Chapter 16 Perimeter

The village was called Nine Mile, and it had been a fishing camp and then a cannery and then nothing, and by the time the Merganser came down on the harbor ice it was a scatter of shanties and one long empty shed and a flagpole with no flag. The engine died as they touched down. It died the way an engine dies when it has been running on a prayer and a sip of fuel for the last twenty minutes, quietly and without drama, and the plane coasted across the ice and stopped and the prop turned twice more and did not turn again, and Nessa sat with her hands on the yoke and let out a breath that she had been holding since the fathom. "We are out of fuel," she said. "That is the whole story." Isaak looked at her. "You knew." "I knew at the point. I knew we had enough to get here or enough to turn back, and not enough for both." She unclipped and reached for the door. "Come on. The ice under us is a meter thick and the shanties are fifty meters east. We take the case and we go inside, and then we sleep, and in the morning we find out what Nine Mile can give us." They took the case and the papers and the dive bag and crossed the ice to the nearest shanty, a low box of plywood and tarpaper with a stove and a bench and a window that faced the lake, and it was cold and clean and had been emptied of everything but a coil of rope and a hand auger and a fishing stool. They got the stove lit with the last of the driftwood they could find, and they sat with their backs to the wall and watched the window, and the first light found them there. They slept a little, in shifts, in the cold shanty, and when Nessa woke the sun was high and the lake was white and the wind had dropped, and the whole world was painfully clear, which in her business was never a gift and always a warning, because a clear day is a day the men in the boats can see everything. The boats came at noon. They came from the north, two of them, and they nosed into the village harbor and tied up at the broken dock and offloaded four men onto the ice. Nessa watched them through the shanty window with her heart going slow and heavy and her hand on the dive bag, and beside her Isaak watched them too and did the counting. "Four," he said. "No dogs. No aircraft. They do not know we are here. They are working the shoreline the way you would work a grid." "They will find the plane." "They will find the plane." He looked at her. "Can we get the case away while they search the ice in the wrong direction?" She considered it. The shanties were on the east side of the harbor, and the men were working the west, and there was a low ridge of shore rock between them and the trees. A person could slip out the back and go north along the shore and be in the trees before the grid reached the shanties. One person. With the case. "You take it," she said. "North along the shore, into the trees, and you keep going until you find the road. There is a road, thirty kilometers, at the head of the bay. Find it, find a car, find a telephone, call the provincial police and then call every newspaper that will answer, and tell them exactly what you have." "And you?" "I stay with the plane." He looked at her and understood at once, and his whole face changed. "No." "The plane is the only thing here that they can connect to us," she said. "If I am with it, I am a pilot whose aircraft broke down. If it is here and I am not, it is a signal. And they will come looking for the person who left it." She took the case from him and pressed it into his hands. "You are the case. You are the only one of us that matters to the whole world, Isaak. I am a pilot. There are other pilots." "There is one of you." She almost smiled. "Then I will make sure there continues to be one of me. Go now, while they are on the west shore. I will give you an hour's start, and then I will make myself very obvious on the south side of the harbor, and they will chase me, and you will be in the trees." He did not move. The men on the ice drew closer, four small dark figures against the snow. "I am not leaving you," he said. "You are leaving me, because it is the only way the case survives, and the case is the only way the men who put your agent in the road ever answer for it." She said it very quietly, and then she did the thing she had been avoiding, and reached up and put her hand along his face for one second, and then let go. "Go." She watched him go until the dark took him, and then she sat down on the fishing stool by the window and gave him his hour, and used every minute of it to do exactly what he would have told her not to do, which was to think about all the ways this ended badly, and to decide, one by one, which of them she could live with. He went. * * * — Isaak — He ran north along the shore with the case under his arm and the cold in his lungs and the sound of his own boots on the snow, and every step he took away from her was a step he argued against. He was a man who had spent two years reading the arithmetic of other people's choices, and the arithmetic of this choice was simple and terrible: the odds that she survived what she was about to do were not good, and the odds that the case survived if he stayed were worse, and so there was no choice at all, only the appearance of one. He hated arithmetic. He had hated it since the first wrong number. Behind him the village fell away, and ahead the trees came up out of the snow like a dark wall, and somewhere off to the south a single sound carried across the ice, a sharp, flat crack, and he stopped and looked back, and he could not see what had made it, and he made himself turn and keep going, because that was the only thing she had asked of him, and it was the hardest thing he had ever done. ---