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i.
Twenty-seven days after Cal and Kira touch down on Icelandic ground, his phone rings.
It's early morning, or maybe it's still late night. Cal can't keep track, because the day cycles here are different. The arch of the sky is still illuminated when you go to sleep, and it's already painted pale blue when you wake up. Only a few, fugitive hours allow solid darkness, before the sun willfully ascends the horizon again.
When his phone rings, they're sailing through one of those reservoirs of darkness. The rhythm of Kira's breathing from the other bed stays unchanged, but Cal is yanked from his own shallow slumber by the insistent buzzing sound. He fumbles with the covers and his phone on the floor, dragging his mind away from the fog, rips the charger out and almost trips over his own feet on his way out into the hallway.
Cal's vision is still bleary with not-quite-sleep and the artificial light stabs at his eyes, so he can't decipher what the screen says. But he can count on one hand the people who have access to this number and none of them would call him just to have a midnight chat.
With fear murmuring behind his sternum, he pulls the bedroom door shut behind him and presses the green icon.
“Hello?”
“Cal?” Her voice. A breath of hesitation. “It's me.”
Her voice.
Cal's heart feels like a coin being sprung into the air from the flick of a thumb; catapulted towards the sky in a tremendous arc, and then dropping down, down, down; it seems to plummet right through the floor.
“Sarah,” he breathes into the stillness.
For a moment, Cal needs to sink back against the wall behind him and press a hand to the paneling, because his limbs feel irrationally like dissolving. So many questions are fighting for a place at his lips, so many things he's thought to say to her but never has, so many confessions and accusations and unfinished sentences. Suddenly they are all there, yearning to be spoken aloud. “Are you okay?” is the one who wins out in the end.
Like a miracle, her hushed voice returns to his ear almost immediately.
“I'm fine, I'm back with S. I got out, Helena helped me out.”
Out of where, Cal wants to know, but he is a starved man for that deep, urgent tone, the way she speaks on an exhale, letting words flow out of her like tendrils of murky water. Her voice (and he revels in it, in the way he hasn't forgotten what it sounds like) is always filled to the brim with emotions. Fear, joy, weariness, lust, rage; it's always right there on the very edge of her tongue, what she feels. Even through a phone receiver, even when they're 3000 miles apart and it's the middle of the ephemeral night. Cal thinks hazily that if he were to kiss her right now, he would be able to taste the relief like a drop of sweetness on her tongue.
“Good,” he says, a little overcome.
“How are you? How is Kira?” Anxiety stacks in Sarah's voice, the almost threatening kind that shines through whenever she speaks about her daughter.
(Their daughter, Cal corrects himself.)
“We're fine, we're fine.” His hand whispers back and forth across the wooden boards like it's feeling for something. “She's asleep. It's- it's the middle of the night.”
Slowly, he scoops up his heart from somewhere below the carpet and feels it quake in his chest. Lets his hand come up to his ribs, like he's trying to touch all those words trapped inside, fighting frantically to escape the prison of his lips. “I'm so glad to hear your voice.”
“Yeah, yours too,” Sarah murmurs.
Her voice against his eardrum after so long makes him feel heady, makes him feel like he could pick up the world and slip it into his pocket, but also like he can't breathe from the crushing magnitude of it.
“What happened after we left?” Cal asks eventually. “Siobhan said you disappeared.”
Sarah huffs a sigh into the receiver. “You and I are both better off not getting into that giant pile of shit, believe me.” There's a pause, before she tells him anyway. “Long story short, I found out my messed up family tree is a little bigger than I thought, I was a prisoner in the Mexican desert for a bit, and then I did some undercover stalking in London. I'll fill you in on the blanks later, when it doesn't cost me a bloody fortune a minute.”
Cal laughs quietly at the sheer insanity of that sentence but doesn't push it further, because there's a promise of a later in there that makes his heart speed up with credulous hope.
For a moment, Sarah allows silence to comprise them, and he rejoices in the sound of their breaths washing over the receiver in unison, the whirring in the background of the phone call like an almost tangible thread, extending across the universe tying them to one another. She's there, in his ear and in his hand. Breathing and alive and real, almost as if he were holding her in his own arms.
And then Sarah decides they can't afford the luxury anymore, and says – voice strained with how much effort it takes – “Cal, I need you to do something for me.”
