Chapter Twelve

Twelve

A year ago, if anyone had told me I’d be atop a mountain in full ski gear, wiping flecks of snow off my goggles and fighting a relentless ice-cold wind in the middle of the Antarctic night, I would have said, Yeah, maybe. Weirder jobs had happened.

If you’d told me I’d be doing all of that with Noelia Boschert, and happy to have her too, that’s when I would have called bull. Funny how drastically things can change within a year.

An artificial vortex of wind blew up snow behind us. Noelia scrambled to catch her unruly double-plaited braids, which were, quite hilariously, slapping her face like it owed them money. I was suddenly grateful I’d pulled my braids into an efficient ponytail.

“Are you sure they can’t hear this at the lab?” Noelia yelled over the thrashing of the helicopter blades. I turned to watch the copter, dark except for the speckles of light from inside the cockpit, rise back into the air. It was a relative tornado dropping down in the middle of the silent continent. Copters aren’t exactly the stealthiest ride out there, so they’re typically repulsive to thieves. But when you need to get to the bottom of the world, the options are limited.

“Chill.” I stage-gestured to the valley of the mini mountain. Down the slope, past another expanse of flat snow and nestled between scraggly rocks on each side and a glacier-filled sea behind it, were a slice of concrete and faint twinkling lights. “We’re miles away. They’re not gonna hear anything, and with the lights off, they can’t see this far either.”

At least, I was 90 percent sure that was the case…

“I’m looking at the feed the American boy is sending in from the shore.” Mom’s voice buzzed in my ear. Hundreds of miles away, on a freighter, she was running coms. Despite being on the team, she was not down for the cold. So she said, but I suspected she didn’t want to risk running into Diane. “The helicopter was practically invisible.”

“I’m listening and watching. Over and out.” A tiny click sounded in my ear as she turned off her mic.

“She knows no one says over and out anymore, right?” Noelia twisted her braids into her goggle straps.

“Mom plays by her own rules.” I checked my watch: 2:55 a.m., but the sun had set only an hour before we dropped in. Most of Antarctica is trapped in daylight this time of year, which would have been a nightmare. However, the Antarctic Peninsula gets a couple hours of night, a small window of time for infiltration.

Noelia and I would ski down the mountain, navigate the lab—then we’d leave through one of the side exits and maneuver around the nest of rocks toward the shore, where Mylo was waiting in our cold-weather-proof Zodiac. From there it would be a brisk ride to our helicopter pickup spot. There was no way we were hauling ourselves back up the mountain to this drop-off spot.

That was if everything all went according to plan. There was also, you know, the other team to worry about. But you couldn’t plan for everything, except that was the reason both Noelia and I were here. Two thieves may be less covert than one, but they also kick more butt than one, even if neither of us were particularly out for blood or anything—

I turned to Noelia, about to ask if she was ready, only to find her tucking a gun into her marshmallow-white waistband.

“What the hell? We don’t do guns!”

“Said who?”

You’d think she’d be done with guns forever after what happened with Yeriel. I breathed in a painfully cold breath. “Lia…”

“Will you relax? It’s not real .” With clumsy hands—I attributed that to the thickness of her gloves—she popped open the mag, revealing dual rows of tiny capsule-sized canisters filled with clear liquid, each with its own baby syringe.

“Sedative. Fast acting.” Noelia popped the mag back into place. “I won it in left right for Christmas.”

I cocked a brow. “Left right?”

“That game where everyone brings a gift, and you pass them around in a circle until the music stops.”

“Someone brought a sedative gun—”

“Christmas is always interesting in the Boschert household.” She resituated the gun at her hip.

“Don’t hesitate to shoot.”

Noelia and I startled. I hadn’t even heard Mom click her mic back on.

She continued. “Trigger-happy people get a bad rap, but at the end of the day, they’re the ones who are alive.”

“Okay, thank you, over and out,” Noelia said. There was a short pause before Mom clicked off again. Noelia sighed. “With advice like that, I’m surprised she doesn’t carry a gun.”

“Mom’s deadly enough without one.” Weirdly, a little spark of envy hit me. In terms of efficiency, it was a shame Mom wasn’t here. No one won like her.

Shaking the thought off, I adjusted my goggles. Noelia clacked her ski rods together for luck. Staring down the miles of slope and snow ahead of us, I blew out a cloud of air, and we took off.

···

By the time I was folding my skis and rods up and tucking them into my backpack, I was unreasonably pissed at whatever asshole architect dropped this lab at the edge of the water, forcing us to trudge across tundra for over an hour. If only all this had gone down a couple months earlier, we could’ve cut time by sneaking across the frozen-over ocean, but the slightly warming temperatures increased the chances of becoming a human game of Skee-Ball on the ice. So that was, sadly, a no-go.

Creeping onto the roof of the lab, which, thanks to a slope of snow, was as simple as walking up, Noelia and I set a drop line to propel into a window. Noelia swung down and shaved away at the glass, carefully handing me the pane before shimmying inside. I gripped the rope, about to follow, when Mom’s voice buzzed back in my ear.

“Just to you, baby girl. There’s a time to do things your way, and there’s a time to do things my way. If you want to win, do as I say. Be brutal this time around.”

Brutal. No hesitation. Were those the parts of Mom that ruined all her relationships, or were they the parts of her that always got her what she wanted?

Winning was something I wanted too.

Noelia tugged the rope from below, probably wondering what the hell I was doing.

“I understand. Over and out.”