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A hermetic sleeping bag. A face mask that warmed up the air before it hit your lungs—
    The sight of the mask stopped her. The need for it stopped her. What was she doing, going to a place where her own unaided breathing could freeze her from the inside out?
    She shook her head and zipped that thought away with all the equipment inside her mom’s old pack. All she needed to worry about right now was getting on a flight. She slipped out of the bedroom and down the stairs. In the darkness of the living room, she watched the rise and fall of Uncle Jack’s bulk on the couch, making sure he was asleep.
    Poor Uncle Jack.
    She hoped he would forgive her. She eased the front door open, squeezed through, and then eased it closed again, all without waking him.
    Out on the sidewalk, she slung the pack up onto her back, and it was a lot heavier than she’d been expecting. She almost lost her balance, but she wiggled under the straps and adjusted herself to the weight of it.
    The reluctant sun still huddled over the horizon, but its first soft glow had arrived. Eleanor pulled out a bus map she’d printed, the routes to the airfield highlighted, and walked to her first stop.
    The schedule didn’t have the next bus leaving for seventeen minutes. As she stood waiting there for it, the early-morning cold closed in. She wasn’t normally outside at this time. Few people were unless they had to be. Eleanor hadn’t worn her warmest gear. She didn’t think she’d need it until she reached the Arctic, but now she wished she’d put it all on. It only took a few moments for her teeth to start chattering, her fingers and toes to tingle, her nose and ears to hurt.
    Before her mom’s first Arctic trip, she had gone over the effects of cold on the human body with Eleanor. It had probably been a misguided, overly intellectual attempt to alleviate some of Eleanor’s fears. It hadn’t worked.
    When facing extreme cold, the human body immediately reroutes blood to vital organs, leaving the extremities without adequate circulation and vulnerable to frostbite. This has other effects, like going numb, and the increased blood supply to the kidneys makes you have to pee. Metabolism slows to conserve energy, which in turn slows brain activity, making you feel sluggish and foggy. The cold makes you stupid.
    But these are only delay tactics. It’s all just the body’s effort to save what it can, the most important organs, until you’re able to get somewhere warm. Because the human body is not meant to survive in cold like this. It can’t.
    Without normal blood supply, your legs and arms get weaker and weaker, making it harder to move. Skin cells start to rupture, and tissue dies. The numbness and the fogginess only get worse until you start to think it would be a good idea to lie down and take a nap. That’s when the cold finally wins.
    And that’s the thing. The cold always wins. All it needs is time.
    Eleanor wasn’t at the point of lying down on the sidewalk just yet, but if she felt this cold right now, here in Phoenix, how would it be in the Arctic?
    The bus rumbled up a few minutes later. Eleanor stamped her feet and leaped on board as soon as the doors hissed open.
    E leanor had to change buses at the city’s main terminal. She disembarked at the same time a new batch of refugees unloaded just up the curb, their eyes glassy from exhaustion and disbelief. Everything they owned they carried in suitcases and duffel bags, having left the rest behind for the ice to devour. Governmentworkers walked among them, giving instructions, handing them slips of paper with their new addresses in the Ice Castles. Their new homes.
    Eleanor wondered where they had come from. Idaho? Wyoming? What had their lives been like, with the ice sheet bearing down on them, grinding everything underfoot? How long had they clung to their homes before surrendering it all to the ice and retreating? How hard