Yakutsk, the capital of Russia’s Sakha Republic, saw winter temperatures that were sometimes even colder than places inside the Arctic Circle.
A howling cold wind from eastern Siberia swept through, and Song Yu instinctively shrank her neck.
“Tell him I’ll add fifty thousand rubles. Ask if he’ll go,” she said to her Russian translator.
The translator Song Yu had hired was a pretty young woman with blonde hair named Lina, who had studied at a university in China for three years.
Lina paused for a moment at her words, then gestured to the car rental boss and relayed Song Yu’s generous offer in Russian.
The car rental boss was tall and burly, sporting a massive beer belly. He hesitated briefly at the mention of fifty thousand rubles before waving his hands rapidly and rejecting the proposal in hurried Russian.
“No amount of money will make him go,” Lina translated for Song Yu.
She shrugged helplessly. “No one’s willing to head into Oymyakon right now.”
“It’s just too cold.”
Oymyakon was known as one of the coldest inhabited places in the northern hemisphere. Its record low had plunged to minus fifty degrees, and the average winter temperature hovered around the same mark.
To make matters worse, it lay eight hundred kilometers from Yakutsk, and the route crossed an infamously perilous highway.
“The Kolyma Highway—one of the world’s ten most dangerous roads, with six hundred kilometers of complete wilderness,” Lina explained.
She turned to Song Yu, hoping to talk her out of it. “Maybe we should call it quits. We’ve checked every rental outfit in town.”
The companies they approached offered vehicles for rent along with drivers, but everyone balked the instant they heard Song Yu’s destination was Oymyakon.
Song Yu jammed her hands into her coat pockets, pursed her lips, and mulled it over for a moment. “Then I’ll drive myself.”
“Ask him to recommend a car that can handle the extreme cold.”
Lina hesitated but passed the request along to the car rental boss.
He stared at Song Yu in disbelief.
Business was business, though, so he turned and led them to check out the vehicles.
In such brutal cold, the engines of ordinary cars simply wouldn’t turn over. In the end, the boss selected a Russian-made UAZ Jeep for her.
Standing in front of the jeep, the car rental boss patted the hood and launched into a rapid-fire spiel.
Lina struggled to keep up with his torrent of technical specs on the vehicle’s performance, but one detail stuck with her.
“Someone took the last new UAZ Jeep last month,” she translated. “This is the final one in stock. It’s second-hand, but it’s been fully inspected and guaranteed solid.”
Song Yu walked a circle around the jeep. She only needed it for a single round trip—as long as it ran, it would do. She nodded to Lina. “This one’s perfect.”
Lina turned back to the boss and haggled fiercely in Russian.
The next day brought snow to Yakutsk.
Song Yu planned to leave before dawn. Lina packed her heaps of food for the road, along with a stainless steel thermos filled to the brim with hot water.
Right before departure, Lina hesitated, clearly wanting to dissuade her one last time.
“It’s not too late to wait for milder weather. I’ve guided foreign scientific expedition teams before, and they only ventured into Oymyakon during spring or summer.”
The black jeep idling by the roadside resembled a hulking beast, its hard-edged, rugged lines embodying the indomitable style of the Russian people.
Song Yu yanked open the door, hopped inside, and fastened her seatbelt.
She propped her elbow on the window sill, leaning halfway out with a smile. “If I wait too long, I might miss my chance.”
She slid her sunglasses back onto the bridge of her nose and gripped the steering wheel. “I’m heading out.”
The jeep’s engine roared to life with a thunderous rumble, plunging headlong into the swirling snow.
From Yakutsk, Song Yu drove steadily eastward.
She had watched plenty of Russian movies and shows before, aware that Siberia was a barren, frozen wasteland. But traversing it herself—over snow-blanketed permafrost—truly drove home the point: surviving in this environment demanded a will of iron.
The farther east she went, the lower the temperature plunged. The car’s heater gave out entirely from the extreme cold, but thankfully, a stove burned in the back seat, courtesy of Lina.
Lina had picked up the trick on prior trips to Oymyakon with foreign expedition teams. The local Yakuts always kept heaters in their vehicles.
Daylight lasted only a few short hours before darkness fell again.
Song Yu saw scarcely any other cars along the way, and even fewer once she reached the Kolyma Highway.
She passed a van flipped on the roadside, its front end buried deep in the snowdrift, abandoned to the elements. No one would brave this icy hell to tow it out.
Even inside the jeep, the cold bit deep. Song Yu’s breath fogged the air in white clouds, and a thin crust of ice formed on the side window where no heat reached.
Ahead, the headlights pierced the mist to reveal a gray-blue ribbon of road, cold and forsaken.
Cross-shaped gravestones appeared sporadically along the verges.
Lina had mentioned before they left that countless lives had been lost building this highway.
Beneath every kilometer of the six-hundred-kilometer Kolyma Highway lay the bones of the dead.
Song Yu’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. Her index finger tapped an anxious, jittery rhythm.
