I sat back in my pillows, blinking with shock. Paulo and Sam didn't know each other. They couldn't. They'd acted like complete strangers when they met in the portacabins.

The night Sam died.

I tried to think if there were any moments when Paulo and Sam had been alone, if they could have exchanged numbers.

There weren't.

So what was going on?

Something else about that night was needling at me uncomfortably now, and I couldn't put my finger on it.

Something about Paulo.

I scrunched up my eyes and saw the Snow-White influencer scrolling Instagram in the ice hotel lobby, under the open jaws of the glassy ice bear.

The second time I saw Paulo.

Something...

Then I realised.

Paulo said he'd never been in the lobby, that time I met him at the hotel. He'd looked at the bear like it was the first time he ever saw it.

Which meant the first time he came, when I had hypothermia, he hadn't gone into the hotel to look for me.

He'd gone straight to the pitch-black portacabins, hidden in shadow, high on the hill.

How on Earth did he know I was there?

And when I crashed the snow-mobile... how had he found me?

I'd gone completely off course in the storm. I could have been anywhere. And the visibility was so poor...

The chances on him just happening on me were minuscule.

Something here was very, very wrong.

I pushed off the duvet and swung my legs to the side of the bed, testing my left foot gingerly on the floor. I winced as hot pain shot up my thigh.

Carefully, resting all my weight on my right, I managed to stand up, the movement making me light-headed.

Slowly, I hobbled towards the door, then down the echoing, institutional corridors, until I found the lounge.

"Jennie." Stephen was in there, typing on a laptop at the table. "Are you alright?"

I nodded, trying not to show how much my leg hurt. "Where's Paulo?" I said. "I need to see him. It's important."

My voice echoed round my foggy head.

"He's in the radiometer room with Phil," Stephen said, standing up. "I'll fob you into the research area."

He offered me his arm so I could lean on him as we traversed the station.

At the entrance to the research zone, Stephen keyed me in, then left. The thick door closed with a heavy click behind me.

Placing a hand on the wall, I limped towards the radiometer room.

The lights were on, and the door was closed. I could hear low voices inside.

Pausing, with a tremble in my hand, I pressed my ear against the wood.

"It's not, Paulo." It was Phil's voice, and it sounded angry. "It was a stupid, stupid thing to do, and you've put us both in danger. I can't—"

"We can trust her." I'd recognise that South America-via-Scotland lilt anywhere. "I think–"

"You're a fool," Phil snapped. "And we're ruined. There's no way out of this."

"Maybe we could tell her we called the authorities," Paulo said.

I realised, with a stab to the stomach, they were talking about me.

"What then?" Phil shot back. "You reckon she'll go home and never mention it again? You think she won't wonder what happened? Why it wasn't in the news? It's never going to add up with her account of things. You've put us in an impossible position. What are we supposed to do?"

There was a long silence.

The lights in the hallway buzzed. My injured leg throbbed, my knees wobbling.

I couldn't just stand there.

So what was I going to do?

Inhaling, still foggy from the opiates, I bit my lip and pushed open the door.

The room within was small, nothing but a computer table with a bank of screens in one corner, and some steps leading up to a trapdoor in the ceiling in another. A GlobalGreen Take Climate Action! poster decorated one wall.

Paulo and Phil were both leaning over the computer like terrorist conspirators. At the sound of me entering, they jumped up and spun around as if they'd been tazered.

"Paulo?" I said, my voice swimming. "What's going on?"

He opened his mouth and closed it again, never looking away from me.

Phil swivelled to glare at him, her expression suggesting both him and me had most definitely ruined her life.

"Jennie," Paulo said firmly. "There's something I need to tell you."

"Paulo, no," Phil said, her voice laden with warning.

Paulo looked grimly at her, then came towards me. "We can trust her, Phil."

I leaned against the wall, wincing, my left leg pounding.

"Here," he gently took me under the arm, leading me to a swivel chair by the desk. "Sit down. You need rest."

I nodded and silently followed him, hobbling on my injured leg.

There wasn't much else I could do.

"I lied to you," Paulo said when I was sitting, crouching down in front of me. "A few times. And I'm sorry. I was trying to protect you."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't even look at him. I just stared at the black computer screen, the scattered pens and sheafs of paper on the desk, a sticker of the South African flag.

Paulo sighed. "You were right all along. I knew about the microwaves," he said. "We identified it straight away. There's quite strict rules on the base about electromagnetic radiation, because of the radiometer."

I glanced up as he pointed towards the trapdoor in the ceiling, then averted my eyes again, unwilling to look at him.

"The minute that phone mast went online it went berserk," Paulo continued, his voice tight. "It doesn't... it can't record atmospheric chemicals any more. The project was ruined. That's why Phil lost her job. That's why they're abandoning the project."

"It's not just that," Phil cut in aggressively. "We were expecting a tipping point. There had been some positive feedback loops, climate wise, and something big was coming. Big. A global shift in greenhouse gas concentrations.

"It would have been any day, we were sure. The readings were changing." Her tone was bitter. "But thanks to that mast, we'll never know. The world will burn, and we won't even realise it's happening until Bangladesh is the new Atlantis."

