4. Rationing the Truth

The maintenance sled coughed twice before its electric motor caught, the sound swallowed almost instantly by the vast, sterile silence of the polar plateau. Elin sat at the controls, her small hands wrapped around the handlebars, her parka hood pulled so tight that only her goggles and the tip of her nose were visible. Runa crouched behind her on the cargo platform, wedged between two spare battery packs and a sealed crate of emergency flares. The sled’s single headlamp cut a pale tunnel through the darkness, illuminating a path of wind-scoured ice that stretched toward a horizon indistinguishable from the sky.

They had left Valhalla through the secondary airlock, the one in the equipment bay that Brekke’s surveillance rotation did not cover. Elin had disabled the door alarm with a technician’s override code she had memorized during her first winter, when a faulty sensor had triggered three false evacuations in a single month. The code still worked. Runa had begun to suspect that Brekke’s control over the station was less absolute than he wanted them to believe—that there were gaps in his surveillance, blind spots he had not yet mapped, protocols he had forgotten to lock down. He was only one man, after all, however carefully he had planned his coup.

The temperature outside was fifty-three degrees below zero, cold enough to freeze exposed skin in less than a minute. The wind was light, barely five knots, but it still found every seam in Runa’s hastily repaired suit and pressed icy fingers against her skin. She had patched the tear with a strip of adhesive sealant from the equipment bay, but the repair was crude, and she could feel the cold leaking through it like water through a cracked dam.

“How long to the outpost?” she shouted over the whine of the motor.

“Two hours, maybe three,” Elin shouted back. “The coordinates Hagan gave you are on the old Thalassian survey map. The outpost was called Station Scylla. It was decommissioned twelve years ago, after the Kostberg Ceasefire. Officially, it was a weather monitoring post. Unofficially, it was a signals intelligence station. The Thalassians used it to intercept Kelvian military communications during the border war.”

“How do you know that?”

“My uncle served there. He was a cryptographer. He never talked about it directly, but when he got drunk on solstice evenings, he’d tell stories about listening to enemy generals argue over supply routes. He said the station was built on top of an old ice tunnel system, natural crevasses that the military widened and reinforced. They used them to move equipment without being seen from the surface.”

A signals intelligence station. A hidden network of ice tunnels. The pieces clicked together in Runa’s mind with the cold precision of a lock engaging. If Brekke had been stationed at Scylla during the war—if he had learned its secrets, its hidden passageways, its surveillance capabilities—he would have known exactly how to isolate Valhalla. He would have known the communication protocols, the emergency frequencies, the weak points in the station’s defenses. And if he had access to the old tunnel network, he might still be using it. Moving unseen beneath the ice. Watching them.

“Elin,” Runa said, a new and terrible thought forming in her mind, “does the Scylla tunnel network connect to Valhalla?”

Elin was silent for a moment, the sled humming beneath them as it glided over a ridge of wind-packed snow. “I don’t know. The survey maps only cover the Thalassian side of the border. But Valhalla was built on an old Kelvian research site from the same era. It’s possible the two networks were connected at some point. During the war, both sides dug tunnels for the same reasons.”

If the tunnels were connected, Brekke had not simply cut off their communications from inside the station. He had been using a hidden route to move between Valhalla and the outside world, perhaps for weeks, perhaps for months before the Ice Maiden disappeared. The supply ship’s diversion might have been only the final move in a much longer game.

The sled crested a low rise, and the terrain changed abruptly. The smooth plateau gave way to a field of pressure ridges, jagged slabs of ice that had been forced upward by the slow collision of two glacial flows. Elin slowed the sled to a crawl, navigating the maze of blue-white monoliths with the practiced ease of someone who had done it before. The headlamp threw strange shadows against the ice, shapes that seemed to move at the edge of vision, retreating into the darkness whenever Runa turned her head.

“We’re being followed,” Elin said, her voice flat and controlled, as if she were reporting a routine weather observation.

Runa twisted around, peering into the blackness behind them. For a moment, she saw nothing. Then a flicker of light appeared, faint and distant, bobbing at the far edge of the pressure ridge field. Another sled. Moving fast. Gaining.

“Brekke?” Runa asked.

“It has to be. He must have realized we were gone. Maybe he found the disabled alarm, or maybe he checked our quarters and found them empty.” Elin gunned the motor, and the sled surged forward, weaving between ice formations with a recklessness that made Runa grip the cargo straps until her knuckles ached.

“Can we outrun him?”

“Not on this terrain. His sled is a military model, faster and more powerful than this one. And he knows these ridges better than I do. He was stationed here, Runa. This is his territory.”

The pursuing light grew brighter, resolving into the distinct shape of a long, low-slung vehicle with a reinforced bow designed for breaking through ice crust. Brekke was alone at the controls, a massive figure in a black EVA suit that Runa had never seen before, its surface unmarked by any station insignia. He was not even pretending to be the commander anymore. He was hunting them, and he wanted them to know it.

“The outpost,” Runa said, calculating distances and speeds in her head. “How far?”

“Three kilometers. Maybe two and a half. There’s a narrow pass ahead, a gap between two ridges. If we can reach it before he catches us, we might be able to lose him in the tunnels.”