“Okay,” he complies, waiting.
“We found the original in London,” Sarah continues in a low voice, and Cal blinks out into the dimness of the hallway, picking up the hem of his shirt and letting it go again.
“Oh,” he says, because he doesn't know what else there is to say.
She sighs. “Point is, we have leverage, but there's always a chance that shit goes sideways.”
“Sarah,” he starts, but she knows what he's about to ask and she is not interested in promising it to him.
“Listen, we have a plan. But you can never be a hundred percent sure, can you? And if anyone gets to me, I don't want to risk leading them to you and Kira.”
He can almost hear how she presses a palm to her forehead to keep the weariness at bay, pacing around in Siobhan's dimly lit kitchen.
“Please, Sarah, don't put yourself in danger. Whatever you need to do, there's another way, surely,” Cal begs, knowing it's a futile mission, knowing his own words are hollow and untrue. Feeling suddenly very tired with the universe and the never ending war on Sarah and her sisters, he lets his head fall heavy against the wall.
“Hey, don't worry about me,” Sarah murmurs, that accent pulling at him in all sorts of ways. “I got S. She'll take out half the nation before she'll let anyone lay a finger on me or Fee.” There's a tinge of warm affection to her voice that hasn't been there until now, like she's considering a dear memory.
Cal does his best to save the sound within him, like how one saves a flower plucked on a particularly lovely summer's day. Puts it between the pages of a heavy book and saves it as a memorabilia to dust off in the dead of winter.
Holding on to that precious scrap of Sarah, he pushes his hair out of his face and asks, voice born and dead and buried in the empty hallway below the inevitable breaking of dawn. “What do you need me to do?”
ii.
The worst part is having to tell Kira.
He sits her down at the kitchen table and knows that he's about to add to the amount of times somebody has torn a hole in the fabric she recognizes as her life. And still, he meets her eyes and does it.
“But... why?” she asks, eyebrows drawn together, like she's really making an effort to justify this, which only further breaks his heart. “Aren't we safe here any longer?”
“We are,” Cal starts, glancing at his hands like they are holding on to the right words, “but we'll be even safer if we move.”
Kira slumps her shoulders and folds her gaze down to the flower-print wax cloth. Cal half expects some sort of protest, arguing, resentment – at the very least some tears. But all Kira eventually offers is a crestfallen; “I really liked it here.”
“Me too,” Cal murmurs. It doesn't escape him for one second how Kira is already referring to this place in past tense, and that's how easy it is then, he thinks bitterly, to overturn someone's life.
Outside, the raindrops begin to collide with the pavement. Softly, like the clouds let them go on a sigh.
“Hey,” Cal says, and she glances up at him. “There are mountain reindeer up north, where we're going. Their fur is all white.”
Kira doesn't look as sad after that.
They pack up the life they have established in the cabin, wash it from the walls and sweep it off the floors. Toothbrushes on the sink, wrinkled bed sheets smelling more of sleep than laundry detergent, a half finished puzzle laid out on the living room table. A sea of bread crumbs surrounding the toaster, stray socks that have made their way under the bed and collected dust, dried mud tracks on the doormat in the hall; all the small ingredients that make a house a home. It takes Cal and Kira barely an hour to collect five weeks of their lives and throw them away or put them in suitcases; two short trips to drop them into the trashcan or load them into the car.
They don't even get to keep that. The guy at the rental service glances at Cal's finger on the map and gives him an unimpressed look, shakes his head and leans back in his squeaking chair. So they clean out the car too and turn it in, and they pick up their suitcases and catch the bus to the airport.
The plane is a small and claustrophobic one, but the stewardess informs them in broken English that the flight will only take thirty minutes. Kira seems small in her seat in a way she doesn't normally do; her eyes in the bleak sunlight look washed-out against the teal fake leather. Cal feels like they're separated by an abyss of wordless sadness, and as the stewardess finishes her safety instructions and takes a seat at the front of the aircraft with an absentminded frown, he can't seem to find a single fitting thing to say. But he reaches for her little hand clutching the armrest, and she immediately folds it into his. Like she wants to say, this is not what I want, but I know it's not your fault.
As they take off, Kira presses her forehead to the window just like twenty-eight days ago when Toronto fell away below them. Cal wonders if she's saying goodbye to the place – goodbye to the slot of time she spent there – or if she just likes the view of everything shrinking and shrinking until you can't see it anymore.
iii.