Paulo sat down on another office chair, scooting it towards me so he could lay a hand on my arm.

I didn't flinch away, but I didn't look at him either, my eyes fixed on the chewed end of a biro.

"We tried to stop it," Paulo said gently. His voice was low and tender, like he was trying to break the news my grandma had died. "We tried everything. We requested the U.K. government start bilateral negotiations, went to the UN, the Antarctic Council. The Russians just weren't interested."

"It's like the marine reserve," Phil said. "Those bastards don't care about anything."

"And then the whales started behaving erratically." Paulo's voice was shaking now. "It was... it was just too much. No one was listening. We didn't know what we could do."

"That hotel is destroying everything, just so a load of domkops can take selfies in the snow," Phil spat with a scowl. "It's bullshit."

Paulo nodded. "We felt so powerless... and then..." he looked at Phil uncomfortably. "Then I had the idea."

"To kill people?" I asked, barely a whisper.

"It's not a death ray," Paulo said quickly. "It's a pain ray. It's... we're not actually killing them. The cold is doing that."

"Technicality," Phil murmured, her arms crossed tightly over her chest.

"From the mast?" My voice was tiny. "How did you do it?"

"It locks onto phones," Paulo said. "We can both receive data to track them, and target the microwaves back."

"But that's not what you should be asking," Phil said grimly. "You should be asking is why it was so easy for us to do that."

Her brow furrowed. "Why, when a 5G enabled microwave transmitter runs on the same wavelength as Active Denial—"

"The US version of the pain ray," Paulo explained. "Every military has one."

"–that can lock onto any phone to both track and target ," Phil went on, "Why this shit is being put up. Why governments support that technology at all." She glowered.

"The Russians?" I said. I was lightheaded, completely disconnected from reality.

This couldn't be real. It couldn't.

"Everyone," Phil replied coldly. "The US, The UK, South Africa. Everyone. These 5G masts are going up everywhere in the world, and no-one cares what it can do."

I nodded, closing my eyes. Paulo was stroking my arm softly.

I knew I should be afraid of him, now that all my insane suspicions had proved to be true, but I wasn't.

After my epiphany, I wasn't afraid of anything.

After all, what did my little existence, my little death,  matter in the great grand scheme of things?

It didn't.

None of these deaths did, not really.

Climate change mattered.

The global migration patterns of whales, an entire species put at risk.

The penguins, every single chick dying out.

The insect genocide.

The plastics choking the sea.

The hole in the ozone layer.

We'd done it all, and we ignored it, our faces in our Facebook, our eyes on our Instagram.

And what was the point?

I'd been so worried that someone from GlobalGreen would see me in those photos taken by Ruben, but I realised now how pointless all that stressing had been.

The truth was, no-one cared.

Not one of those two thousand people that liked that picture would have looked at it for more than half a second.

I thought of the Snow White girl, back in the hotel, scrolling through her Instagram continuously, barely registering what she saw.

Isn't that what I did too?

The pictures didn't matter.

The content didn't matter.

All that mattered was that it was there.

I looked up at Paulo and Phil, him coiled like a fist in the chair opposite me, her stooped, deflated, against the desk.

The weight on their shoulders, the fear in their eyes.

"It's colonisation," Paulo finally said, looking dead at me. His eyes were on fire, all the gentleness from his voice gone.

"It's the same thing that killed my mother, that makes my grandparents scrape to survive like serfs. It's the same thing that tortured and murdered Phil's parents when she was seven, just because they wanted to vote."

I glanced at Phil. I hadn't known that about her. It made sense though, considering her age, that she was a child in the last desperate days of apartheid. Her head was hung, eyes staring blankly at the floor.

"It's the exact same thing, Jenny," Paulo went on urgently, picking up my hand from my lap and squeezing it in both his. "You've got to see that. This is the last place to be taken, and it just happens to be whales and penguins being wiped out, not Indians and blacks."

I closed my eyes, trying to fight the story he was telling me.

I couldn't.

What was the line between adventure and exploration, exploration and imperialism?

The British in South Africa, the Spanish in South America. The Indonesians in Papua. The Danes in Greenland. The Chinese in Tibet.

The slavers. The dodo-hunters. The whalers.

And they were Vikings all.

Just like Luca and Sam, Suzie and me, our narcissism and need to prove ourselves leading us to that accursed ice hotel.

"I know... this must be hard to take in," Paulo said. "But we were trapped. It was all we could do." He squeezed my arm. "Think about Everest, Jennie," he said. "Think about it."

I didn't need to.

Looking over to Phil, I asked, "Is this how you did it? On this computer?"

She nodded, eyes glistening, lip between her teeth. "We went over to the hotel, when it was just the construction team there, and linked up the base station to the radiometer."

I didn't reply, my eyes on the screen.

"Jennie?" Paulo said uncertainly.

I looked at him. Dark and tortured, every inch the murderer.

I didn't care anymore.

I knew that he was right.

Fuck the Vikings.

I nodded.

"Kill 'em all," I said.

🔥🌏🔥