“And if we can’t?”

Elin did not answer. She leaned forward over the handlebars, her body tensed like a sprinter at the starting line, and pushed the sled to its maximum speed. The motor screamed in protest, a high, keening whine that echoed off the ice walls around them. The cold wind bit through Runa’s hood, stinging her cheeks and freezing the moisture on her eyelashes. Behind them, Brekke’s sled closed the distance with the steady, implacable patience of a predator that knew its prey had nowhere left to run.

The pass appeared between two towering pressure ridges, a narrow corridor of ice barely wide enough for the sled to squeeze through. Elin aimed for it and accelerated. The sled shot into the gap, its sides scraping against the frozen walls with a shriek of metal on ice. Runa ducked low, feeling the rough surface tear at the shoulder of her suit. Then they were through, emerging into a wide, shallow bowl surrounded on all sides by ridges. At its center, half-buried in drifted snow, stood Station Scylla.

It was smaller than Runa had expected—a cluster of prefabricated domes connected by covered walkways, their surfaces scoured dull by decades of wind and ice. The main entrance was a heavy steel hatch set into the largest dome, its red paint faded to a pale pink. A faded Thalassian flag, stiff with frost, hung limply from a pole above the door. The whole complex looked abandoned, lifeless, a fossil from a war that most people had already forgotten.

Elin killed the motor and dismounted, her boots crunching on the hard-packed snow. “The hatch is electronically locked. I’ll need a few minutes to bypass it.”

“We don’t have a few minutes.” Runa pointed back toward the pass, where the headlamp of Brekke’s sled was already visible, growing larger by the second. “He’ll be here in under two minutes.”

“Then you’ll have to slow him down. There’s a flare gun in the emergency crate. It won’t stop him, but it might make him think twice about charging straight at us.”

Runa pried open the crate and found the flare gun, a stubby, orange-painted launcher with a single cartridge preloaded. She had never fired one before. The instructions were printed on the grip in three languages, but her hands were shaking too hard to read them. She braced herself against the side of the sled, aimed at the mouth of the pass, and pulled the trigger.

The flare arced across the bowl in a trail of brilliant red light, illuminating the ice with an eerie, blood-colored glow. It struck the ridge wall just above the pass and exploded in a shower of sparks and burning magnesium. The effect was immediate and dramatic. Brekke’s sled swerved hard, its front ski catching on a chunk of dislodged ice, and the vehicle slewed sideways into the ridge wall with a grinding crunch of metal.

“I got him,” Runa breathed, hardly believing it.

“You slowed him down,” Elin corrected, still working on the hatch panel. “He’s not done. He’s never done.”

As if to confirm her words, the crumpled sled began to move again, its motor grinding in protest but still functional. Brekke’s silhouette detached itself from the vehicle, and Runa saw that he was on foot now, moving toward them with the unhurried stride of a man who did not need a machine to finish what he had started. He was carrying something in his right hand—not a weapon, but a small, handheld device with a blinking red light. A remote detonator, Runa realized with a chill. He had booby-trapped the pass. He had wanted them to reach the outpost. He had wanted them to lead him here.

The hatch groaned and swung inward, revealing a dark corridor beyond. Elin grabbed Runa’s arm and pulled her inside. They stumbled down a flight of metal stairs, their headlamps carving frantic patterns on walls lined with outdated equipment and frost-covered cables. At the bottom, a long, low-ceilinged room stretched into darkness, filled with banks of silent monitors and dusty control consoles. The air smelled of old metal and chemical decay, the residue of a military occupation that had ended a decade ago but never really left.

“The tunnel entrance should be at the back of the main chamber,” Elin said, her voice echoing in the dead space. “If we can reach it before Brekke seals us in—”

An explosion shook the dome above them, and a section of the ceiling collapsed inward, showering them with ice and shattered metal. Runa threw herself flat, covering her head with her arms. When she looked up, the stairway they had just descended was buried under a ton of debris. They were trapped.

But the tunnel entrance was still ahead, a dark, circular opening in the far wall, barely visible through the dust and falling frost. And from somewhere deep within it, Runa heard a sound that made her blood run cold—a low, rhythmic chanting, the same guttural Old Kessian cadence she had heard Brekke murmuring in the communications room. It was not coming from behind them. It was coming from below.

“He’s already here,” she whispered.

The chant stopped. In the silence that followed, a single voice spoke, distorted by echo and distance but unmistakably Brekke’s, calm and conversational, as if he were welcoming guests to a dinner party.

“Dr. Linde. Dr. Solberg. I was wondering when you’d finally arrive. Come down. There’s something I want to show you. Something that will make everything so much clearer.”

Elin looked at Runa, her face pale and frozen in the beam of her headlamp. Runa shook her head slowly. Whatever was waiting in the tunnels beneath Station Scylla, it was not an explanation. It was not a confession. It was the final piece of Brekke’s design, the trap he had been laying since the moment the Ice Maiden disappeared.

But they were trapped between the collapsed stairway and the dark mouth of the tunnel. Forward was the only direction left. Runa drew a breath, felt the cold fill her lungs like liquid nitrogen, and stepped into the darkness.