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.”
“ThenI’lllook 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.
Inside, it was claustrophobic. Two bunks, the lower one stripped to the mattress, the upper made up military tight. On the desk, an old e-reader and tablet, both dead now, and a notebook. She picked that up and flipped through it. Ink sketches filled the pages—people, penguins, birds, a boat bobbing in an icy ocean, a plane coming in for a landing. When she got to the first page, she froze. Her own face stared up at her, caught mid-laugh.
Oh, God. She remembered Maren sketching this. They had been hiking together near Moab, Utah, when they stopped for a water break and to admire the almost extra-terrestrial beauty of the red rock formations. She’d taken out the brand new notebook and drawn the sketch in thirty seconds flat.
That had been the summer before she came here and disappeared.
This was real.
Maren had been here.
Rue closed the notebook and pressed it to her chest, forcing herself to breathe as she scanned the rest of the desk. A field notebook, pages curling from the damp as the ice covering everything started to melt. The last entry was dated almost exactly a year ago.
Storm’s getting worse. Helena says we can’t risk the traverse to Thwaites tonight, but I don’t thinkwe have a choice. The radio’s dead. If anyone finds this?—
That was all. The page ended mid-sentence, the pen trailing off into a broken line.
Rue’s vision blurred. She blinked hard and forced herself to focus. She rummaged through the desk drawer, searching for anything else, but there were just pens and a half-finished crossword. She shut the drawer, and something small toppled off the desk and bounced across the floor, landing at her feet. It was a small carving of a red fox. The wood was worn, one ear chipped off.
Maren’s lucky charm. She’d carried it on every expedition, claimed it kept her from getting turned around in the field. Rue stared at the fox until the outline started to double, then she closed her fist around it so tight the edges dug into her palm.
She forced herself upright, wiped her face with the back of her hand, and left Maren’s room, continuing down the hall, desperate to find more signs of her.
The next door was jammed, but the third down was open, and the smell hit her before she crossed the threshold—a sour, coppery sweetness, unmistakable and out of place in the clean cold. Blood. Old, but still potent enough to leap straight to the back of her tongue. She flicked the headlamp higher and saw the stain, a dark starburst frozen onto the floor. It fanned out from the base of a bunk, the sheets rumpled as if in a fight, the pillow half-off the frame.
Rue’s heart pounded against her ribs as she eased closer. The blood was dry, the color faded to rust, but there was too much of it for anything short of violence. She scanned the room. The upper bunk had a fist-sized hole punched through the mattress.The insulation had spilled out in a lumpy, haphazard cascade, and there were more rusted red stains.
She edged back, the sick feeling crawling up her throat. This wasn’t an accident. This was a horror movie scene—panic, violence, and then the aftermath, frozen in time. She shot a glance down the hallway. Elliot was probably in the comms room, wrestling with the radios, trying to get in touch with his family. She should go to him, tell him what she’d found…
But, no, she needed to see the rest first. Needed to know what had happened here.
The next door was different: a heavy steel slab with a hasp and a massive padlock, the kind you used to keep out polar bears or—her mind offered—the kind you used when you didn’t want whatever was inside to get out. It was scratched around the edges, and the paint on the handle was worn off by repeated use. She rattled it, and the echo boomed down the corridor.
The lock was a cheap hardware store model. Easy peasy, thanks to one of her dad’s men teaching her the art of lock picking when she was a teen. She retrieved a multitool from the side pouch of her parka and went to work, her fingers numbed in the frigid air. The metal was cold enough to burn, but she’d done worse with less. The shank twisted after two tense minutes, the lock snapping open with an anticlimactic click. The sound was so loud in the silence she almost jumped.
Just as she pulled the lock free of the hasp and pushed on the handle, she heard Elliot’s footsteps thundering down the hallway toward her.
