"Early," he said. "It was a light news day – just the heartbeat and the weather. Speaking of which, I thought we could go outside and enjoy the sun for a while."

She felt a breeze on her skin, and she propped herself up on her elbows to see where it was coming from. "I left the window open," she said. Then she turned to Luka. "Can I ask you something?"

"Uh-oh."

"No, no, it's nothing like that. You have birth and then you have the car accident, right? So what's the third most important thing that ever happened to you? You never told me."

There was a pause as he sat down, lifted her gently by the shoulders, and put her head in his lap. It was as though she had asked him her question again – why do you love me? – and he had decided to answer her as he always did, by not answering at all.

He spent a few moments stroking her hair with the back side of his hand, then flipped it over by the roots so that it covered her face in a thick curtain.

"Now you look like a caveman," he said.

It was so ridiculous that she had to laugh. He was always saying things like that – at the least expected times, in the least expected places. No one else had ever been able to make her laugh like he could. No one else had ever tried so hard. No one else had ever known her well enough.

Not a soul.

FOURTEEN. THE MARBLES

And the spring came, with the sun breaching the horizon and the wind lifting the snow off the ice and the bay popping and cracking like the frame of an old house. Shoals of fish traced the open water, and flocks of skua followed close behind them. Great chunks of glacier thawed and broke off into the ocean, carrying the blue-green ice of a thousand years ago. For a few hours each day the snow glistened like rubies in the drawn-out light of the sun, and for a few minutes, as the light grew stronger, it glistened like diamonds. No other spring in the world was anything like it.

It was a kind of twilight, though not the real one. The air was surprisingly warm, and for once Laura did not have to thrash around inside her sleeping bag to force her way out, because it had already melted down to the thinnest mesh around her. She lifted herself onto her elbows. Ten thousand loose threads slipped over her arms and shoulders and pooled together on the floor. They fell so softly that she could barely feel them moving over her skin. When she ran her hands through the threads, they rippled and separated, bending away from her fingers like water. A fish swam by beneath her. She had the notion that she could dive through the surface of the tent, parting the threads with her body, and wheel around to watch them close back together, that she could sink through the material until she forgot she was sinking at all, an anchor plunging deeper and deeper, but instead she opened the tent flap and stepped outside onto the crisp white snow.

The penguins were nowhere to be seen, nowhere even to be heard, though when she thought about it, she realized she could indeed hear them chattering hectically to one another, so they were somewhere to be heard after all, and she could see them huddled together at the base of the cliff, so they were somewhere to be seen. They had hatched their chicks and were warming them beneath the folds of their bellies.

The sun described a thin arch at the very edge of the sky, the moon a slightly larger arch at the opposite edge. The wind played softly over her skin. She was not wearing her jacket or her gloves, her boots or her socks, her pants or her undershirt – was not, as she understood it, wearing any clothing at all – and yet she had never been warmer or more comfortable. She wondered why she had ever been cold in the first place, why she had ever decided to be cold. Such a strange choice, she thought. And the world, this world, was all about choices.

It felt good to stretch her muscles. She flexed her fingers, combing them through her hair. There was still a trace of frostbite on the index finger of her left hand, a small plum-colored circle as perfectly formed as an adhesive bandage, and she peeled it off by the tail of red string that protruded from the top, dropping it at her feet, where it sank immediately into the snow and disappeared. She held the finger up to the fading light. Much better.

Scattered over the patch of wind-polished ice that surrounded her tent were the same delicate little puffs of white snow she had seen when she was sledging across the ice so many months ago. Why she hadn't noticed them before, she couldn't say. They were the size of marbles, the largest of them no bigger than a quarter. Some of them even seemed to present the same whorled feathering pattern as marbles, spreading open into blurred segments inside the glass. She tapped one of them with her big toe and it fell apart, spilling into its nearest neighbor, which also fell apart. They seemed so insubstantial that she wondered how they had ever managed to hold together at all.

A light wind came twisting through the cove, and the marbles drifted lazily about before settling back into the snow. It seemed as though they were regulated by a weaker gravity. One good gust was all it would take to carry them away, she thought, and the thought alone was enough to do it, for it wasn't long before she heard the wind sighing down from the cliff, picking up speed as it worked its way toward the rookery. She watched the marbles shudder as the first few hairs of the breeze brushed up against them, and then they floated up off the ice and began to tumble forward. Within seconds they were on their way. They moved with the same strangely purposeful spontaneity as a flock of birds, tacking from one side to another, crowding together and then fanning apart, yet always pressing forward. Where were they heading with such deliberation? she wondered. Where would they come to a stop? She wanted to know, and so she followed them.

The marbles guided her along at a brisk walk. Soon she had left the rookery far behind. The metallic quacking of the penguins faded slowly away until she couldn't hear them at all anymore, just the dimmest rasping sound at the furthest limit of her perception.

The marbles were rolling out over the bay toward the sun, which was higher than she remembered, and in a different quadrant of the sky. Every so often they would shuffle positions, the ones in front sliding to the edge of the pack while new ones drifted forward to take their places. She assigned names to her favorites, and then abandoned the names and assigned them sizes, and then abandoned the sizes and assigned them colors. The red one overtook the green one as she maneuvered around a rise in the snow. The blue one was falling steadily behind. She realized that she had abandoned her campsite without any of her supplies, without even her tent, but she brushed the thought away.

She didn't need her supplies. She couldn't imagine she would ever need her supplies again.

The bay had broken apart into huge chunks and floes that bobbed loosely in the deep water, swaying on every axis like plates spinning on wooden poles. Tremendous gaps and scissures opened between them as they rode their weight through the water. Small waves lapped quietly at their sides. The marbles sailed over the rifts as if they weren't there at all. Laura walked carelessly along behind them, watching the cracks seal shut as she approached. The floes came together with a great heavy precision, butting up against one another with a hollow thump, like boats sliding into their berths. They lingered just long enough to allow her to keep her stride before they floated apart again. She went on like this for hours.

Eventually, the marbles hit some sort of pocket or eddy, spinning in place, and she paused to take a breath. She looked behind her. She had left only the most superficial string of impressions in the snow. The footprints at her feet were so shallow they displayed a hollow curve along the instep, something like a barbell in shape. There was a long empty gap between the thick part of the sole and the five tiny jellybeans of the toes. It was as though she had been walking over a thin layer of sand on a bed of the hardest rock. The sand was an unmistakable Sahara yellow. It gave off a continuous warm pressure that rose up powerfully against her bare feet, though her soles were no longer sensitive enough to detect the million-some punctures of the individual grains. They were hardened by her years of desert walking. She was a sort of nomad. A dry wind swept in from the flatlands. The air around her seemed to shimmer. She could hear the flapping of wings beneath the sun as she followed the marbles out toward the dunes.