Cal keeps them put. Almost.
Sarah had asked him to relocate, but not to any specific place. That was the whole point, that she didn't know where Cal moved them. That way, no matter how hard she was pressured (tortured, abused, interrogated, blackmailed, his treacherous brain supplies whenever it has the chance) she wouldn't be able to give up their location.
But instead of making arrangements in Germany or Brazil, Cal decides to stay in the country. They're flying north by about 160 miles, but it's the same island – the same language and the same snow-mixed rain and the same endless fish and chips restaurants. He's doing it for Kira. He's doing it for the thin homelike structures and the tentative relationship they have let strike root in the mossy Icelandic soil.
Akureyri is a port town at the foot of a big mountain. Wikipedia says it's the second biggest city on the island, but when it whirls past outside the taxi windows it feels small. A lot of white wooden houses occasionally interrupted by a splash of color, hundreds of boats and ships lining the harbor, and beyond that the colorless sea. Everything is quiet, muffled by heavy winter coats and clouds of steam. The air smells the same as in Reykjavik – salty and damp – it's just colder.
Cal's contacts have arranged for him and Kira to live in a cabin on the outskirts of town, further up the mountain. Closed off. Harder to find. Cal doesn't realize what closed off really means until they get there and everything, in every direction, is untouched ice.
“That's where we're gonna live?” Kira shouts over the roaring engine, squinting at the single little cabin from where she's sitting in front of him on their rented snow scooter.
“Yeah, that's... our new home,” Cal tries, and fails to sound genuinely excited.
Kira considers it for a second as they close in on the small house, turning her hat-clad head left and right against his chest to soak up the scenery. They arrive, and when Cal kills the engine, the world goes excruciatingly quiet. He can hear the cold emptiness pressing at them from every angle, and he has the urge to cover his daughter's ears and protect her from it, to bow his head in shame and apologize for bringing her to this place.
Kira slips down on the ground, blinks at her new surroundings with large warm eyes.
“It's very beautiful here,” she says.
And if Cal strains his ears beyond the silence, he can hear the soft sound of her accepting his apology.
The cabin is smaller, cleaner and less homely than the one in Reykjavik. Every surface is smooth and plain, the books on the shelves are stiff and smell of freshly printed paper when opened. The sheets are unwrinkled and without any threadbare patches. Nothing is broken or battered or used or stained; there are no attributes of a previous life anywhere.
He thinks Kira feels the same unease he does, because she keeps her stuffed monkey closer than earlier, and she wanders the house silently, letting her hand run over every bright, nondescript surface like she's trying to evoke some hidden history behind it.
They share the only bedroom, a queen size bed this time, and at night when the taste of toothpaste is still fresh on their tongues, Kira writes new words in her notebook. Cal is grateful for the familiarity of the act.
“What's the word for ice?”
The app on Cal's phone buffers. “It's, uh, let's see, it's... ís.” He shows her the screen so she can copy the word.
“I with a little thing on it, and then an S,” Kira spells out, scribbling the letters down in the book propped against her knees. Her stuffed monkey is tucked in securely beneath the covers, resting in the crook of her arm. Cal reaches over to stroke his hand over her hair, tugging a little at a ringlet, making her mouth form the ghost of a smile. Her eyes tumble down the page as she reads through her list of words, and then she looks over at him.
“What's the word for good night?”
Cal types it in. “You're gonna like this one, lots of funny letters,” he murmurs as he hands the phone over, stifling a yawn.
Kira writes the words down at the bottom of the page, then closes the notebook and places it on the little table beside the bed. Cal flicks the lamp off, and they are rendered momentarily blind by the sudden absence of light. The only sound for miles and miles is the soft rustle of the covers as they try to find comfort between the never before used sheets.
Gradually, Cal is able to make out the shape of his daughter against the low light of the moon coming through the window, her ribs rising and falling, the wave-like movements of her eyelashes as she blinks slowly against the fatigue.
“Good night, dad,” she whispers.
“Sleep well, Kira,” he whispers back.
iv.
Cal and Kira have spent four nights in their new not-quite-home when they come.
