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 wordsfilled 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 wearrived.” 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.”
