The White Base

At the very southern end of the Earth, where the sun doesn't rise for three whole months in winter and doesn't set for three months in summer, stood Horizon Research Base.

It was a cluster of red and white rooms raised on iron stilts above the snow, so that the storms couldn't bury them. All around it, in every direction, lay an endless white plain. White, then white, then more white, until it met the sky. Outside, the temperature could drop to sixty degrees below zero — so cold that water thrown into the air froze before it hit the ground.

This was not usually a place for children.

But Leen was here.

She was twelve, and her father, Dr Kamal, was a glaciologist who studied the layers of ancient ice to discover what the Earth's climate had been like thousands of years ago. When her mother had died two years before, he couldn't bear to leave her alone, so he got special permission to bring her with him on this research trip — six months. She did her lessons over the slow internet, helped in the kitchen and read every book in the base's little library, even the boring ones about penguins.