Chapter 22
twenty-two
“That’s not Thwaites.” Rue squinted through the driving snow, her injured ankle screaming with each step despite Elliot’s steadying arm around her waist. The building materialized from the white void like a ghost ship emerging from fog, its prefab walls battered by decades of polar storms, but its silhouette was wrong—too small, too angular, missing the distinctive communication array that crowned Thwaites Station.
Elliot’s grip tightened around her waist as she stumbled. “Does it matter? It’s shelter.”
But it did matter. Because as they drew closer, she could make out the faded lettering on the side of the building, half-obscured by accumulated snow and ice.
Her stomach dropped. “Shit.”
“What?”
“This is Takahe Station. It was decommissioned decades ago when they built Thwaites to replace it.”
Elliot stopped walking, forcing her to stop too. Snow swirled around them in violent spirals. “Decommissioned means abandoned, right? Empty?”
“Should be.”
But if it was empty, why was there a snowcat half-buried in the snow and ice next to the building?
Elliot ducked his head and kept plodding forward, all but dragging her. “Then nobody will mind if we make camp in there for the night. We stay out in this, we’ll die.”
He was absolutely right, but as they drew closer to the station, her unease spiked. The building’s exterior showed signs of maintenance—patched siding, a replaced window, none of the decay she’d expect from a decades-old abandoned outpost.
The metal door was painted a faded orange that had once probably been bright safety yellow. A small placard beside it read “Takahe Research Station - Established 1987” in weathered lettering. Below that, someone had spray-painted “CONDEMNED - DO NOT ENTER” in stark black letters.
Elliot reached for the door handle anyway. It was dark inside, and he switched on his headlamp as they stepped inside.
The entryway opened into a common area that looked disturbingly similar to Thwaites—same prefab construction, same institutional furniture, same layout designed for maximum efficiency in minimum space.
But where Thwaites felt lived-in, this place felt.
.. paused. Like someone had been interrupted mid-meal and simply walked away.
Coffee mugs sat on tables, their contents long since frozen solid.
Food trays were scattered across the small dining area, their meals crystallized into unrecognizable lumps.
Coats hung neatly on hooks by the door, as if their owners had just stepped out for a moment.
“This is all wrong,” Rue said, limping further into the room. Her ankle sent sharp spikes of pain up her leg with each step, but she ignored it. The wrongness of this place demanded investigation, even if her body was screaming for rest.
“Sit down,” Elliot ordered and grabbed a chair. It cracked like a gunshot as it broke away from the thin layer of ice coating everything.
She sat, but only because her ankle was screaming for relief. “What are you doing?”
He moved across the common room to the kitchen. “This place is set up like Thwaites, right? So…” He disappeared through a door, and several long minutes passed.
“So what?” she called.
There was no response.
“Elliot?”
There was a clank and a rumble of a generator, and the lights flickered on over her head. He returned with a smirk and a streak of grease on his face. “So… the mechanical room was in the same place.”
She exhaled a soft laugh. “Mr. Fix-It.”
The lights cast everything in harsh fluorescent reality, making the abandoned station look even more unsettling.
Rue rubbed her arms, trying to chase away the chill that had nothing to do with temperature.
The place felt like a museum exhibit— Life in Antarctica, Circa Last Tuesday —except museums didn’t usually smell like diesel fuel and something vaguely organic that made her nose wrinkle.
“Better?” Elliot asked, wiping his hands on a rag he’d found somewhere.
“Warmer, at least.” She tested her weight on her ankle, grimacing at the sharp protest. “Though I’m not sure I like what the lights are showing us.”
He followed her gaze across the common room.
Now that they could see clearly, the details were worse.
A half-finished card game spread across one table, hands of five-card stud dealt and abandoned.
A crossword puzzle with only three words filled in.
Reading glasses perched on top of a paperback novel, bookmarked at chapter four.
“It’s like they all just... left,” she murmured. “In the middle of everything.”
Elliot moved to one of the windows, scraping frost from the glass with his fingernail. “Or like they left in a hurry.”
The thought sent ice through her veins that had nothing to do with Antarctica. She’d seen this before—not personally, but in the reports. Research teams that vanished without explanation, leaving behind only questions and carefully worded incident summaries that revealed nothing.
