Chapter 23
twenty-three
Stale air rushed out, carrying a smell that made Elliot’s stomach clench—antiseptic overlaid with something organic and wrong. He held his arm out, blocking Rue from entering.
“Let me go first.”
“Not happening.” She ducked under his arm, limping into the darkness beyond.
Goddamn this woman. She’d march fearlessly into the fiery pits of hell if the situation demanded it.
And goddamn him, because he’d always follow.
Unlike the orderly abandonment of the rest of the station, this room showed signs of panic—shelves overturned, equipment scattered across workstations, papers strewn across the floor. A biocontainment suit hung from a hook on the far wall, its fabric torn at the shoulder.
“Something went very wrong in here,” he said, keeping his voice low.
Rue moved carefully between the workstations, examining abandoned equipment. “Look.”
She pointed to a row of sample containers. Inside each one, something black and viscous clung to the glass—similar to the substances they’d seen in the ice caves, but more concentrated, almost alive in its density.
Elliot leaned closer, careful not to touch anything. The samples reminded him of the black filaments in the ice cores at Thwaites. The chill rattling down his spine had nothing to do with the temperature.
“There’s another door,” Rue said, already moving toward the far end of the lab where a circular hatch was set into the wall. Unlike the entrance, this one was sealed with manual bolts like a bank vault.
A placard beside it read: “COLD STORAGE - LEVEL 4 CONTAINMENT - AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY” in bold red letters. Below it, someone had scrawled a single word in what looked like black marker: “QUARANTINE.”
“Rue, maybe we shouldn’t?—”
“Help me with these bolts,” she interrupted, already working at the first one.
The mechanism was frozen, requiring both of them to put their weight into turning each bolt. His injured shoulder screamed in protest, but he kept working, driven by a mixture of dread and grim determination.
Whatever lay beyond this door, they needed to know.
The final bolt gave way with a sound like breaking bones.
Rue pulled the handle, and the hatch swung open on surprisingly well-oiled hinges. Cold air billowed out, even colder than the rest of the station—artificially cold, like a walk-in freezer. It carried a sharp tang of antiseptic and metal, sterile and wrong.
Bodies. At least a dozen of them, stacked against the walls like wood, half-encased in gleaming ice.
No, not stacked. Arranged with clinical care, each one tagged with a plastic wristband bearing a number and date.
Men and women in torn lab coats and survival gear, their skin a waxy blue-white, eyes open and glazed with frost. Some seemed peaceful, as if they’d simply fallen asleep; others wore expressions of agony, mouths frozen in silent screams. Some of the ice encasing them had a faint black tinge, as if the same substance they’d seen in the samples had somehow been incorporated into the freezing process.
Rue made a choked sound beside him. “Oh my God. What happened to them?”
Elliot reached for her hand instinctively, finding it ice-cold and trembling. “Someone quarantined them in here. We should leave.”
The room. The station. The godforsaken continent. He’d seen this horror movie and had no intention of living it, especially not with Rue.
He tugged on her hand. “Now.”
“We can’t,” she whispered and broke away from him. He tried to catch her, but she was already moving deeper into the freezer.
Jesus fucking Christ on a crutch. Did she have a death wish?
She moved closer to one of the bodies—a man whose lab coat pocket still held a pen and ID badge. The badge bore the logo of the Atlas Polar Institute.
Of course. That rich fucker named everything after himself.
“Look, some of them are wrapped up,” she said, staring across the rows of bodies.
“Someone was trying to take care of them after death…” She knelt beside one of the bodies that hadn’t been offered the same kind of care as the others—a woman who looked like she’d fallen and died right where she lay.
“She took care of them all until she couldn’t. ”
Rue reached out to touch the woman’s frozen hand.
Elliot’s heart leapt into his throat, and he darted forward to stop her. “Don’t. There’s a contagion in here.”
“It’s not active in the cold. If it were, we’d have been exposed back at Thwaites or in the caves. We’d be dead by now. But I bet Tyler was exposed when he cut himself in that crevasse.”
