Nov 3, 2009, the Arctic
hen the entity came she’d been daydreaming, thinking of W home: Brit, Cat and Ada. Its coming was silent to the natural world, but it created loud reverberations in the link between her and Hardson. The link severed and reattached three times, then broke and stayed that way. Now, Bell could only mask and block. She could sense it, but only passively. She knew it had used up much of its energy store on the journey, and it was disappointed with Hardson, its new host. It attempted to sense more of the environment, searching for new hosts with more energy than its current, nearly frozen one.
The wind had calmed considerably in just the last few minutes.
Now there were periods of nearly calm air, with good visibility, punctuated by short-lasting gusts of thirty to forty knots.
The Beaver had crash-landed 22 minutes ago. Bell began to worry that Art could not convince the friend who controlled Heaven’s assets to risk his career to help her. She understood. If she could have told that friend the whole story, if she could have made a true believer of him, he would help her. Anyone would, knowing the greater good his deed would serve. As it stood, however, Art had asked that friend to risk his career on a hair-brained folly with only Art’s word to persuade him. That’s why she’d switched off her phone right after sending the coordinates. If disappointment came, she wanted to put it off as long as possible. She’d find out on her own soon enough. She didn’t want to hear the bad news from Art.
She didn’t want to say goodbye under those circumstances.
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