Like Maren’s team.
Her chest tightened. She pushed herself up from the chair, ignoring her ankle’s furious protest. “We need to search this place.”
“We need to rest,” Elliot countered, not turning from the window. “You can barely stand, and I feel like I got hit by a truck. Whatever happened here, it happened a while ago.”
He was right, of course. Her body was screaming for food, warmth, and about twelve hours of sleep. But the wrongness of this place crawled under her skin like a living thing. The coffee mugs still had frozen coffee in them, for fuck’s sake.
“Something’s not right here, El.” She limped toward the hallway that led deeper into the station. “This isn’t how people leave a place.”
His reflection in the frosted window showed him watching her, his expression unreadable. “Rue.”
The way he said her name—soft, careful, like he was approaching a spooked horse—made her turn around.
“What are you looking for?” he asked. “Don’t deny it. You’ve been looking for something since we landed on the continent.”
The question stole her breath more effectively than the fall into the crevasse had. She felt her face go hot despite the cold, heat creeping up her neck as Elliot’s blue eyes searched hers with that damnable perceptiveness that always saw too much.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, but the words came out thin and unconvincing even to her own ears.
“Bullshit.” He moved away from the window, crossing to her with that careful, measured way he had when he thought she might bolt. “You’ve been wound tight as a spring since we got here. And earlier, when we found that gear in the cave, you went white as the ice.”
Her throat constricted. She wanted to deflect, to make a joke, to do anything but have this conversation in an abandoned research station that felt like a tomb.
But Elliot’s expression was patient and implacable, the same look he got when he was working through a tactical problem that had too many moving parts.
“It’s nothing,” she tried again, turning away from him toward the hallway. Her ankle screamed as she put weight on it, but she welcomed the distraction of physical pain.
“Rue.” His hand closed around her wrist, and her drew her into his arms. “Talk to me.”
The touch undid something inside her chest. Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was the adrenaline crash, maybe it was the simple human contact after hours of thinking they might die alone in the ice. Whatever it was, the words came spilling out before she could stop them.
“Maren Portillo. She was my friend. My mentor, really. She disappeared on an expedition here last year.”
He swore softly against her hair. “I wondered.”
She stared up at him in shock. “You knew about her?”
“I knew about the lost expedition. I found a news printout about it when I searched Moretti’s room.”
“God.” She shook her head. “I knew he was lying about something. Nobody was supposed to be at Thwaites when we arrived.” A sudden thought struck, and she straightened away from him. “I thought Maren was at Thwaites, but what if she was here? I need to look around.”
He caught her before she made it two steps. “No, you need rest.”
Normally, she liked it when he got all protective, but now was not the time. She crossed her arms and scowled at him. “We need to search the place for food and dry clothes anyway.”
“Then I’ll look around. You sit down and get off that ankle.”
“Elliot.”
He returned her narrowed-eyed stare, but otherwise didn’t budge. “Trouble.”
He was not going to give in. She could see it in those ice-blue eyes, the hard set of his jaw and shoulders. If she didn’t comply, he was liable to scoop her up and make her sit down.
Under other circumstances, that image would be sexy as hell. But as it was, she was too annoyed and exhausted to enjoy it.
“Ugh! You are so stubborn.” She threw up her hands and reluctantly sank into the chair again. “Fine. I’m sitting. Happy now?”
He pointed at her as he moved deeper into the station. “Stay.”
She stuck her tongue out at his back and waited exactly ten seconds after he disappeared before limping after him.
There was no way she’d let him poke around an abandoned, potentially haunted station alone.
Plus, she needed to see it herself. Needed proof that Maren was never here, or—her chest tightened—proof that she had been.
The hallway beyond the common area was a time capsule.
Abandoned boots lined up neatly. A whiteboard by the kitchenette listed chores in faded marker—Koos was right, they did make you clean up after yourself in Antarctica.
The handwriting was neat, blocky. Maren’s was loopy, slanted, always running off the edge.
Rue trailed her fingers over the surface, searching for any sign her mentor had left behind.
Nothing.
She limped further, teeth clenched against the pain. The residential wing was a gauntlet of doors, some creaking open under a push, others jammed shut. She ducked into one that felt colder than the rest.