The first thing that hit me about the British Antarctic Survey Oates Research Station was the heat. It was incredibly warm in there. Tropical. Sauna excepted, I was hotter than I'd been for days.

It was heavenly.

Paulo and I quickly stripped down to t-shirts, me feeling grubby in my chunky socks and well-worn thermal base-layers, him looking disturbingly attractive for someone who I was 60% sure was a murderer.

He still hadn't smiled.

I was starting to feel paranoid, like I'd forced myself on him, and had to remind myself that if anything, with his twelve calls and abrupt invitations, he had forced himself on me.

He's just shy, I reminded myself of what I'd known of him in Edinburgh, and it comes across as hostility.

I was having difficulty believing it.

We padded in our socks down a network of bright corridors and through eerily empty rooms. The decor was bright and institutional, white, splashes of colour, lots of moulded plastic; like a new-build college library, a cafe called Citrus! or Fresh!

"Here," Paulo said, pushing a heavy double door open for me. "This is it."

The room had low, modern couches in it, and two guys were lolling about, one on a laptop with headphones, one reading a battered paperback. They put both down and turned to face us immediately as we entered.

"Jennie," Paulo introduced me. "And this is Davey and Stephen."

We went to join them on the sofa, both of them looking at me like I was some sort of special exhibit.

"Nice to meet you." Davey, the guy who had been on the laptop, reached out his hand. He had tousled long hair, beyond his shoulders, and looked a similar age to me. A shoe-string necklace with an aboriginal style wooden ornament on it was tied round his neck. He looked like a surfer, someone that would be friends with Ben, immediately making me intimidated by him.

He also had a soft Northern Irish accent, reminding me of Sam. Anxiety pulled on my chest like a drawstring.

"So you're from the ice hotel?" Davey asked.

I nodded, self-conscious under their scrutiny.

"Wow," he marvelled, like I'd affirmed I came from the moon.

Paulo stood up. "I'm going to finish dinner. You're okay here, Jennie? You want a drink?"

I nodded again, and again when Paulo suggested tea. I was starting to wonder if I'd lost the power of speech.

"So..." I cleared my throat, relaxing slightly after Paulo left. "Are you guys scientists too?"

Davey shook his head.

"No," the other one, Stephen, said.

He was tall, with wavy dark blonde hair, and had an almost aristocratic English-country-tweedy look about him, even though he was in a faded North Face t-shirt and Goretex trousers.

"Paulo and Phil are the only scientists here. Ecologist and Atmospheric chemist respectively. I'm a medical doctor. They have a medic overwinter on every research base in case of emergency. Even tiny ones where there's naff-all to do." He smirked.

"And I'm a janitor," Davey added.

"More than a janitor," Stephen said. "He's being modest. He does the upkeep of the building, all the plumbing and electronics etcetera, looks after the snowmobiles. We'd die within seconds without him."

"We'd die without you," Davey countered.

"Only if you got appendicitis."

Stephen shrugged. He picked up his paperback, which was splayed open beside him on his seat, and marked his page by folding down a corner before pushing it under the sofa. He was reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.

"How many of you are out here?" I asked.

"Up to thirty in summer." Stephen said.
"But only four now."

"Skeleton crew," Davey said in a ghost voice, wiggling his fingers. "Rattling our bones in the long night."

"Wow, just four?" I was surprised.

"Yep. For five months. Only four of us. Stuck out here." Davey nodded.

"Sounds... intense."

Davey laughed loudly, tossing his long hair over his shoulder. "That it is, that it is. Nice accent. You Scottish?"

I nodded.

"So what's this hotel like?" Stephen asked.

"I still can't get my head round the fact it's there," Davey said. "Like, that you're here. We've got a visitor. It's fucked. No offence," he added quickly.

"It's a new age for Antarctica, that's for sure." Stephen shook his head. "I've done three winters out here, and this year... just knowing they've got those helicopters, flying in and out just ten miles away, while we're—"

"Prisoners," Davey said light-heartedly.

Stephen nodded. "It makes you feel so much more trapped. Psychologically. It's startling, the power of comparison."

"Is it cold?" Davey asked. "I can't believe it's made of ice. That's gotta be cold. It don't seem safe. Maybe in Sweden or something, but not out here."

"They heat it inside," I told him. "To minus five."

Davey made an 'interesting' face, and said, "that's still pretty cold."

"It is," I agreed. "There's a sauna though. And the bathrooms are heated."

The others nodded, hanging on my every word.

"You should come over," I suggested. "Have a drink in the bar. It's really beautiful. There's like, ice sculptures and stuff."

"Yeah," Davey said doubtfully, sucking on his lip. "I skidoo'd over when they were building it like, to have a gander. Dunno if I'd go in for a drink. Maybe. It would be interesting."

"There's a lot of politics around the whole hotel thing," Stephen said, leaning back in the sofa. "Some ambivalence."

His accent was very private school.

"Because it's Russian?" I asked, remembering what Ruben had said about geopolitics.

"It's Russian?" Davey exclaimed.

"Is that right?" Stephen sounded surprised. "I thought it was American. You know, the Yanks and their free enterprise."

He definitely went to private school.

"Majority Russian ownership," I informed them. "That's how they have the helicopters. Ottercopters. They're a Russian military technology. Built in Siberia."

"Well there you go," Stephen remarked. "That's interesting."

"And strange," I added, warming up to my favourite topic. "That they would use military technology on something as insignificant as tourism, don't you think?"

