I sat with Suzie and Ruben in the dining room of the ice hotel, thinking about Paulo as they discussed their social media strategy for the week.

The dining room was a long, narrow hall, lined with little caves on each side, each with a curved ceiling and bench-like seats made entirely of packed snow. Everything was made entirely of packed snow.

The benches were scattered with reindeer hides to sit on. The same hides lined the beds in our rooms, the beds themselves solid, icy plinths.

The tables in this dining room were ice too, as clear and perfect as glass. Crystaline columns lined the walkway at the centre of the room, lit bright electric blue. Above us, a giant snowflake, glowing white and apparently carved from ice, hung over our heads. It was both beautiful and surreal, like nowhere else I'd ever been.

Ruben and I chewed on venison burgers, while Suzie picked distractedly at a bowl of sauerkraut. Strange, really, with the venison and reindeer skins, how this Antarctic hotel had co-opted the culture of the exact opposite end of the world, because no human culture existed here.

How far had they had to ship this meat, just so I could eat it?

It was also strange how primitive people had made their lives for centuries in the harsh climes of the Arctic, yet no-one had come to the interior of this continent until 1910—and died when they did.

Thinking about that made me feel intensely isolated, my head spinning into the sky like a movie camera, taking in the miles and miles of undisturbed snow all around us. It made me nauseous, my venison tough and stringy in my mouth, and I shivered.

Despite the walls and nearly all of the furniture being made of ice and snow, it was significantly warmer in the hotel than it was outside. They heated it, can you believe that?

Another female twenty-something InTrepid employee had told us, in an introductory talk when we arrived. The winters here got as cold as minus ninety, so the ice hotel was heated to a consistent minus five.

Minus ninety. Guaranteed death, surely?

"So," Suzie said, flicking at the screen of her phone, where she had the list of InTrepid-provided excursions. "Ice climbing would give some great pictures, especially if we can get landscape shots. And it's gotta be the South Pole trek, but we'll have to be smart about it, to get images without too many other people in shot. Did you say penguins for the third, Ruben? Are you sure?"

Ruben nodded through a massive mouthful of burger, relish on his bristly chin.

"Jennie?" Suzie asked curtly, the fact that I wasn't pulling my weight on the social media front dripping from her voice.

I hastily slipped my phone back into my pocket—Paulo hadn't texted—and said, "Penguins, yes. They're super tame. They'll let you get really close, so you could get some good photos."

"Okay, cool," Suzie said, placated. "Now..." she placed her phone on the table, and pointed to Instagram, open on her screen. "Other people have already started posting. We need to get our asses into gear. But we also gotta offer some original content. Except for the GlobalGreen reach, which we can't access at the moment—"

She looked accusingly at me, and I swallowed and whispered, "Sorry."

I'd told her that our social media manager had gone on maternity leave and there was a temporary mix up with the passwords, but that wouldn't buy me much time.

I didn't have a plan B.

"So until then, we gotta focus on my audience and yours, Ruben," Suzie went on, frowning as she scrolled up and down Instagram, "And we have a lot of crossover with the Back of the Van and Eco Kitchen guys, so can't recreate their content. We need something original. Any ideas?" She squinted up at us, breath curling white from her nose like a dragon.

Ruben slid Suzie's phone to our side of the table, so we could inspect the #IntrepidIce and #Antarctica tagged posts.

My first response was surprise.

Though I was here, right now, and the hotel was undeniably beautiful, it somehow looked much better on the screen.

In reality, crowds of people were clattering about, shouting and clanking dinnerware, bright parkas and red-noses, eternally flashing phones.

Yet somehow, in those pictures, the hotel looked peaceful, eerily deserted. I looked up, and watched a skinny woman in a huge bobble hat arranging and rearranging an antler candelabra on one of the dining tables, set with steaming food. The rest of her team were shivering, arms folded in the walkway, as they waited for her to finish styling and watched their food congeal.

"Got it." Ruben pushed the phone back to Suzie, sniffing with a flourish. "They're all inside, aren't they? Or at least the front of the hotel, up close. We wanna get original? We gotta get a panorama. Get some distance. Beat the bounds, man."

He looked at us, triumphantly.

"You mean get a long shot of the hotel?" Suzie asked, unsure.

"Sure thing," Ruben said. "This tiny place, mountains behind, night sky above... fuckin' show it all." He extended his arms out to the side, then clapped them on his knees.

"What about the phone mast, though?" I asked. "It's kinda ugly."

"We crop that outta shot," Ruben said. "No, even better, we walk up there, take the picture from right beneath. Then we got the whole scene right out in front of us. End of the world."

Suzie and I both nodded. It did seem like a good idea, and it wasn't a long walk to the mast. Besides, it had lights flashing on the top of it, so would be easy to find, even in the hostile winter darkness.

