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who were carrying her. She felt a rush of happiness. They weren’t going to leave her to be sent home after all!
    ‘Quick,’ Chills hissed. He pushed open the door out of the Bridge and checked to see no one was in the corridor. ‘Into the Met lab.’
    They carried her through a nearby door, with a sign on it that said ‘Meteorology’, and put her down on the floor. Chills had a sack in his hand and Stay thought he was going to throw it over her head. But to her surprise he rolled her on her side and started to fiddle with the lock on her base.
    Stay felt a rush of alarm. He was taking the money! The Boss had been right! She wished she could growl and show her teeth. That money was for the Guide Dogs. How dare he touch it?!
    Chills managed to unlock the panel and coins began to trickle into the sack. He put his hand inside and started to scoop them even faster. Stay felt sick as they rolled out. The notes were the last to go — the money that had been paid to get revenge on Neptune. Horse’shundred dollars fluttered out at the end. She felt Chills snatch it and stuff it into the sack. With all her might she tried to send a thought to him.
    Don’t you steal that money!
    She heard him jiggle the bag and give a satisfied chuckle at the sound of the coins chinking together. Then he picked up one coin and put it back into Stay before closing the panel on her base and turning her the right way up.
    ‘An excellent haul,’ he said. ‘Now put her in the bag. I’ll deal with this.’
    Stay felt Beakie pulling the black bag over her head. He picked her up and she felt him open the door, then start carrying her down the stairs. She wanted to howl. How could they betray her like this?

Chapter 11
    Beakie carried her a long way through the ship and Stay lost track of the staircases and corridors. They arrived at a place that clanked and echoed. It sounded like a large, open area, but Stay couldn’t imagine where she was.
    She heard lots of scuffling and clacking before Beakie laid her down on her side. She felt him pile a whole lot of heavy things on top of her. She wanted to struggle or to find some way to escape, but there was nothing she could do.
    ‘See you later, Stay,’ he said.
    She heard a door slam nearby and then the distant sound of his footsteps disappearing.
    Stay felt lonely. She had let herself be dognapped and now she’d let herself be robbed too. All that money was gone. How would she ever raise so much again? She’d thought Chills and Beakie were her friends. Thatpart hurt most of all. She’d trusted Chills, and it looked like she’d been wrong.
    Jet had told her that Labradors were a trusting breed. Too trusting, Stay thought. She should have been more suspicious. Perhaps all along Chills and Beakie had been planning to rob her and then hide her so no one would find her before the ship headed home from Antarctica.
    She tried to send a thought to the Boss to come and rescue her, but wherever she was on the ship, she couldn’t sense humans nearby. I won’t even see Antarctica now, she thought. She’d spend the rest of the voyage stuck inside a bag and when she did get back to Hobart, she wouldn’t have any money to show for it. Nothing. Stay sank into misery.
    Hours passed. Eventually Stay could sense the buzz of human excitement on the ship. She realised that the day of their arrival had begun and everyone was awake. This was the day they would crack through the sea ice to get as close as possible to Davis Station. The Boss had told her how he would push and push until the ship was firmly wedged into the fast ice, which was thick sea ice attached to the shore, so the cranes could unload the cargo containers over the ship’s side straight onto the frozen ocean. Big trucks and machines from the station would then carry the containers to land, along with all the people. A fuel line would beconnected from the ship to the tanks on shore and the Aurora Australis would pump out hundreds of thousands of