The table absorbed the blood, and the red vanished as if down a drain. She looked at her chicken. “Have you ever seen a polar bear in a cage?” she asked. “It paces. Back and forth. All day long: back and forth. It wears a rut in the floor. It doesn’t stop to eat. It doesn’t stop to sleep. It simply paces until it wastes away and dies.”

“You are unhappy?”

Unable to answer that, she looked up at him. “I want to go home,” she said.

It didn’t take her long to prepare to leave. Bear watched her from the bedroom door as she packed her belongings. All was silent around them. There was no wind, no creak of ice, no nothing. It felt as if the castle were holding its breath.

“Do you plan to return?” Bear asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. She couldn’t look at him.

“How can you not know?”

“I just don’t.” All she knew was the idea of staying made her miserable and the idea of leaving made her just as miserable.

“So I must wait like a good little puppy dog while you decide our future?”

Cassie couldn’t answer that. Instead, she focused on pulling on her Gore-Tex and flannels over her clothes. She was heading back out into a world where she’d need all her layers. She had a memory of herself, age eight, being dressed by her father in so much fleece and down that she couldn’t lower her arms. When she got back to the station, she’d see her father again. She tried to imagine that conversation. How was she going to explain why she hadn’t returned sooner?

Bear growled, low in his throat, making the hair on the back of her neck prickle. “I have been a fool,” he said. “I believed you cared about me.”

Cassie frowned at him as she zipped her parka. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s me.” He was… sweet. And fun. But this wasn’t about him. It was about her—who she wanted to be, what she wanted her future life to be.

“Of course it ‘has to do’ with me,” he said. “It is my life you speak of.”

“And my life,” she snapped back. “You want me to sacrifice my career, friends, family, a mother I have never even met.” Granted, after the first few weeks had passed, she hadn’t missed her mother at all. Ruthlessly, she pushed that thought aside. “I can’t do that.” She’d worked so hard—late nights studying for Dad’s pop quizzes, long treks chasing bears, weekends cleaning equipment, all so she could someday earn an official staff position, a future she’d just tossed away to do what? Be Bear’s companion? Play in the topiary garden? Dance in the ballroom? It wasn’t enough.

“You do not belong there anymore,” he said. “It is your past. You cannot go back. This is your home now.”

Cassie shook her head. This wasn’t her home; this was Bear’s castle. Her eyes swept over the ice rose bed and the seabird wardrobe and the shimmering walls and golden door. She did know every curl of ice now, every rainbow reflection. She loved the shimmering sheen of the ice, the soothing wind outside, and all the memories she now had of everything here. But it’s not home, she told herself firmly. She had to remember that. Home was the station.

“You belong with me,” he said. “We are one.”

“No, we’re not. You’re out being munaqsri, and I’m…” She felt like… like a pet, kept at home until he was free to play with her.

“Should I let the polar bears be stillborn? Is that what you want me to do? Let their souls drift beyond the ends of the earth? I have responsibilities. You know that I do.”

“I know!” This was hard enough, and he was making it worse. It reminded her of how she’d come here—by being blackmailed with a bargain she hadn’t been able to refuse. But that wasn’t fair. The bargain to save her mother had been her own idea. And after that, Cassie had chosen to stay. At least, she’d thought she’d had a choice. She’d believed him when he’d said she wasn’t a prisoner. What if… He wouldn’t force her to stay. He wasn’t like that. “If you really cared about me, you’d let me go.”

He turned away from her. “Go,” he said. She exhaled a breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. He added, “I will stay here and pace like a bear in a zoo until you return to me.”

Cassie sat down hard on the bed as the anger and frustration drained out of her. “I didn’t mean…” Didn’t mean what? To leave? But she did mean to leave. From the beginning, she had meant to leave. She just hadn’t meant to hurt him. And she hadn’t meant to care if she hurt him.

Bear sighed. “If you wish it, I will take you home.”

Latitude 70° 49’ 23” N

Longitude 152° 29’ 25” W

Altitude 10 ft.

Cassie hadn’t remembered the station being so ugly. She’d always thought it resembled a sideways soup can, but she’d never noticed what an old soup can it had become. Its metal walls were pockmarked with the red-brown stains of decades of rust. The shed walls were worse. The whole complex was incongruous with the pristine ice desert. After all the years she’d walked in and out of that dented, rusted door without ever looking at it, seeing it now felt… strange.

She dismounted from Bear, but her hand stayed on his neck. He turned his head to look at her with his soulful eyes. “It looks different, that’s all,” she said, in answer to his unspoken question.

“You are different,” he said. “This place is not your home anymore.”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” she said, taking her hand off his neck. “This is hard enough as it is.”

“I do not want leaving me to be easy.”

“Well, it’s not, so stop it.” He subsided, and she went back to staring across the station compound. Skidmarks from a Twin Otter crossed in front of the shed and headed behind the station. Max was here. Max. Owen. Liam. Scott. Jeremy. Dad and… and Mom. Cold pierced her cheeks even under her face mask now that she wasn’t touching Bear. Cassie closed the gusset on her hood.

“Are you afraid?” Bear asked gently.

“Like hell I am,” Cassie said. Ridiculous to be nervous about meeting her own mother. This should be the best day of her life.

But her feet wouldn’t move. All she had to do was walk to the door and open it, and there she’d be—her mother. “You could come in with me,” Cassie said.

Snow drifted across the doorstep in silence.

“I know you do not want that,” Bear said finally.

She nodded. She didn’t know what had made her say it.

“Raise the station flag and I will come for you,” Bear said.

No more thinking, she told herself. It was time to do this. Shouldering her pack, Cassie marched briskly across the lit snow. Closer, she heard the generator humming—a comfortingly familiar sound, like the welcoming whine of a family dog—and she slowed to a stop in front of the door.

Behind her, she heard Bear rumble, “I love you.”

Suddenly, going inside seemed easier than staying outside. Without looking at Bear, she pushed the door open. The smell of unwashed bodies hit her in a wave, and she reeled backward from the sourness. Steeling herself, she stepped into the entryway and closed the door behind her. Breathing shallowly through her face mask, she opened the second door.

And she was home.

Cassie stood in the second doorway and blinked, her eyes adjusting to the barrage of color: orange life vests, red parkas, bright blue packs, green and purple climbing ropes. Slowly, as the colors resolved into familiar shapes, she started to relax. Heaps of gear, stacks of files, rats’ nests of clothes on top of and around the desks and file cabinets… She knew this mess. Cassie stripped off her outer gear. She could hear voices in Owen’s workshop. She left her pack and gear on her desk and crossed to the half-open door.

The scene was very familiar: Max and Owen stood at the workbench. They were muttering over a chunk of engine. Leaning against the door frame, Cassie watched them. Max and Owen. Her two pseudo-uncles. She used to play in here while they muttered over some hunk of metal, exactly as they were doing now. She felt a grin tugging on her lips. “Nice toaster,” she said lightly.