The casual way he backed her up sent a flutter through her chest.
“I suppose I should prepare my equipment,” Dr. Keene said with obvious reluctance. “Tyler!” he called toward the residential corridor. “We leave in two hours!”
As forecasted, the weather cleared, but Jess warned another front was moving in, so they’d have a six-hour window at most before conditions deteriorated again, and three of those hours would be spent traveling to the ice field and back.
They had to move fast.
Rue stood at the entrance to the equipment bay, checking and double-checking their gear while the others suited up around her. The familiar ritual of preparation helped calm her nerves—testing radio batteries, inspecting rope integrity, counting carabiners. She’d done this dance hundreds of times before, but something about today felt different.
“Radio check,” she called out, clipping her headset into place. One by one, the team responded—Tyler’s voice crackling with excitement, Mia’s steady and professional, Dr. Keene practically vibrating with anticipation, and Noah’s clipped military cadence. Elliot’s voice came through last, warm and reassuring despite the tension she could read beneath his careful composure.
He was worried, too.
Her stomach knotted with dread, and for a second, she considered calling the whole thing off. She wasn’t normally one to let fear dictate her actions. She found fear exhilarating most of the time. Fear meant she was pushing boundaries, exploring places others wouldn’t dare venture. But this wasn’t that kind offear. This was the cold, crawling certainty that something was fundamentally wrong.
She glanced at Elliot, who was methodically checking his climbing harness with the precision of someone who’d done this a thousand times before. The set of his jaw told her he was fighting the same instincts she was—the voice that whisperedturn around, go back, this is a mistake.
But Dr. Keene was practically bouncing on his toes, clutching his sample collection kit like a kid with a new toy. Tyler had his camera ready, and even Mia looked eager despite her usual caution. They were counting on her to get them to the cave system safely.
And she needed to see what was down there. If these microorganisms were connected to Maren’s disappearance, she had to know. She couldn’t let fear win now, for the first time in her life. She’d never forgive herself.
“Copy, all stations,” she responded, shouldering her pack. The weight felt good—familiar. “We stick together, we follow protocol, and remember we’ve got a hard out in three hours, no exceptions. Questions?”
No one spoke up, though she caught Dr. Keene bouncing slightly on his toes like a racehorse at the gate.
“Alright then.” She pulled on her goggles and opened the bay door as everyone climbed into the snow cats. “Let’s go find your microorganisms.”
seventeen
Rappellinginto the crevasse had been like descending into another world, one that existed somewhere between science and fantasy. The crystalline tunnels stretched before them, their surfaces glowing with faint blue-green bioluminescent algae that traced delicate patterns across the frozen walls.
“Holy shit,” Rue whispered, her breath clouding in the frigid air. “This is incredible.”
She’d explored ice caves in Patagonia, Alaska, even Greenland, but nothing like this. The light pulsed gently, casting everyone’s faces in an eerie underwater glow that made them look like ghosts. Beautiful, but deeply unsettling.
Keene landed next to her, grinning like a madman. “It’s beautiful,” he breathed, holding up his phone for rapid-fire photos. The cave walls soared overhead, slick and glassy and studded with veins of copper and sulfur—red and yellow racing through the blue in frozen lightning bolts.
Mia and Tyler followed, then Noah and Elliot, who paused halfway down to scan the tunnel behind them before dropping the final distance.
Rue glanced up, counting heads. Six now, including herself.
Keene surged ahead, camera flashing. “Look at these filaments,” he said, kneeling at the wall and tracing the black inclusions with reverent fingers. “They’re everywhere. Interwoven. Like a mycelial network.”
Tyler knelt beside him, shining a UV flashlight at the nearest patch. The filaments pulsed faintly, alive and shifting under the light. “Cool,” he whispered. “Like Christmas lights, but grosser.”
“Any smell?” Mia asked, voice muffled through her face mask.
Keene inhaled. “Earthy. Not sulfur. More... peat.”
Elliot scanned the air with a digital meter, then shot Rue a worried look. “Oxygen’s low, but not dangerous. Keep an eye on the levels.”
Noah moved at the edges of their group, quiet, scanning the ceiling and the path behind them. Rue appreciated his caution; in this place, it felt justified.
They edged deeper, past a bottleneck where the ceiling pressed close enough that even Rue had to duck. Beyond, the cave opened into a crystalline cathedral.
It was staggering—columns of pure ice refracting the thin light into spears of gold and cyan, walls stippled with coppery flakes, and everywhere, the strange black filaments, thicker here, twining together in gnarled braids. Overhead, what looked like a chandelier of bioluminescent algae hung in delicate threads, glowing gently as if responding to their presence.
Keene nearly sobbed. “This shouldn’t be possible,” he murmured. “The temperature, the absence of sunlight—these organisms should be dead, dormant at best.” He pointed to a wall where the filaments radiated out from a central bulb, like the spokes of a wheel. “But they’re... thriving.”
