They bundle Linda into the SnoCat first, arms tied tightly in front of her with zipties. Every maneuver prompts desperate kicks and screams. As she’s bound to her seat she hurls insults at everyone nearby. ‘Murderer!’, she pins to Kelpie, and ‘Terrorist!’ to Typhon, and worse yet, but no-one flinches at her words; and her bonds restrict her struggles to useless writhing. Eventually she falls silent.

Linda is disarmed and sandwiched between Kelpie and a locked door. Eddie watches her from the front, armed with a gun. Every precaution has been taken. They have stripped her of everything she could use to escape.

Everything except her faith.

Linda knows she has been sent here for a reason. She knows that if she is meant to remain here, then remain here she will, however impossible it might be. She merely needs to be ready to act without hesitation; so she sits pacified, and plots. Could she kill one of them? Make herself too dangerous to take with them? But she has no weapons, no use of her hands. Could she threaten Kelpie? How would she stop them from just incapacitating her?

Eventually the SnoCat sets off, trundling carefully through snow drifts and crystal spires. Linda staves off sleep for as long as she can, fearful of missing her chance. But even faith cannot resist monotony indefinitely, and eventually the noise of her schemes dwindles to silence.

Linda dreams of herself, as she appears in the eyes of others. She dreams, first, of her family back home: the husband that she no longer loves, the children who she abandoned to come to Antarctica. Do they hate her for leaving them? For the bullying and the death threats her reputation has inflicted on them? Or — has she slipped from their memory entirely, leaving only blank indifference?

And next of Mateo, who she stabbed, and Kelpie and Eddie sitting next to her; do they hate her, for wanting to stay? For insulting them, hurting them, to get her way? Or — is she nothing but an annoyance to them, no more than the author of the pain she has caused?

Finally she dreams of caverns, spiralling in great loops within the Antarctic ice. They do not care for her, she is certain. They do not care for her with more intensity than anything ever has cared for her. They do not care for her more than the roiling ocean does not care for a sailboat, more than the blood-stained general does not care for a lone soldier, more than the endless voids of space do not care for the pale blue dot she calls home.

They brush up against her, and they writhe.

A crystal spike erupts from the darkness and tears against the side of the SnoCat. Linda is jarred awake by the collision and the shower of glass that rains upon her as the passenger window shatters.

There’s a blade in her lap, a shard broken from the spike by the SnoCat’s frame as it plowed past. She takes it reverently in her bound hands, and as the other occupants of the truck panic, she cuts her bonds methodically, like the steps of a ritual.

And then she turns calmly in her seat and drives the shard into Allison’s neck.

The SnoCat is clear of the spire, now, and Eddie is turning in the front to check on the passengers in the back. Linda grabs at the window frame, leaps for the frigid abyss beyond — and as she slips through, Eddie draws his gun and shoots her.

Somewhere in America a man is waiting for his wife to come home. He’s angry and confused, he has suffered for reasons he does not understand, and he is all to eager to share give her a piece of his mind. Soon enough he will discover the truth, and he will wait no longer.

His children wait as well, worried about a mother they will never see again. It will take far longer for them to understand what has happened, but eventually they will wait no longer.

A scattered collection of true believers are waiting too. Waiting for the final article that will bring everything together, that will explain why a small lifestyle column made such a shift into politics and conspiracy. One by one, they will realise that no answer is coming, and they will wait no longer.

Somewhere in Antarctica, a woman is waiting. She waits for the deliverance that has been promised her, for any sort of meaning behind everything that she has done. She will wait even as everyone she fought to save leaves her behind.

She will wait even as the blood that stains her hands freezes, her own blood crystalising along with the blood she has shed, in a way that might have been beautiful if she could move here frost filled eyes enough to see it.

She will wait even once the life has faded from behind those same cold eyes, her stiff body neither rotting, nor being lifted into the skies as she wishes she could be. She is dead in more ways than just this, for she has been forgotten. Her husband has moved on, the people's lives she touched have let her slip from their minds. She is nothing more now than a statue of flesh and ice, waiting still for anything to answer her pleas. The world will turn, life will go on, and she will wait.

Written by Amy C.