Mira momentarily forgot the cold as the barge anchored in the channel near the edge of the ice sheet. Through the haze of smoke belching from the barge’s stacks, she saw the jagged white shore glistening in the morning light.
“Ready?” said her uncle, who stood beside her on the deck, bundled in faux ice lynx fur. He already knew the answer, but Mira gave it anyway: “Yes.” And again: “Yes.”
When her uncle and the other scientists climbed into the rowboat, Mira staked her spot among them, ignoring wary looks from the adults who thought a 12-year-old girl had no place on the Survey. She gripped the wooden seat to steady herself as the merchants lowered the rowboat roughly down into the channel.
“Don’t dally on the ice,” one merchant barked from above. The scientists, stuffed like sardines in the rowboat with their thick coats and packs of Survey gear, made no such promise.
As the scientists rowed carefully through slow-drifting plates of ice, Mira squinted at the