Kira is outside, like she always is here, and Cal is in the small, clinically bright kitchen pretending to have something to do. He opens the fridge and moves a bottle of juice, turns over cups on the drainer and watches the water collected in the hollows of their undersides pool on the counter. He straightens the two chairs until they're perfectly, symmetrically aligned with the table.
Out here, the silence is deafening and the brightness is stark and unkind. It makes him itchy and anxious, makes him feel like he's trapped in the split second before the explosion. Cal finds himself missing the old rental car they spent so much time in; the candy bar wrappers in the glove compartment and the tangerine peels in the back seat, the mysterious dent in the passenger door and the sunken seats. Even the deficient air conditioning system and the weird indigenous CDs they bought at gas stations and listened to on their way to adventures. The traces of him and Kira, of people before them, the familiarity of a space that doesn't exist in this strange, empty house.
Sometimes he wants to scream for no reason, or dig a hole in the ice just to see if it ever ends and the earth ever returns, and several times a day he finds himself looking at his hands like they are foreign things, not knowing what to do with them.
Cal stuffs them deep in his pockets and walks over to the window to locate his daughter. He finds her immediately – a smudge of color and warmth against all the frozen, nonliving. She's standing partly turned away from him, completely still, gaze fixed on something far away. Cal scans the greyish horizon to see what she is already seeing.
At first, Cal thinks the tundra is playing a trick on him; that what he's seeing is a mirage made up of dust and too many anxious hours spent in a small space. But when he blinks, it doesn't disappear.
In the distance, three tiny flecks are making their way across the ice like bugs crawling over a marble floor. With great speed they close in on the figure standing alone outside the cabin, wrapped up until she can barely move in bleeding red gore-tex, like the perfect target.
In a frenzy, his big, useless hands manage to get the window open.
“Kira! Come back inside!” Cal shouts, voice breaking, head spinning with Sarah's voice. There's always a chance that shit goes sideways. I don't want to risk leading them to you and Kira.
But Kira stands transfixed, staring at those dots like she is somehow connected to them. Cal squints through the blinding whiteness, through the snowflakes, trying to see what's approaching. His pulse is a wild thing in his throat, humming they found us they found us they found us. The roaring fear that has woken from it's light slumber behind his heart cannot be tamed.
He yells Kira's name again, but his daughter does not move, and for some reason, neither does Cal.
The bugs turn into black snow scooters, and the silence that flourishes on the foothill around the cabin is eaten by their rumbling engines in a terrible crescendo. When they are so close their drivers could pick up a gun and fire it at Kira; could run her straight over within seconds, the figure on the scooter closest spans to a halt and lifts the goggles from her eyes, rips away the cloth covering her face to reveal a blinding smile. And the universe shifts.
“Monkey!”
Sarah (Sarah) throws herself across the ice, slowed by her layers of protective clothing, running to her daughter like her life depends upon it. Kira wobbles for a moment before she starts moving too, making clouds in the air with her laugh.
Stupefied, Cal watches the two dots, one red and one black, heading straight for each other. When they collide, it's as if the dense silence that has been pressing at his eardrums ceases, and he is standing in the heart of the explosion. Feels it send electric currents through every nerve-ending in his body.
The collision he witnesses has Kira's face turned away from him, but Sarah's is visible; her glittering eyes, screwed almost shut with irrepressible mirth. A strand of her hair caught in the wind. She presses her daughter against her body like she's a missing limb, a lost ship finally returned to shore. Holds on so hard that she topples over, but the fall is muted by all the clothes Cal has wrapped Kira up in, and it seems like they hardly notice it anyway – far too busy with laughing and staring and holding on so very tightly.
Cal stands there in the window and watches the two separate pieces of his heart mold together below the falling snow and colorless sun, and the muscle in his chest that is keeping him alive seems to swell until it fills every nook of the house.
v.
There's reindeer in Iceland.
Sarah has played that sentence in her head hundreds, thousands, millions of times during the past six weeks. In a dusty barn, staring down the barrel of a gun held in the violently shaking hand of her brother. Beneath the pressing heat of the desert sun, collapsed on the dirty stone floor of a prison cell. In an apartment filled with shadows and regrets, facing the woman who is the closest she will ever come to putting an end to the war that life is waging on them.
