Arctic Rising

21

The Bent Horn refinery dominated the southern tip of Cameron Island. Stacks belched fire and smoke, pipes clustered and ran from bell-shaped building to building, and the docks harbored massive oil tankers with extra-thick ice-breaking prows. It was an industrial, post-apocalyptic sprawl of brutal architecture made more forbidding by the gray low hills of the island and the Arctic tundra, lit by the perpetual gray day and the sudden lightning-like orange bursts of fire from the stack tops.

To the back of the refinery, rusting derricks slumped over—remnants of the original drilling operation on the island from the 1970s, abandoned just before the turn of the century.

Company dorms, brightly colored but square-block apartment buildings, loomed around the edge of the refinery. Beyond it, another hundred or so buildings crept up the side of a hill, the nascent form of a town springing up around the economic activity of the refinery as year-round workers pulled in family and then all the other needs of a large group of humanity: bars, eateries, stores, recreation, infrastructure.

Roo guided them around the shadows of barges and tugs toward the docks. No one paid much attention to them, as several other dinghies moved around the harbor to get people to and from anchored ships that couldn’t fit. There was no reason for anyone to assume they came out of the ocean, as Roo had initially come around the coast to the harbor.

By the time they tied up, the wind had started to howl and rain pelted the artificial harbor. They hurried toward a bright green dormitory building.

Anika browsed a company store attached to the dorm, soaking in the warmth and calm, while Roo disappeared. “Going to find an ATM for some cash from one of my backup accounts, and seeing if we can get transport to Pleasure Island,” he told her tersely.

He came back an hour later reequipped with a phone he’d purchased off someone, two large Arctic peacoats, hats, gloves, and a thick wad of cash.

Anika stole a few bills from him to buy three chocolate bars she’d been eyeing and a large hot chocolate. They sat at a small plastic table in the corner of the store. It was quiet, in between shifts, though a handful of men in overalls sat in the other corner downing coffee and bitching about one of their managers.

“There’s a helicopter pilot taking supplies out to a couple of mist boats near that area,” Roo said. “One of the crew is a journalist with money who has fresh stuff flown in once a month. If we agree to help unload, and we pay for his refueling there, he’ll get us to Pleasure Island.”

Rain sleeted against the window, howling away outside, as she sipped and let the warmth spread through her.

“I think,” Roo said, “we’re okay. For tonight. We should stay inside as much as we can, come out in between shifts.”

He’d found a room. It was filled with gear: heavy boots, warm clothing. Posters of naked airbrushed women holding impossible poses and hungry expressions hung from the wall, tacked into place. A perfectly clean, empty, white fridge.

They were in a quiet cocoon of temporary safety. A stillness after a storm of danger and activity that felt far away.

Roo sat down on the couch and unlaced his shoes. He paused, thinking about something. He stopped. “So … you’re Vy’s girl, right?”

Anika sat on the bed. She would have taken the couch, it was a friendly thing to do. But Roo had done it first, and she was all but drooling at the thought of sinking in between the covers and getting warm and rested. “I don’t know. It’s complicated. We got interrupted, and we barely know each other.”

“So you like girls?”

Anika sighed. In Africa, she’d been a monk outside the city. Conversations like this caused her to tense up. Suddenly Roo wasn’t a compatriot, but a possible problem. “Yes. I like women,” she said. It was a flat statement.

“You ever try it with a man?” Roo asked.

Anika sighed. “Have you?”

Roo continued unlacing his shoes. “No. But if you never…”

“Roo, would you like to take a hot throbbing cock between your lips?”

“No.”

“Neither would I. I didn’t wake up one day and decide I hated men and liked women. I see a woman, I like what I see. I want to be with that. Not the other. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember.”

“Okay.” He lay down on the couch and propped his feet up on the end.

If he hadn’t grabbed the couch first, she’d have considered it a bad pass at her. But he was aware that Vy and she had something.

If it was curiosity, she felt that was somewhat forgivable. She’d downgrade it to merely annoying. She owed Roo her life. He could ask annoying questions.

