“A bad one.” He looked up at her face, trying to gauge how much pain she was really in. “Can you walk?”
“Of course I can walk.” She said it like he’d asked if she could breathe. “Just help me get my boot back on.”
He did, though it took both of them working together to ease it over the swollen joint. When she tried to stand again, he slipped his arm around her waist, taking some of her weight.
“I don’t need?—”
He didn’t wait for her to finish the protest; instead, he tightened his arm around her. “We both know you’d crawl to that station on your hands and knees if you had to, but there’s no point in making it harder than necessary.”
She shot him a look that could have melted the glacier beneath them, but didn’t pull away.
That was something, at least.
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?”