Ammonite

Marghe’s feet were numb now and the blizzard still raged. She chewed on her last strip of meat, knowing that this one, like all the others, would not give her enough energy to keep warm.

The day wore on. With her snow mask pressed tight against nose and mouth, and her face pressed against the fur of her hood, she could hardly breathe. She could not get rid of the persistent image of herself as a blowfly egg, waiting to hatch into a maggot in the rotting flesh of the horse’s carcass.

The numbness in her feet crept to her knees. She was not sure if it was frostbite or a result of her restricted circulation, but moving would mean lifting the skin flap, and the wind would whip away all her hoarded warmth in a heartbeat. She was too weak to survive that. If the blizzard did not stop soon, she would grow weaker and weaker until her heart stopped.

She did not want to die. Even now, half suffocated and starving, with patches of skin dying on her face and hands, she refused to give up. This was not how her life was meant to end, frozen and stinking and alone, forever listed as missing, unless she turned up entombed in an iceberg drifting down the eastern coast between the mainland and the Necklace Islands. She refused to die.

Think.

There was a story her father had told her once, about the organic chemist who had been searching for the solution to the structure of a certain molecule and had fallen asleep and dreamed up the answer: the benzene ring. Her father had used the story to illustrate several of his annoying sayings, like Where there’s a will there’s a way, and Westerners teach their children how not to think, and Relax, let it come in its own time. Right now her hunger and fear were blotting out everything else. She needed a clear mind, a relaxed body; she needed to be still, and let it come. Perhaps there was a solution to all this, a solution as perfect, elegant, and obvious as the benzene ring.

Her hands were numb now, as well as her legs. When she unstoppered the locha skin, the tiny movement sent agony into all fingers except the third and fourth on her left hand. She drank the last mouthful of thick, clotted blood and then rubbed her hands as best she could inside her gloves. Feeling did not return to the two fingers. Frostbite—a clear signal that parts of her body were now shutting down permanently.

Think or die.

But could death really be any worse than this pain in her back, pain from curling around a bottle of blood almost inside the belly of a dead horse? Might it not be preferable to feeling bits of herself die of frostbite, and rot? Death, whatever else it was, would surely be peaceful, not like this constant diamond hiss of cold, this endless grinding fear and pain and struggle. If she just gave up, gave in, who would know, and what difference did it make?

She did not have the answers.

Why was she trying so hard to stay alive? If she lived through this, she might not live through the virus. If she survived the virus, Company might blow the planet to pieces. Life was nothing but a series of fruitless struggles. A sudden memory of herself as a three-year-old dropped into her head like a screen menu. She was in the roof garden of their house in Macau, high above the sweet smells of rot and rice wine, squatting next to an old plastic pail in which she had placed a handful of earthworms. The worms wriggled and humped their way up the sides of the pail, slipping now and again, but persisting, getting closer and closer to the rim, and freedom. She watched them with the utter concentration of all three-year-olds. Every time one reached the top, she leaned over and carefully flicked it back down to the bottom. It was not cruelty that prompted her; she simply enjoyed watching things try. And those worms kept trying, blindly, stupidly, stubbornly, and eventually her three-year-old self got bored and tipped the pail up, and the worms slithered out and burrowed safely into the dirt.

Very well. She would try to wriggle out of the pail; there would be time to worry about the quality of the dirt afterward.

Her first deep breath triggered a coughing fit that wracked her body enough to momentarily crack open the frost-rimed skin flap, admitting a slice of air so cold her eyes streamed. She rubbed her face into the fur of her hood to dry them—ice would blind her. She was well-practiced; her second deep breath, then her third, triggered deep muscle relaxation.