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 andprogression. 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.
