had crept into the thrum.

Leo listened, because she asked him to in her way. He sifted through the sound until he caught it, a subtle flattening, like the plane had swallowed its own breath. “I hear it,” he said, and her chin tipped, an acknowledgment that felt like more than it was.

He wanted to follow that tiny opening, ask what else she heard, who had taught her to listen this way. But the moment folded back into itself. Her shoulders squared. She clicked her pen closed and set it on top of the notebook like a paperweight, as if fixing the page would fix the world.

The windows on their side filmed at the edges with faint lace, the cold working its quiet design. A bead of condensation crawled between panes and trembled with each vibration. Under them, the infinite plain blurred, then sharpened as they slid between layers. The sun fell into dull wool. The horizon, once a clean line, was now a dense seam, its texture like breath on glass.

Leo eased his elbow toward the armrest. He didn’t quite touch her. He could feel the warmth of her through the inches, the way you could feel a fire across a room. “You always travel with a plan like that?” he asked, his smile gentle, angled to defuse the way the air had tightened.

“I don’t travel without one.” She said it as if anything else would be reckless, not courageous. She glanced at him then, a bare flicker that could have been curiosity or a check to make sure he was keeping up. “Your work looks…” she searched for a word that would neither wound nor invite, “opportunistic.”

He huffed a quiet laugh. “I prefer adaptive.” A beat. “It pays better.”

“Mm.” It was not agreement or disagreement, but he filed the sound away anyway, liking that it was hers.

The engines lifted in pitch as Anders trimmed for climb. “We’ve got more build-up than I want. De-ice holding. We’ll skirt east, get around this bank,” he called back, not quite hiding the extra attention in his voice.

Elara’s spine straightened. She looked toward the cockpit door, then down at her hands for one small second, as if she didn’t trust them to stay still. They did.

Leo could make the mood lighter with a joke about in-flight refreshments, about his famous mile-high granola bar. He could, but he didn’t. The gray outside wasn’t just weather anymore; it felt like a room about to close. He watched her watching it, the distance she’d rebuilt between them set like a pane of glass. He didn’t press. He accepted that she had chosen her side of it, for now.

To fill the space, he lifted the camera with deliberate slowness and, without turning the screen toward her this time, scrolled past the bear, past a sweep of drifted snow like pressed linen, to a photo he’d taken of the empty outpost at dawn—a single antenna mast iced over, sky bleeding pale. He didn’t show her. He only looked, letting the image work on him, reminding him why he’d said yes to this assignment beyond the check.

The world ahead had gone from gray to graphite. The sun was a smudge trying to burn through and failing. The rumble under their feet steadied, not smoothing but resolving into a pattern he could start to trust. Elara’s breath fogged the inner pane and vanished. She pressed her palm to her thigh and kept it there, as though force alone could keep things in line.

He tried the bear one more time without words, tipping the camera a fraction to the side where it might catch her in the corner of her eye. She flicked a glance, quick and efficient, the way someone checks the time. “You shouldn’t have stayed out in the open like that,” she said, softer than before. Then, because she wasn’t cruel, “It’s a good shot.”

It was an olive branch wrapped in caution tape. He took it as it was and tucked it away. “Thanks,” he said, and this time he let the screen go black.

They climbed. The space around them narrowed. Outside, the sky pressed closer, grainy and opaque, the white land a memory beneath the heavy lid of cloud. Inside, they sat side by side, not touching, separated by inches and choices. Her gaze stayed on the window. His slipped between her profile and the gray ahead, restless and drawn. The wall between them settled, solid and intact, as the plane moved forward into the deepening dark.