But to be honest, right now, she just really wanted to disappear into this bed and not hold some deep, intimate discussion about the nature of sexual orientation. She was too fucking tired for it.

“Do your parents know?” he asked.

“Roo, do you really want to talk about this right here? Now?” She pulled the covers back, and threw the topmost blanket at him.

Nestled inside, she stripped down to an undershirt and leaned back against the pillows. The bed smelled of someone else: sweat, oil, grime, dirt. But it didn’t matter. It was warm and soft.

Right then, the howling wind of the Arctic, the cold ocean, the people trying to kill her: they were all things outside this little warren of a room.

“Back in the islands, it ain’t the mainland. Not very accepted, you know? Most people don’t come out, and I never felt like I could just ask questions. Other than Violet, no one ever spoke to me as a friend where I could just … ask.”

Her eyes were closed, sleep creeping up on her. “No, my parents don’t know. My father, he is a very traditional Lagos man. He was raised fire-and-brimstone style. He used to watch these Nollywood movies made by the megachurches about the dangers of witches and the devil and so on.”

“Megachurches make Nollywood movies? Serious?”

“Some, yeah. A lot of money in there. Big productions. They even send missionaries to Western Europe and the U.S. to knock on doors.” She yawned deeply and thoroughly.

“And what about your mother?” Roo asked.

Anika snorted. “She probably wouldn’t care. But I haven’t talked to her since I was a child.”

Roo sat up. “You split with her?”

“She split with us. She was a Nollywood actress. Not a lot of white women from England around Lagos aspired to be Nollywood stars back then; she stood out. She was in high demand. She mistook that for something else, and then left to try her luck in America. Then Vancouver.”

“And you haven’t talked to her since then?”

“No.”

“That’s sad,” Roo said.

“She has never, ever tried to contact me,” Anika said. After all, it was just as easy the other way. “Now leave me to sleep, Roo. Please.”

“Okay,” he said. “Just one thing.”

“Yes.”

“Be good to Violet. She been through a lot. She’s a good friend.”

Okay, Roo, she thought. But I didn’t ask her to do all this. She chose to.

“Tomorrow we have to think about changing your appearance,” Roo said through a large yawn.

“Okay,” Anika murmured.

Wait! What?

But she had already slipped under into grateful sleep, though with a frown still on her face.

The next morning Roo woke her up and put two plastic bags down on a foldout table in the corner of the room. One had milk and an assortment of tiny boxed cereals, as well as some plastic bowls.

As they ate a quick breakfast, Roo laid out the contents of the other plastic bag: clippers, hair straighteners, dyes, combs, twist ties.

“We need to change you look,” Roo said, crumpling his bowl up and putting it in a bag. “People looking for you. My advice: stand out, grab a bold look.”

“Bold?”

He smiled. “Most of the eyes on you will be computers using public-classified cameras. Change you hair, change you style.” He tugged on his dreadlocks.

“I wouldn’t know how.…”

“I do,” he said. “That and some glasses. Yes. And I have some combat makeup.”

“Combat makeup?”

“To confuse facial analysis software.”

Anika looked down at the remains of her cereal. “I thought getting locks took years.”

“Real natty dreads, yeah.” Roo stood up and swept everything back into a plastic bag. “But I can back-comb you hair into locks. I did it for my sister once.” He held out a hand.

Anika took it and followed him into the bathroom.

“I always wanted to look like Dakore Egbuson,” she said with a big smile.

“Who?” Roo started lining the lip of the tub with all the items in his bag.

“When I was eight or nine, she was one of the Queens of Nollywood. She was so beautiful. And she had locks. I wanted to have hair like that, but my father said no.”

But he did let her hang the poster in her room. Dakore’s brown eyes looked down at her every night, her warm brown figure in a curvy white cocktail dress.

“Little Anika’s first celebrity crush?” Roo asked from the edge of the bathtub. Anika smiled, remembering closing her eyes and imagining the tips of Dakore’s locks brushing against her shoulders, remembering the feel of her own fingers creeping down to her thighs, the back of her hands sliding against the sheets.

“Something like that,” Anika said, sitting down on the floor in front of him.

