Free Zodiac Station by Tom Harper

far they’d lead me. About ten metres, where a jumble of broken rocks marked the edge of the glacier. Another dead end.
    I put my hand in my pocket and felt a lump, the key I’d found by the edge of the crevasse. I took it out for Greta to see and explained where I’d found it.
    ‘It must have fallen out of Martin’s pocket, I suppose.’
    ‘I never saw him with a key.’
    ‘How else—’
    She pointed to the large footprints. ‘Maybe his.’
    That was a nasty thought. I dangled it away from me, like something picked out of a blocked drain. No clue to say who it might have belonged to. I
♥
NY didn’t mean much. I mean, who hasn’t been to New York?
    I put it away and looked back at the footprints.
    ‘Shouldn’t we take some photographs? Something to show Quam?’
    ‘You trust Quam?’ Greta had got her backpack off the snowmobile seat and zipped it open. She pulled out a fat coil of rope and a webbing harness, which she tossed to me.
    ‘What’s this for?’
    She shook out the rope and tied it around the snowmobile’s cowling. She handed me the other end and nodded to the crevasse.
    I backed away. ‘I’ve never done anything like this.’
    ‘Then you should learn.’ She snapped a carabiner at me like a crab’s claw. ‘If something happens, you need me up top to get you out.’
    The light changed as she lowered me in, like slipping into a lagoon. An intense, sapphire blue that soothed my eyes after the stark white landscape. I couldn’t stop looking at it. The ice walls swam in sinuous shapes, curves and hollows that no human mind could have conceived.
    I shuddered as my feet touched down on the snow at the bottom. For a moment, I felt very clearly that I was standing in Hagger’s grave. My senses came alive, fluid roared in my ears and the ice seemed to tremble, as if the walls were colliding to crush me.
    Greta’s face appeared above me. Small, a long way off.
    ‘Are you OK?’
    ‘Fine.’ I put out my arm and pressed my gloved hand against the wall, just to be sure. The ice was cool and adamant. One day, it would move and close up Hagger’s grave. But not now.
    I walked along the crevasse floor, the rope paying out behind me. It wasn’t long, maybe twenty or thirty metres, curving in a shallow crescent so that from one end you couldn’t see the other. The only marks in the snow were my own footprints. Whatever Hagger had planned to find here, he hadn’t had a chance to look.
    They call Utgard the last place on earth. For me, buried in ice, freezing cold, at the end of a crevasse where a man had died, I felt like the last man on earth. The blue walls no longer bathed me: they drowned me. There was nothing here.
    But as I turned to go back, something caught my eye. A strange formation at the bottom of the cliff, flat grey against the blue-gloss ice. Spindly columns poking out of the snow like the teeth of a comb. Ivory smooth. I reached out to touch them.
    And gasped as I realised what they were. The sound echoed off the ice, back and forth, as if I was in the throat of an enormous beast.
    A beast who ate bones. That was what they were. Bones. I saw it the moment I touched them. Limbs and a ribcage, so small that for a ghastly moment I thought it might be a child’s. Then I got hold of my senses.
    Greta’s face appeared again at the top of the crevasse, dark against the sky.
    ‘Find something?’
    ‘There are bones down here. A polar-bear cub.’ I didn’t look too closely, but that was all it could be. Definitely not a bird, and no way a seal could have come this far from the sea. ‘The body’s completely decomposed.’
    ‘Bodies don’t decompose on Utgard.’
    ‘They must be ancient, then.’ Perhaps that explained the size, some prehistoric creature that had dropped dead thousands of years ago – millions, maybe – and been swallowed by the ice. Preserved perfectly, museum-fresh; only revealed this year when the crevasse split open.
    And Hagger had died here. A gruesome