Free Until the Night by Giles Blunt Page A

her door again. The temperature had dropped ten degrees and there were loud cracks and pops from outside. Ice contracting.
    I’ll tell you about my ideal world, I said. My ideal world is one where you turn around the moment you hear footsteps, because you hope it’s me.
    She shook her head, not looking. You can’t talk to me that way.
    You and Vanderbyl are breaking up. You’ve already broken up.
    She shook her head again. You can’t.
    But I am. I think you want me to.
    She removed her hands from the keyboard and folded them in her lap and looked down at them. When she looked up again, she pointed at her lidar readout. The screen resembled a spray of yellow and red confetti.
    You know what that is?
    No.
    You’ve just come in from outside. How would you rate ground-level visibility?
    Right now? If it wasn’t for the curve of the earth, you could probably see Denmark.
    Clouds?
    None. Not one.
    That—she tapped a trim fingernail on the screen—is a cloud. It’s not visible to the naked eye. It’s not visible to a telescope. It’s not even visible to infrared. I’m looking at a cloud here and I have no idea what it’s made of. I’m going to be analyzing these readings for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t want also to be trying to figure out if you love me or hate me. There’s only room in a life for so many mysteries. I couldn’t face coming home to another.
    A wave of bitterness took me by surprise. Don’t flatter yourself, I said. I just want to sleep with you.
    She gave me one of those single blinks. Data received. There was always the risk with Rebecca that you transmitted more than you knew. She raised her hands once more to her keyboard and resumed typing.
    If I thought that was true, she said, it might stand a chance of actually happening.

5
    D ELORME’S ALARM WOKE HER AT four a.m. She patted the bedside table to shut it off, cursed, and sat up on the edge of the bed. It was cold in the room and she was wearing nothing but the long T-shirt she slept in. The alarm was on the chair where she had put out her clothes the night before, placed there to ensure she got out of bed.
    She hit the button to silence the alarm and closed the window and went still for a minute. Fragments of a dream. A highly graphic scene involving Leonard Priest. “Oh, please,” she said aloud. “Gah.”
    Lifting her T-shirt over her head, she caught the fragrance of Ivory soap and resolved to switch brands. She put on the clothes she’d laid out and went to the kitchen, where her coffee was waiting. She poured it into her thermal cup and put the lid on. She ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts standing up and put the bowl in the sink.
    She strapped on her Beretta and sat down to pull on her big boots. Then the blazer and finally the big parka. She closed the inner door of her vestibule—her airlock, she called it—and stepped outside into the dark. Black sky, crescent moon, and air so frigid her lungs refused the first breath entirely, making her cough. She locked the door and went down the steps,then went back up and opened the door. She picked up the tool kit she had put there the night before and shut the door again.
    Her Volvo was facing the street, the trailer and snowmobile already attached.

    Black streets. Empty. Soft roar of the Volvo’s heater.
    Ten kilometres north of the city, almost as if she had crossed a border, the world turned white. Snowbanks, shoulder high, lined the highway, and boughs hung down under their burden of snow. Delorme made a left at a sign that announced a series of recreational trails. The parking area was empty. She got out and unloaded the snowmobile. When she climbed on and started it, the noise was shattering. Thirty-five years she’d managed to live in Algonquin Bay without owning a snowmobile, but the previous year she had caved in and bought one. The winters were long in this place, and if you let them imprison you, it could make you crazy. She had joined a club, paid a fee, and got a trail map