Roo began to section off her hair. She couldn’t see what he was doing from her position on the floor, but over the next hour, she could feel it.

After creating sections, he began twisting, rolling, and combing toward her scalp on each section, using twists to hold the lengths in place. Each lock also got waxed.

He worked quickly, efficiently, and with practiced hands.

Which made sense, she realized. He would have experience with his own locks.

When she stood and looked in the mirror, she had to smile. The locks came down right to the tops of her ears, longer than she thought she had the hair for.

After all this time pinning it back for the UNPG, she had to admit she liked it.

Roo held up four bottles of hair color. “Henna-based, it won’t fuck up you hair like the regular stuff. Got it from the hair place.”

Anika looked at the bottles, and then tapped the left-most one. “Purple,” she said.

Her professional UNPG look was long gone now. And it was about to get worse, she knew, because Roo had pulled out a small kit. “Face paint,” he said. “Facial recognition cameras can be fooled, if you willing to get a little … dramatic. We don’t know who here is hunting for you, and what resources they have, but better safe than sorry, yeah?”

Anika looked down at the makeup kit. “Okay,” she said hesitantly.

“To fool the cameras, we need to put a pattern on your face, a solid cover that distorts your cheekbones, nose, and eyes. Almost like what you see on a picture of a harlequin. Like you getting into carnival.” Roo held up the makeup, and then his phone. On it were several line drawings of faces with swooshing patterns crossing the eyes and cheeks. “Pick a color and a pattern you like.”

Anika sighed deeply and took the makeup and his phone, then turned to the mirror.

Using a green that complemented her new locks, she slowly covered the top left half of her face, then drew the solid patch of color down under her right eye.

“How does this look?” she finally asked, turning to face Roo.

He held up his phone and took a picture, then tapped around the screen. “I have a facial recognition program here, looks for pictures I take and tags them for me.” He smiled. “And you fooling it. We ready. Maybe even cutting it a bit close to late. We have to hurry.”

Chandra Gupta, a leather-faced helicopter pilot with piercing green eyes and a thick mustache, directed them to the back of the helicopter. “You’re late,” he told Roo. “I should have left without you.” Anika kept waiting for Chandra to ask about her, standing there with loudly colored hair and a wildly made-up face, but the old helicopter pilot didn’t even bat an eye.

There were no seats in the back, they perched on crates of medical supplies and boxes of fresh produce.

Chandra was an old Indian Air Force pilot. Once he was finished complaining to Roo about messing with his schedule, he kept on chatting to them as he got the helicopter ready to fly, flipping through a checklist.

He’d served in combat over Kashmir and Pakistan. “It’s better here,” he told them while flipping switches. “It’s just cold here. There, it was cold and really fucking high altitude. That flying, it was murderous, and in the hills, some separatist with a rocket launcher sitting on a rock at the same height or higher than you is just waiting for you to turn the corner. Miserable times. Miserable times.”

The helicopter rose from its pad, rising above the towers and stacks of Bent Horn, then tilting and swinging out over the sea.

Turbulence shook them around a bit, and Roo swore as a crate hit him in the back.

But then it smoothed, and the miles whipped by underneath.

“See that!” Chandra shouted over the cabin noise back at them. He jabbed a finger off in the distance as they banked. Three large U.S. Navy ships were pushing through the heavy seas at top speed. A carrier and two support ships. A destroyer or cruiser may have been on the distant horizon, Anika couldn’t quite make it out. Even this far away, she could see bow spray as the ships slammed against the large waves. It would have been dangerous down there in their stolen Coast Guard boat.

“Yeah?” she shouted forward.

“They are headed to join the U.S. Polar Fleet. They are beefing it up.”

“Why?”

Chandra shrugged. “Supposedly it is a joint fleet maneuver with the Europeans. I think they’re just trying to show everyone they still have the military edge, even in the Arctic.”

Roo looked out the window. He didn’t seem to believe Chandra’s theory, but he didn’t add anything to the conversation.

But he was very interested in the ships. He kept staring out of the window until they were past the wakes they left behind and banking into a new direction once more.