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compute.
    Alicia Marshall’s face was colder than Greenland itself.
    Jo shrugged. There was nothing here, other than the fact that Douglas and Alicia Marshall had a terrible relationship, which enabled him to go ice-hopping at regular intervals without a moment of regret. He probably wasn’t the kind of man, anyway, to sit down in the snow and weep over his private life.
    Yet she wondered. She still wondered.
    Most of all, she wondered who Franklin had been, what the lure could be. Someone who, by Bolton’s own admission, had been the passion of Marshall’s life.
    She looked briefly at the blackboard menu, propped on the wall outside the pub, and went in.

Three
    The bear lifted her head. She could hear the plane.
    She was on hard-packed floe, and the weather was startlingly clear.
    Space lost all perspective here, where there was nothing to measure distance or size. Alone, she was the center of a perfectly flat and featureless world, and the horizon was a line that might have been ten miles away, or twenty. Ice crystals in the atmosphere created a double sun, a central light source with a circle of glowing satellites.
    She turned away, toward the dull drone of the aircraft engine.
    The Twin Otter was flying low. Richard Sibley, swathed in layers of expedition clothing, sat forward, waiting to take shots through the copilot’s window. He had spent the last week at Resolute, begging space from the base there both to stay over and to take whatever flights he might be able to charter now that the historians had left Beechey Island.
    When conditions were right, and luck was in, it was theoretically possible to take the kind of photographs that kept him in business. As far as he knew, he was one of only a handful of Arctic specialists. Because you needed to be more than a little crazy, or bloody minded, to endure subzero work.
    Still, when the rewards came, they were huge. Last year Sibley’s image of a semicircle of bull and cow musk-ox, shielding their yearlings, apparently against a blue-gray blizzard—but in reality against him—made him a good income for a few weeks. The fixed, ochre-glowing eye of the bull ox, almost lost in its prehistoric mane, its brow covered by the base of thickly ridged horns, formed the entire frame of one photograph. Almost, but not quite, lost in the center of the pupil was a faint ghost of the ice ridges on which it stood. It was one of those pictures that stopped people dead in their tracks. It was almost impossible to look away from that primeval glare of endurance.
    But the musk were evasive today. After making a fuel run to Prince of Wales Island, the plane was heading back. They were skimming the desolate hills, heading out for Peel.
    Sibley had the edge of the island in his sight. Rippled ridges of land—much like the corrugated sand left on a shoreline by a retreating tide—swept underneath him. The colors were hypnotic—gray ridges of stunted vegetation, threadbare lichen, striped with snow. Or what had once, perhaps, been snow. Now, he knew, the consistency would be more like icing sugar or thin flour—powdery, fragile. On the ground the thermometer was at minus thirty; the wind speed about fifteen. The equivalent temperature, down on the approaching sound, was probably about minus sixty, or more. It would freeze his flesh in seconds.
    It was just then, as they crossed the indeterminate border between land and icebound ocean, that he saw her.
    The bear was standing stock still, though the plane was heading straight for her. As he stared down in amazement, he saw, through the lens, the crescent scar on her forehead. His heart skittered through several uneven beats; she seemed to be looking through him, without even lowering her sights in the familiar pose of aggression, let alone turning away from the engine noise.
    They passed over her twice. She might have been carved from stone, her fur shimmering in the oblique light.
    He had the most unearthly feeling that she was guarding