been worried about most, in terms of ice melts. More specifically, they’re worried about the massive glaciers sitting on land, behind this ice shelf. They’re not floating.”
“So if they melted,” Roxberry added, “sea levels would rise.”
“Exactly. Up until now, ice shelves like this one have been keeping back the glaciers, sort of like a cork that’s holding in the contents of a bottle. Once the ice shelf breaks off, the cork’s gone, there’s nothing left to stop the glaciers from sliding into the sea—and if they do, the global sea levels rise. And this melting is happening much faster than forecasts had predicted. Even the data we have from last year is now considered too optimistic. In terms of disaster scenarios due to climate change, Antarctica was considered a sleeping giant. Well, the giant’s now awake. And, by the looks of it, he’s really grumpy.”
Roxberry quipped, “I’m trying real hard to avoid saying this could just be the tip of the iceberg—”
“A wise choice, Jack,” she interjected. She could just picture the smug, self-satisfied grin lighting up his perma-tanned face and groaned inwardly at the thought. “A grateful audience salutes you.”
“But that’s what we’re talking about here, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely. Once these glaciers slide into the sea, it’ll be too late to do anything about it, and . . .”
Her voice suddenly trailed off and dried up, as something distracted her: a ripple of sudden commotion, shrieks and gasps of shock and outstretched arms pointing out at the ice shelf. The words still caught in her throat as she saw Dalton’s head rise from behind the viewfinder of the camera and look beyond her. Gracie spun around, facing away from the camera. And that’s when she saw it.
In the sky. A couple of hundred feet above the collapsing ice shelf.
A bright, shimmering sphere of light.
It just appeared there, and wasn’t moving.
Gracie concentrated her gaze on it and inched over to the railing. She didn’t understand what she was looking at, but whatever it was, she couldn’t take her eyes off it.
The object—no, she wasn’t even sure it was an object. It had a spherical shape, but somehow, it didn’t seem . . . physical. It had an ethereal lightness to it, as if the air itself was glowing. And its brightness wasn’t uniform. It was more subtle, graded, intense at its core then gradually thinning out, as in a close-up of an eye. It had an unstable, fragile quality to it. Like melting ice, or, rather, just water, suspended in midair and lit up, if that were possible, only Gracie knew it wasn’t.
She darted a look at Dalton, who was angling the camera toward the sighting. “Are you getting this?” she blurted.
“Yeah, but,” he shot back, looking over at her, his face scrunched up in sheer confusion, “what the hell is it?”
Chapter 2
Gracie’s eyes were locked onto it. It was just there, suspended in the pallid sky over the edge of the ice shelf. Mesmerizing in an otherworldly, surreal way.
“What is that?” Finch asked. His hands went up to his glasses, fidgeting slightly with their position, as if it would help clarify things.
“I don’t know.” A surge of adrenaline spiked through her as she struggled to process what she was seeing. A quick, almost instinctive trawl through the possibilities of what it could be didn’t get any hits.
This was unlike anything she was even vaguely familiar with.
She glanced across at the knot of scientists crowding the railings. They were talking and gesticulating excitedly, trying to make sense of it too.
“Gracie? What is that behind you?” Roxberry’s voice came booming back through her earpiece.
For a second, she’d forgotten this was going out live. “You’re seeing this?”
A couple of seconds for her question and his reply to bounce off a satellite or two, then he came back. “It’s not perfectly clear, but yeah, we’re getting it—what is it?”
She composed herself and faced the camera squarely, trying to keep any quiver out of her voice. “I don’t know, Jack. It just suddenly appeared. It seems to be some kind of corona, a halo of some sort . . . Hang on.”
She looked around, scanning the sky, checking to see if anything else was around, noting the sun’s veiled position, unconsciously logging her surroundings. Nothing had changed. Nothing else was out there apart from their ship and the . . . what was it? She couldn’t even think of an appropriate name for it. It was still shimmering brightly, half-transparent, its texture reminding her of