She has clung to the soft promise in Kira's voice, rewound the tape and listened again and again to those four words. So hopeful, so reassuring. Kira and her father – her kind, loyal, worrying father with the funny socks and the origami papers and the dubious past, traveling to Iceland to see the reindeer. That is the image that has kept Sarah sane through hours of beating sunlight, bleeding wounds and raging fevers. Cal and Kira, hand in hand, laughing beneath the endless sky, tucked away in a pocket of the world where evil can't reach, running with the reindeer.
The entire time on the scooter, the peculiar world around her turning whiter and whiter, she spends afraid. Everything that scares her whirls around inside her like a blizzard, tries to reach for her fingertips on the handle of the rumbling vehicle to make some sort of decision for her. And there are so many things that scare her.
Broken down doors, vans driving away and disappearing, faceless scientists pushing needles through Kira's unsullied skin, Cosima's bloodshot eyes as they apologize, her wheezy breathing as she injects the fabricated drugs. Wrinkled hospital gowns next to meticulously ironed pencil skirts against dark leather sofas, and all those humming machines and chewing computers, searching for an answer that won't be found no matter how much bone marrow is pumped out of a small body.
But.
Giving that strong-willed dread access to the fine muscles of her hands, turning around and leaving this white sanctuary that she has been dreaming of for so long. Exact patterns of chestnut irises slowly fading from her memory, the feeling of golden locks between her fingers no longer reminiscent, the sound of that voice when it calls for her, reduced to an echo of an echo. Oblivion.
They tumble around inside her, all those clashing fears, making the scooter swerve dangerously. A million times she's on the verge of turning around and going back before she can tear everything down. She almost does it, almost gives in to reason, almost. But in the end, her hands remain still on the handle. She's just too goddamn selfish.
And it is so easy to forget, and Sarah does it, when she gets the first glimpse of a red smudge through the snow. All the things that could go wrong from here, they are smoke leaking from her mouth as she throws herself off the scooter, rips off the goggles and run. Everything in the entire universe seems to melt away except that bright red little person, moving towards her across the ice.
It is so easy to forget how dangerous living is when her daughter is, after these reservoirs of time, once more in the circle of her arms, yelling with laughter. When those shining eyes are once more tethered to her own.
“Mommy!” Kira yells with the sheerest of delight, “mommy, I missed you so much!”
It makes Sarah tremble. It makes her feel like a hot air balloon is inflating in her chest where fear once nested. She clutches her child so tightly they fall over, but it doesn't matter, the cold foreign ground against her cheek doesn't matter, because she is enlaced in that familiar gaze, tracing every crest and valley of those irises, and she is home.
They stay like that, on the ground, so close together that their airy laughs mix. Just looking; making up for all those hours they couldn't see each other. Sarah has an impulse to say something stupid, like I'll never leave you again or we'll always be together now, or some other promise she can't keep, but she keeps herself quiet. She strokes Kira's hair, smiles at every inch of her face, and let's the rest of the world wait.
In the distance, there are footsteps. She hears them, but she can't be bothered to look up. Wants to look at nothing else but her daughter for the rest of time, but then Kira laughs again and sits up, so Sarah does too, the world spinning a little, and then there are a pair of untied boots before her and when she looks up Cal is the one standing there.
“Hi,” he says, blinking down at her with the strangest look on his face. He's wearing a t-shirt and a knitted cardigan drooping off his shoulders. No coat. No hat. Not even a scarf.
Sarah squints at him, and her already sore heart jolts.
“Hi.”
Cal drops to his knees and his arms come around her like he hasn't been whole ever since they parted, and he breathes her name against her temple over and over, just her name.
Sarah reaches for her daughter (their daughter), and Cal opens the prison of his arms to let her in. Snow is sticking to the mesh of his cardigan and he must be freezing – he's shivering – but Sarah doesn't suggest they move inside the cabin because she does not ever want to move. She pokes off her glove and finds the nape of Cal's neck, presses her nose to his sternum and revels in how he still smells like him.
“God, I missed you two,” she manages unevenly.
Cal breathes a shaky laugh into her hair, and soon Kira's tinkling laugh joins him. Sarah laughs too, it seems to be overflowing her lungs all of a sudden. Snow piles on their eyelashes, melts in the clouds from their breaths, in the heat generated by three bodies pressed close together.
There, on the ice in the last safe pocket of the universe, Sarah is so close to her dream she can taste it on her tongue.