The conversation seemed to be happening somewhere far away, the words drifting around Samantha, her mind unable to capture them for long.
“Isaksen, Jones here.”
“Jones, go ahead.”
“Decker says it’s a strong sedative. She probably needs oxygen. He says they keep portable oxygen canisters in all of the buildings in case someone gets sick from the altitude. McClain here says to look beneath the bar.”
We’re just going for a little walk out the rear fire escape. Oh, don’t worry. I disabled the alarm. I’m hoping I got the dose right and you can still walk, but if you can’t, that’s okay. I’ll carry you or drag you by your hair. I don’t care.
“No!” Samantha cried out, tried to fight. “Don’t!”
“Samantha, honey, it’s me, Thor. You’re safe here. Can you open your eyes?”
She tried but just couldn’t do it. “My skin… It burns.”
“You have mild frostbite. The burning is a good sign. I’m going to give you some oxygen. Just breathe, okay?”
A plastic mask over her mouth. A hiss. A puff of canned air.
“That’s it. Keep breathing.”
Every time she inhaled, there was another hiss.
But it was the sound of his voice, deep and reassuring, that held her.
She tried to tell him that. “Talk to me.”
Hiss. Hiss. Hiss.
“Okay. You keep breathing, and I’ll keep talking.”
He told her how he’d found her and carried her out to Summer Camp and how they both had hypothermia. “When I saw you lying there, I was so afraid I was too late, that you were already gone. I don’t think I’ve ever been more afraid in my life.”
He’d been afraid for her?
Hiss. Hiss. Hiss.
Then he told her how the coldest he’d been before this evening had been after a snowstorm in Greenland.
“There was more than a meter of new snowfall, more than the dogs could handle. My partner had twisted his ankle that morning, so it was up to me to ski ahead of the sled and break trail for the dogs. After a while, the snow that got into my clothes melted from my body heat. I got wet down to my skin. It was only forty below, but I became hypothermic. We had to stop and make camp.”
More than a meter of snow?
Hiss. Hiss. Hiss.
He drifted from story to story. “People think that being in Sirius was all about the weather, but it was really all about the dogs. I can’t tell you how many times I had to break up fights between horny male dogs because one of the females was in heat.”
As her head began to clear, his words painted vivid images in her mind.
She remembered the scars on his wrists. “They’re big dogs, aren’t they? Wasn’t that dangerous?”
“I suppose it could be. We made sure the dogs never forgot that we humans were the pack alphas.”
Hiss. Hiss. Hiss.
“Malik said … you saw polar bears.”
“Lots of polar bears.” He told her how a bear had followed them, showing up every night when they made camp, but keeping its distance as if waiting to see whether they’d do something stupid and become a snack. He told her how a bear had broken into one of their emergency shelters and eaten all the food, leaving a big pile of shit with candy wrappers in it as a thank you. He told her how he and his partner had dug into a snowbank for emergency shelter, only to realize there was a mother polar bear denning in that same snowbank.