“Fuck.” Cold realization washed over him. The kid’s deteriorating condition, the coughing. All of it made terrible sense now.
Rue glanced back at him, and he saw raw terror in her eyes. “He could be spreading it to the others as we speak, and they wouldn’t have a clue.”
His Rue was fearless, but the naked vulnerability in her expression now made something primal roar to life in his chest. He moved to her side, crouching next to her. “We’ll get back to them and make sure everyone gets out of here alive.”
She smiled sadly and looked down at the body lying before her. “I’m sure she thought the same—” She broke off and shot to her feet, crossing the room to a body on one of the gurneys. It had been covered by a sheet, but the sheet had slipped halfway off, revealing the face beneath.
Rue’s entire body went rigid. “No,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “No, no, no.”
She pulled the sheet back with trembling fingers.
There, preserved by the cold, lay a woman with high cheekbones and dark hair streaked with premature silver at the temples.
Her eyes were closed, unlike most of the others, and someone had carefully folded her hands over her chest. She wore an expedition jacket with the Atlas Frost logo, the name “Portillo” stitched above the breast pocket.
“Maren,” Rue choked out, her voice so small and broken that it shattered something in Elliot’s chest. “Oh God, Maren.”
She reached out with shaking fingers to touch her friend’s frozen cheek. He wanted to stop her, to pull her away from the body and the danger it might still pose, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
This was her moment of grief, and he had no right to take it from her.
He watched helplessly as something inside her seemed to shatter. She didn’t cry—Rue Bristow never cried—but the sound that escaped her was worse than tears: a raw, broken noise that seemed torn from somewhere deep and vital.
“I came to find you. I was supposed to save you.”
Jesus, she was killing him, slicing his heart right in two. He placed a hand on her back, feeling the tremors running through her body. “Rue, I’m so sorry.”
He wanted to pull her into his arms and shield her from every goddamn thing that had happened here, but there were no words big enough, no hug warm enough to make up for the slab of ice that was all that remained of Maren Portillo.
Rue’s breath came with a wheezing sound, rawer than he’d ever heard it.
For a long time, she stayed bent over the gurney, her gloved hand resting on the sleeve of the corpse, as if she might rouse her with sheer force of will.
He couldn’t see her face, but she was rigid with tension, the energy rolling off her as palpable as static.
Finally, she scrubbed her face with the back of her hand and straightened, not looking at him.
“I need to—” Her voice broke. She drew a breath and tried again. “I need to find her notes. She was meticulous. She’d have documented everything.”
“I’ll look.” Maybe he couldn’t give her comfort, but he could give her something else: answers. “You don’t need to stay in here.”
She turned toward him, and he braced for the inevitable argument, but she only stared at him for a long moment like she couldn’t understand what he was saying.
Those wide, tear-filled eyes gutted him. He’d never seen her like this, never seen Rue Bristow—wild, fearless, impossible Rue—look so small.
“Listen,” he said, voice low, roughened by everything he wanted to give her and couldn’t. “I scavenged some supplies earlier. Clothes. Blankets. And, I checked, there’s hot water—miracle of miracles. You can clean up, get warm. Let me hunt for her notes. You don’t have to stay in here.”
She blinked at him, and for half a heartbeat, he thought she might fight him. That was her default, after all—challenge, push, bite down, and never back off. But instead she only stood there, trembling.
He would’ve carried her out if she’d asked. Hell, he wanted to even though she hadn’t. Every cell in his body screamed at him to protect her, even if the only thing he had to offer was a room down the hall, clean clothes, and hot water to wash away the cold.
“Rue,” he said again, softer this time, his thumb brushing over her cheek, tracing the path a tear had carved through the dirt there. “Let me take care of this part. Just this once.”
She nodded and walked out.
It took everything he had in him not to follow.
He waited until her footsteps faded, then looked down at Maren’s body. “She loved you. I hope you know how rarely she lets herself love and how lucky you were to have it.”
