The First Session

The survivor's name was Hanne, and she was the calmest person Dr. Søren Bakke had ever interviewed.

This was, in his experience, a very bad sign.

Survivors of extreme events — frostbite, starvation, isolation, the loss of companions — were rarely calm. They were dissociated, or they were hypervigilant, or they cycled rapidly between both. Hanne sat across from him in the hospital's recovery suite, her hands folded, and answered his questions with the measured precision of someone describing a commute.

"You were in the field station for two hundred and ninety-four days after the team stopped responding," Søren said.

"Yes."

"And the last confirmed communication from Dr. Larssen and the others was on day forty-one."

"Yes."

"What happened to them?"

Hanne looked at him. Her eyes were the color of ice over deep water. "I told the first team everything when they found me."

"I'd like to hear it again." Søren clicked his pen. "In your words."

She told him. It took twelve minutes. The account was detailed, coherent, internally consistent — a plausible sequence of events involving a structural failure in the secondary shelter and a storm that had lasted eleven days. Tragic, but explicable.

He had the first team's debrief notes in the folder on his lap.

He had read them on the flight in. In those notes, Hanne had given a completely different account: no structural failure, no storm.

Instead: something that had come out of the ice on day thirty-nine.

"Dr. Bakke?" Hanne said.

He looked up.

She was smiling, very slightly, with an expression he could not quite read.

"You're holding the folder upside down," she said.