I can lead you home, says the wolf. He is somewhere off to Red’s left, watching, paws treading silently on the snow. You know I can.
 

“Yes,” says Red, and feels Hilda and the others follow her into the wind.
 

********

 

An object in motion will remain in motion but there is also the matter of objects at rest. To will herself to her feet each morning is a monumental hurdle. To pull apart the cooking stove is another. Breaking camp is like breaking bones—everything pulled into painful, discrete fragments. Then it’s all stashed on the sleds, hitched to a few bodies, and sent off into the white horizon. Since his disappearance, they’ve had to deconstruct Erik’s sled, pull out only the essentials for the remaining five of them. Red has taken his ice axe. It now resides securely on her belt, tapping against her leg with each laborious step. She looks down at it, occasionally, and can easily picture Erik alive—standing in front of them, sentry-like, with his hands on his hips. Addressing her with a formality that should’ve seemed out of place but never quite did: Ms. Little, do keep up. In another era he would’ve worn khaki and blazed his way through a jungle. Or axed his way through a copse of frontier pines in tattered wool. Instead, he was here, occasionally snowblind but always stalwart.

  

Until a late afternoon storm had kicked up into a white-out and swallowed him like a pill.

   

She knows the mouth of the tundra is still open.

  

In his absence, she has picked up some of what he left behind. She thinks he would want her, each night, to lay out the route for the next day. He would want her to keep the others on track toward home, to keep their spirits buoyed not by charisma but by sheer dogged determination. The routine has become rooted inside her, meshed with the dwindling muscle and sinew writhing beneath her skin. Wake, walk for eight hours at whatever pace they can collectively manage, stop before sundown so that a new camp can be established before dark, fall into dreamless sleep. Even with Erik gone, the rhythms of the expedition do not halt. Her limbs move of their own accord.

 

Today, she finishes spearing tent poles into the snow and trots in the direction of a deep blue crevasse, field sample kit under one arm, ready to gather evidence of what perhaps will be the last hope for the climate and for mankind inside its capricious grip. The others will still be able to see her from camp; her snowsuit remains vivid even in the waning light. She’d chosen the color for that purpose specifically—a scarlet so bright it gleams almost as persistently as the ice. A color so immemorial that, surely, it can’t disappear into the blowing snow.

    

Are you ready to go home? asks the wolf, standing on the other side of the crevasse. Red bends down in the snow, begins to dig. She thinks about the looming ice shelf, about the decision regarding their route over or around it. About how it might feel to lead everyone to their deaths. Are you ready for warmth?

 

“I’ve forgotten what it feels like,” she replies, without looking up.

   

Wouldn’t you like to remember?

​

There is something delicious in the thought of slipping back into humanity with a new depth of appreciation for warmth. Toes dipping into a hot bath. Soup swelling down her throat. Mornings before dawn beneath layers of bedding. The mundane world suddenly brought into sharp focus. Maybe that’s why she’s here. Maybe that’s why they keep going.

​

She pulls her hood further down over her ears, until all she sees in her peripheral vision is red.

    

You were always so easily led astray, says the wolf.

​

********

 

In the early hours of the morning she listens to the even breaths of Dagmar beside her and ponders the swaying nylon roof of the tent. Every muscle in her body is tight against the urge to shiver. Outside, the wolf paces. They’re both growing restless.

  

She allows herself to lift the left sleeve of her long johns, clenching her teeth against the chill. In the blue light of the coming morning, it’s a shock to see her own bare skin. A shock to find that the wind hasn’t worn her down into something as shapeless and barren as the world outside. The familiar scars still trace down her forearm. Track marks still weave in and around the veins—the middle one, bifurcated and plump, was always first choice, but ultimately none were safe from sacrifice to the hungry needle. She wasn’t Red back then. In her snowsuit she is something else. Someone who can never quite disappear.

​

At daybreak, Aldo turns on the miniature propane stove. “Weather permitting, we should make it to the ice shelf by the afternoon,” he says, putting the kettle on. “Then we’ll have to vote.”

    

“It’s impossible,” says Red. “It’s impossible to replace him.”

​

The others are just beginning to stir in their sleeping bags. Hilda reaches for her gloves, Bertie rubs at his eyes, Dagmar burrows deeper into her ragged pillow. Red glances around, finds herself looking for Erik in their faces and finding only something abhorrently foreign instead.