He gathered himself, then began moving through the place, rifling through shelves, drawers, and file boxes in search of anything that looked like field notes.
Even with the generator working again, the cold in here was so deep it seeped through every seam in his jacket, numbed his cut-up hands, and made his teeth hurt.
Probably why they had repurposed it into a morgue when people started dying.
Was the same thing happening at Thwaites now?
That was a cheery fucking thought.
He kept moving, methodical and thorough, ignoring the chill and the bodies and the feeling that he was shuffling around in someone else’s nightmare.
He found nothing but the bodies in the inner cold storage room, but the outer lab was a riot of overturned chairs, broken glass, and chaos—the panicked, last-ditch scramble of people who knew what they were facing and knew it would eat them alive regardless.
He found three more bodies stuffed behind an upended shelving unit, the backs of their heads splintered open.
The blood had frozen in starbursts across the tile, flecked black where it congealed with the same glistening substance from the samples.
Two wore civilian clothes: a grad student and a custodian, maybe, judging by the patchy beard and faded Huskers T-shirt.
The third, in a lab coat, could have been Maren’s contemporary.
They’d all tried for the outer door with torn fingernails and shredded hands.
So someone had survived long enough to lock them all in here. Where was that person now? He knew they couldn’t still be here—at least not alive—because nobody would’ve survived here long without heat.
He wasn’t a betting man, but he’d be willing to bet his entire bank account that Atlas Frost and Praetorian were behind all of this.
He circled through the office annex, picked through the gory evidence, and finally wedged open a half-crushed metal locker in the corner with the heel of his boot. Inside, he found what he’d been looking for.
He picked up a folder labeled PROJECT THANATOS - PHASE 1 OBSERVATIONS. Pages and pages of handwritten notes and observations, clinical descriptions of symptoms and progression. His stomach turned as he realized these were death records, detailed accounts of how each person in this room had died.
Most disturbing were the photographs—close-ups of skin showing black, vein-like patterns spreading beneath the surface, of eyes clouded with dark particles, of mouth and nose tissues infiltrated by the same filamentous structures they’d seen in the ice.
He flipped to the last page, and a name jumped out at him: Dr. Helena Moretti.
No doubt related to Dr. Emerson Moretti.
He closed the folder, grabbed the box he’d found it in, and backed out of the room. Once in the hall, he debated for a half second whether he should shut the freezer door, locking them all in again, and…
Yeah, that seemed like the safest option.
Not that he believed in zombies or shape-shifting aliens, but he’d just spent twenty minutes in a walk-in freezer with a roomful of corpses, some of whom had been clawing at the doors when they went down.
He wasn’t taking chances.
He shut the outer lab’s door, too. The padlock was still on the floor in the hallway where Rue had dropped it. He scooped it up.
He wanted to preserve as much evidence as possible because he fully planned to nail the bastard who had done this, putting that haunted look in Rue’s eyes.
“You won’t be forgotten this time,” he told the people inside before sliding the lock into place. “We’ll be back with a full team. The world will know what happened to you. You will have justice. I promise you that.”
He moved down the hall toward the bathroom, tapping on the door with his knuckles. Inside, the shower was still running.
“Rue?”
No answer.
He tried the door. It opened without resistance, and steam came pouring out. Keeping his gaze averted, he stepped inside.
“Hey, Rue, I found something. It’s not Maren’s notes but?—”
Rue sat hunched under the weak spray, hair streaming down her back in a sodden tangle, arms locked around her knees. Her parka and fleece clung to her in sopping layers, water pooling at her boots. She shivered anyway.
Elliot didn’t think. He just moved, dropping the box of files and going to her.
She didn’t look up when he joined her under the spray and folded himself around her.
She smelled of damp wool and sharp minerals from the water, the outside cold still clinging to her like it had seeped into her very bones.
But beneath it all was the faint smell of her skin, that earthy, wild, feminine scent that had driven him crazy for years—stubborn proof she was still here, still alive, and God help him, still his to hold.