A sidelong glance at her watch showed seven o’clock in the evening. Oymyakon couldn’t be far now.
Hours of nonstop driving had left Song Yu bone-tired. She yawned incessantly, her eyelids drooping in a losing battle.
Dreading a fate like that wrecked van’s, she flicked on her hazards, pulled onto a flat patch, and stopped to rest.
Song Yu left the engine running. In this weather, killing it might mean it never started again.
She fished the camera from her bag on the passenger seat. The brutal cold had drained its battery fast—fully charged at departure, now it clung to its last bar.
Not far from her parking spot stood a white cross, stark and solitary against the vast, empty expanse of ice and snow.
Along the route, Song Yu had counted sixty-seven such gravestones. Those were the lucky ones, marked and remembered. Countless others lay nameless beneath the frost.
She reclined against the seatback and poured herself water from Lina’s thermos. It had gone lukewarm.
Rested enough, Song Yu snatched up the camera, shoved open the door, and jumped out.
The outdoor chill stabbed like knives—even breathing ached. Song Yu had never known cold like this, not even in the Arctic.
She snapped hasty photos of the crosses and the Kolyma Highway before scrambling back inside.
The door slammed shut with a bang, sending a cascade of snow tumbling from the roof.
Song Yu flung the camera onto the passenger seat, twisted the key in the ignition.
The engine coughed out an unnatural grunt and died.
Frowning, she tried again several times, but it refused to catch.
Song Yu muttered a quiet curse. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
She cranked it for a solid ten minutes, every attempt ending in failure.
The massive jeep hunkered there like a stubborn beast, refusing to budge.
With the engine silent, the interior temperature plummeted further, dimming any hope of restarting.
The frozen world outside offered no mercy, yet Song Yu sweated from sheer frustration.
In minus fifty or sixty degrees, the cab turned into an icebox. She shivered uncontrollably, her hands and feet gone numb, as she mechanically kept trying.
After who knew how many failures, Song Yu pounded the steering wheel. The horn blared, jarringly loud in the deathly hush of the Kolyma Highway.
She slumped back, hand shielding her eyes, her peripheral vision catching the stove in the rear.
Even it succumbed to the cold, flickering out.
Song Yu dug out her phone and dialed for help.
The dispatcher spoke only Russian, droning on slowly. It took ages of back-and-forth before Song Yu conveyed her location and plight.
He rattled off a long reply that she couldn’t parse. When she hung up, she still had no clue when rescue might arrive.
Siberian gales battered the land, making the mighty jeep seem puny and fragile, as if a strong gust could topple it.
Song Yu’s teeth chattered violently. She dragged a blanket from the passenger seat and threw it over herself, to no avail.
She clambered onto the seat with both feet, curled into a ball, wrapped the blanket around her entire body, tugged her parka hood low, and huddled motionless.
Every so often, she checked her watch. The ticking second hand grated on her nerves.
Her body heat ebbed away relentlessly; the metal shell enclosing her felt like a coffin.
Fear closed in.
She gazed down the straight, endless highway, shrouded in mist—every bit the “Ghost Road” it was nicknamed.
Song Yu’s eyelids grew leaden. She knew sleep was death, yet exhaustion crashed over her.
In one last effort, she blinked.
For a moment, she wondered if she was imagining it—a light pierced the windshield.
A harsh yellow glow.
She narrowed her eyes and spotted a white Jeep slowly approaching from the distance.
A man stepped down from the vehicle. He was tall and lean, and in the blinding light, she couldn’t make out his face—only his silhouette.
It was as if a savior had descended upon them.
She felt someone pull open the car door from outside, and an even more piercing chill rushed in.
Song Yu’s body had stopped shaking entirely. It was as though she’d lost all sensation—even her blood seemed to have frozen solid, turning her into a block of ice.
The man rested his right hand on the roof of the car, his thin lips pressed together lightly and his brows slightly furrowed. He seemed a touch impatient, perhaps accustomed to seeing travelers stranded on Ghost Road.
He spoke in English: “Get out.”
His voice was low and resonant, laced with a magnetic quality.
Song Yu froze for a moment before slowly lifting her head.
Pei Zhi’s eyelids drooped, and without warning, his gaze met hers.
The man’s dark pupils dilated abruptly.
“Why are you here?” His brows furrowed even deeper.
Song Yu stared at the man she hadn’t seen in so long. Her breaths came in shallow gasps, and every inhale of the frigid air felt like a knife scraping down her throat.
She smiled. Her lips, stiff from the cold, twitched painfully, as if they might split open.
“Why is it that humans, even when they’re freezing cold, still breathe in the icy air?”
Song Yu had no idea why she’d ask such a foolish question in a moment like this, when there were far more important things she should have said.
Her eyelids felt weighed down by a thousand pounds. “So sleepy,” she murmured softly, on the verge of drifting off right then and there.
“…”
Pei Zhi gazed at the woman curled up in the seat. His expression was grim and rigid.