“You’ve been awful scrappy since I taught you to box,” he said.

She gave his chest a light swat with her mittened hand.

“Fisticuffs are my thing,” she said. “Before long I’ll have to watch out for cauliflower face.”

“I think,” he said, “You mean ‘cauliflower ear.’ ”

“Close enough.”

They stood there facing each other.

“Got to head off,” Nimec said, and nodded toward the waiting choppers.

“Yes,” Megan said.

“You mind the store. There should be enough men here to—”

“I’m really okay,” she said. “I’ll be okay. And so will this base.”

They stood a few seconds longer in the blowing cold. Then Megan stepped forward and hugged him.

“Thanks, Pete,” she said, her voice catching, her arms tight around him. “Thanks very much.”

Nimec cleared his throat.

“What for?” he said.

“Just for being you,” Megan said.

Over Bull Pass

“We’re seeing . . . nk . . . think the . . . tch . . . can . . . sn . . . us . . . down where . . . sss . . . ssssss . . . sk . . . ”

“Chinstrap One, you’re breaking up. Say again?”

“Srks . . . siss . . .”

“I’m losing you, Chinstrap One,” the UpLink chopper pilot said as Nimec listened from the passenger seat. “Repeat your status. Over.”

“Crkrrsssss—”

The pilot frowned, tried to reach the other MacTown bird. He was a wire-thin black man named Justin Smith who wore a sparse, tightly kinked chin beard and spoke with an occasionally strong peppering of a Caribbean accent. Nimec thought it sounded like Trinidad.

“Chinstrap Two, we’ve lost contact with Brother Penguin,” he said, pronouncing the word Brother as Brudda. “We need to confirm you’ve made your tick mark. Acknowledge.”

“Ngg . . . you . . . rppttt—”

“Say again—”

“Still cnnttrd. Extnr . . . ssssszzzdrr . . . rceee . . . ”

Nimec turned to Smith. “Snap, crackle, pop,” Nimec snorted in disgust. “There any way to get a lock?”

Smith shook his head.

“Our radios are already hopping,” he said. “The disturbance cuts across all bands.”

“Try our own bird again,” Nimec said. The trail ship carrying Waylon’s team had peeled away toward its rendezvous moments earlier.

Smith radioed it, got more garbled noise, cursed under his breath.

Nimec wondered if Smith missed palm trees and white sand. “We’ll have to forget about any of them reporting for now,” Nimec said. “Keep our fingers crossed they’re in position.”

“They’ll be doing the same for us.”

“Yeah.”

Nimec looked out his windscreen at the coiling lights in the sky. What had started out as an isolated purplish stain near the sun had become a moving, living rope of color across the horizon, twined with a glowy spectrum of greens, reds, and blues.

“Damned freakish,” he said. “The weatherman says it’ll be a sunny day, you can count on having to leave your house with an umbrella and galoshes. But solar flares, radio interference . . . this they can all get on the mark.”

Smith flew in silence, making unconscious, minute adjustments to his sticks as a highway driver would to his steering wheel.