"I do and I don't." Stephen shrugged his expensively educated, probably-distantly-related-to-royalty shoulders. "Nothing out here is really insignificant. The hotel isn't only about tourism, just as this research station isn't only about science. You spend any amount of time on the ice and you realise that politics drive everything."

"Oh aye," Davey nodded. "It's all political, like. Countries angling for advantage. We're part of the British imperial effort." He lifted his hands to the walls around us. "Which is pretty ironic really, with me being from the colonies myself."

"And Paulo is Argentinian," Stephen added, "and Phil—the other scientist wintering here—is South African."

"Aye, and there's Brits on the German station and Indians on the US and Americans in the Norwegian," Davey went on. "Whoever can do the jobs, especially for the science. It's so specialised—I don't think anyone could run that massive bloody radiometer thing we've got in there except Phil. Calibrate it, translate the atmospheric readings that come out, its gobbledegook to me. So all the geopolitics—the this is Australia staking their claim, this is New Zealand—is kinda weird when you think about it."

"Yeah," I said. "I see what you mean."

International staff, doing national business. My Paulo Argentina theory was starting to look a little weak.

"So why the ambivalence about the hotel?"

"It's just... different." Stephen propped his elbow to the back of the sofa, lifting a hand to ruffle his golden waves of hair. "I mean, there's been tourism for a while now, and it's consistently growing..."

"Two thousand percent in the last thirty years," I cut in, remembering Luca's words.

Stephen nodded. "That doesn't surprise me. But the hotel is a new step, you know? First the research vessels had to get used to sharing the seas with the cruise ships. Then it was sharing the summer ice with the Pole trippers and penguin spotters. And now, winter... and a permanent base. It's like there was this uncontaminated space for science for so long, and now things are changing.

"It's a new era, a new dawn. People are just wary of change." He shrugged.

I got it. Losing Ben, leaving GlobalGreen, leaving London... I wasn't particularly enjoying change either.

"Plus it seems dangerous as fuck," Davey added glibly. "Like what their HSE protocols are I don't know, all those people in the ice like that."

I wondered momentarily if I should tell him about the incident, but decided against it.

"I suppose they don't need that, not like here," Stephen said. "Not if they've got those helicopters and can just push off at any time."

"Aye," Davey said. He sounded almost bitter. "That's half the problem. You know, a hundred years ago men was killing themselves trying to get to the Pole." He pointed to the plaque bearing the name of the research station. "Dying on the way there, dying on the way back. Then just a few short years later, they had the technology to fly over the fucker. Mapped it all. Saw it from the cockpit, like. What was the point? You die of gangrene in a blizzard, thinking you're some hero. That airplane makes you a fool."

Stephen laughed, heartily. "You might see it like that," he said to Davey, "but not everyone does. Oates is a hero, isn't he? Whether they flew over the Pole or not. This place is named after him."

"What are you talking about?" Paulo has returned, carrying tea.

He distributed it to us as Stephen said, "Politics. How all the countries are just using the science to stake their claim in Antarctica. Same for the hotel. It's Russian, did you know?"

I watched Paulo to see how he reacted to this news, but he seemed completely nonplussed, sitting down, sipping his tea.

"It doesn't surprise me," he said. "They blocked the marine reserve, wanting to fish in the waters. They don't seem shy about focusing on what they can get out of Antarctica in terms of resources."

"Aye, yeah, but they're all like that aren't they?" Davey said. "The science is just a cover...."

As he went on talking about the history of the research bases being established and territorial struggles before the Antarctic treaty, I realised I hadn't felt the need to look at my phone—or had any particularly crazy thought spirals—the whole time we'd been talking.

I was having a conversation. I was engaged in it, rather than looking for hidden or alternate meanings I the others' words, or thinking about something else.

Was I enjoying myself?

Is this what it having fun looked like, for me?

Maybe where Suzie had her yoga and Ruben his photography, I had conversations about history.

Suddenly my ears pricked up, and I zoned back into Davey's geopolitical monologue.

"No, no!" Davey was saying. "The Argentinians are the worst! Tell Jennie, Paulo! Tell her! Tell her where you were born!"

Paulo looked disapprovingly at Davey.

"I was born in a boat," he said stiffly.

"No, no!" Davey laughed, clicking his fingers excitedly. "Tell her where!"

"Between South Shetland and South Orkney," Paulo surrendered, his tone unwilling.

"I was born in a helicopter," I said to Paulo. "Between Shetland and Orkney."

He lifted his downcast eyes from his tea to look at me, making proper eye-contact for the first time.

His eyes were as black as the Antarctic night, rimmed in long, dark lashes, deep enough to drown.

I couldn't look away.

"Which is Antarctica!" Davey was saying next to us, his voice gleeful. "He was born in fucking Antarctica! He's only fucking Antarctican!"

I managed to tear my gaze away from Paulo's, painfully, like separating grafted skin.

"Really?" I said to Davey, feigning amusement though my hands were a little shaky.

"Totally!" Davey crowed. "It's some fucked up political stunt the Argentine government pulled in the 80s, like making natives to claim the land. Get him to show you his passport!"

I wanted to turn back to Paulo to ask him but was afraid to meet his eyes again. Glancing at him sidelong through my fringe, I could see he was still staring at me.

"Paulo?"

Then the voice came, and he immediately turned away.

We all did. Towards, the door, where a woman stood, glowering at us, her hands balled into fists.

"Phil," Davey said, which could have been a greeting or declaring her name for my benefit.

She ignored him either way.

Her narrowed eyes were set on Paulo. Then slowly, hatefully, they swivelled towards me.

"Okay," she said. "Who the fuck is this?"