    

He trusted you,” says Aldo, with a shrug. “I trusted him and he trusted you.”

​

Red just shakes her head in bewilderment. The sun has begun to slant sideways through the thin, fluttering walls of the tent, catching on chrome zippers and scientific instruments and discarded cooking tools. Red reaches down to roll up her sleeping bag but ends up feeling her forearm once more through the fabric of her suit. The skin feels new again if she doesn’t press too hard.

​

********

 

A particularly fierce wind dries out Red’s lips so fast that they crack and bleed before noon. She spits crimson onto the snow and trudges in front of the others. Hilda scrapes along beside her, unaware of the wolf that pads ten yards to the left and matches their pace step for step. Red consults the compass periodically, but they don’t stray much from their course due north toward the ice shelf. It’s there that things will get complicated—someone will have to make the decision on the best navigable route around the shelf to the coast beyond. The southerly path is trickier but has fewer miles, a miasma of crevasses and mountains that must be met head on; the northwesterly one is an eternal swath of unbroken, flat terrain that stretches miles and miles longer. It’s a question of endurance. Out here, it always is.

    

Aren’t you tired of the struggle? asks the wolf. At home you will be yourself again.

   

“I know,” she murmurs, but her reply is snatched by the wind the moment it falls from her splintered lips.

   

The wolf looks familiar sometimes. It shifts through people she’s known, but the eyes always give it away. It’s a forgery that is pulling eternally at her loose strings, attempting to unwind her in the direction of the whiteout. The needles used to do that, too—snag on her clothes when she would try to pull them away from the veins, yearning to snatch themselves back into the warmth of soft flesh. The routine controlling her hands as if they were no longer attached to the rest of her body. Another forgery, a mockery of free will. Old traumas groping their way to the surface and inhabiting her the only way they know how.

 

The ice shelf presents itself by twilight. She looks at it for a long moment, itches at her forearm, suppresses the urge to push forward blithely into the whiteness to the south—an old, out-of-control habit to take the shortest route to easy bliss inside warm veins. They make a brisk camp at the base, wordlessly securing tent poles and sleds without a moment’s pause for thought. Red opts to organize the collection of ice cores, arranging and rearranging the crystalline glass containers, while Aldo tears off strips of paper from his steno pad and Hilda prepares a canned dinner.

 

For dessert, they cast their votes. The void that Erik has become lingers––dark matter at the edge of her consciousness. A push rather than a pull.

​

The delicately folded paper shreds are removed, one by one, from Bertie’s skullcap. Red watches them blossom open, her fate a near guarantee as Aldo lays out the result. They’ve elected her, of course. Red is written in varied handwriting across every slip of paper except her own, which has remained stalwartly blank beneath her hand.

​

“Are you up to the task?” Aldo asks her, as if there’s ever been a choice in the matter. But perhaps there is, actually. Perhaps she’s an expert in choices—in making them poorly or not making them at all. Before she was Red, at least. Why had Erik trusted her, she wonders. Had he known she spent her time resisting the wolf?

​

“You can lead us home?” asks Dagmar, teeth worrying her full bottom lip.

​

Red nods. They’ve never seen her bare arms.

​

********

 

An orange sun presides over their morning regimen. Red inspects the map one last time, tracing the northwestern route with one finger. Longer and safer. Pushing against the wind with endurance rather than brute force; all she’s ever wanted to know how to do. It feels more like a choice than it probably is.

​

I know who you are, says the wolf. Its footsteps perpendicular to the line on her map. They point south, toward treachery. If you follow me, you’ll remember too.

​

Erik’s ice axe swings on her belt as she turns. The wolf speaks to her in her own voice.

​

And how exquisite it will be, it adds. The first dip of a toe in a warm bath. The slide of a needle into nostalgic flesh.

​

She pulls her hood tighter against her ears.

​

You’re going to remember it all.

​

The others have finished securing their sleds. She spares a final glance at the compass, at the map, at the glowing red arms of her snowsuit. The world swirls empty in the periphery, the wolf leaning in from all sides.

 

She squints her eyes shut, then steps forward into the white and takes the lead.