We pushed our empty plates over the slippery ice table, and headed into the night.

***

Minus twenty feels very different from minus five, I can tell you that. I've been cold before—hell, sub-Arctic Shetland gets pretty damn frigid—but never like this.

The cold got inside, that was the weirdest part. I breathed it in and it jagged in my throat and lungs, each molecule as sharp as razorblades.

I stomped beside Ruben in the crispy snow, Suzie a few metres ahead of us. I couldn't feel my feet, nose or fingers, and my body kept shivering spasmodically.

The walk was longer than I expected. The phone mast was so big, it seemed closer to the hotel than it really was.

"Pretty icy!" Ruben boomed, not looking cold at all in his $2,000 jacket.

"Yeah," I said. "Your coat looks good, though."

"Canada Goose, man. The best! What's yours?"

"Um, Perry Ski," I said.

I'd got it in a discount outdoors warehouse online. At £300 it was the most expensive item I'd ever bought, but I was starting to question its quality.

Suzie turned back to yell at us. "We gotta get a picture of me in my hat, okay?" she called. "The brand are my sponsors, so they're gonna want to see their product."

"I'm not into all this bullshit, man," Ruben said under his breath, shoulders high, fists plunged into pockets, as we hiked up a small incline in the snow. The blinking red light atop the mast was slowly getting closer.

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

"Brands and products and content, y'know? I'm a journalist. I wanna write something serious."

"Yeah," I said. I saw his point. I'd listened to Ruben's show, and it didn't seem right for the hashtag-blessed crowd we were surrounded by.

I shivered again, pulling my hood tighter around my face, trying to concentrate on the blinking red light high above signalling our destination. It was so dark I could barely see anything else.

"You got any ideas?" I asked. "For what you want to write?"

"Yeah, man," Ruben said, his speech soundtracked by the crunch of his snowboots. "That incident, before we got here. You heard about that? Apparently a whole load of construction workers got hurt. Real bad."

He sniffed. "So that's got me thinking, what's the staff treated like? How well are they looking after the workers? It ain't easy to leave here, not without those ottercopters. What conditions they living in? Are they being exploited?"

I hadn't thought about that.

Some cook must have made our venison burgers, and a waiter had brought them—what were their lives like? Where did they live? On the reindeer and ice beds, just like us? Surely not.

"Good idea," I said.

It was. There was something appealing about getting beneath the icy glamour of this strange cold place, to the dirty reality below.

As we drew closer to the mast, low rectangles started to appear ahead of us. I recognised them as the portacabins I'd seen during the short period of daylight earlier.

Thank God we were almost there.

The cold was so painful all I wanted to do was take this stupid photo and get back as quickly as possible. I tried to get my phone out of my pocket to check if Paulo had texted, but I couldn't. My fingers weren't working. I couldn't stop shivering.

We turned around when we reached the dark portacabins and surveyed the scene in front of us.

The ice hotel glowed bright as an alien spaceship on the monochrome snowscape, casting its blue light across the snow all around it. Behind it, I could only barely make out the shift from snow to mountain to inky sky.

But above that... wow. The stars.

I'd never seen anything like it.

The complete lack of light pollution made the stars jaw-dropping. There were thousands of them. Thousands. Every millimetre of the sky crowded with pinprick white lights. Down the middle, the glittering streak of the milky way was bright and immense.

I could see the whole universe.

"Holy shit," Suzie said.

"Now that's a fuckin' photo," Ruben crowed.

It was so beautiful. I just stood, dumbfounded, as Suzie took out her camera, and Ruben started setting up a tripod.

It was so beautiful, I forgot to feel cold.

The two of them moved noiselessly around me, calibrating their equipment, taking pictures, repositioning, taking more.

I just stood and stared at the sky. It wasn't even cold anymore. The view was so sublime it was warming me, warming me from the inside like I'd swallowed a sun.

I began to unzip my coat.

"How you doing, Scotch?" Ruben called to me, still crouched over his camera.

An octopus swam across the stars. I'd never seen an octopus before. I'd always wanted to.

I was glad I'd come on this undersea trip after all. It was worth it, even though it was dangerous.

Even though we didn't belong.

"Ruben?" That sounded like Suzie. It was hard to tell, underwater. "Ruben? What's wrong with her? Why's she's taking off her coat?"

"Fucking hell," someone said, and then two divers were swimming towards me.

"What's wrong? It's just a squid," I tried to say, but my voice didn't seem to be working.

I was tired. Maybe I'd sit down. Maybe I'd have a nap.

"Suzie! We've gotta get her inside!" a diver yelled, and it was the last thing I heard before I lay down in my soft, soft bed, so white and powdery, to dream them all away.

"Night, Ben," I murmured into the dark. "I love you."