"The maintenance vents are dead mass now, girl," Gideon said, wiping the black grease from his forehead with the back of his heavy iron glove. He didn't look at Amaya with anger, just the dull, flat stare of a miner who had seen three shaft collapses in his life. "The Sovereign didn't just order a lock. When the upper bulkheads drop, they drop under hydraulic gravity. Three-inch solid cast plates. They seal the air columns to keep the pressure from leaking into the lower sectors.""There is always a bypass," Amaya said, her voice thin but tight.She was holding her right wrist with her left hand. The white, waxy look of the frostbite was fading, replaced by a dark, angry purple bruising. Inside her forearm, the resonance wasn't smooth anymore; it was firing in sudden, violent bursts like a cracked electrical wire. It didn't give her a map of the machinery anymore—it just gave her an erratic, painful headache."The secondary venting terminal is behind the mixing cylinder," Vance said,

The brick chamber didn't echo. The space was too vast, the air too thick with damp soot, swallowing the sound of their boots before it could hit the curved ceiling.Amaya stood frozen in the ankle-deep water, her left hand holding the edge of the broken iron grate. Her right arm was still dead weight in her coat pocket, but the throb behind her eyes had changed. It wasn't a headache anymore. It was a rhythmic, low-frequency pulse that matched the mechanical groan from the roof."The ballast tanks," Vance whispered again, his eyes wide as he looked up at the sweating iron underbelly of the station. "If Jarek has isolated the lower sectors, the automated system will start dumping the stabilizing weight to balance the upper spires. Millions of gallons of dead brine."Amaya didn't look up. She dropped her gaze to the dark water swirling around her leather boots.Something felt wrong.She bent down, dipping the fingers of her left hand into the dark pool. She brought it to her nose. It did

The wind didn't hiss like the steam lines inside Station 04. It didn't roar like the boilers. It was entirely silent until it hit the jagged teeth of the ice shelf, breaking into a low, mournful whistle that seemed to stretch for miles across the white dark.Amaya lay on her side in the snow, her chest burning as she swallowed the freezing air. Without her heavy winter coat, the thin linen shirt she wore underneath felt like nothing at all. The blue frost-lines along her collarbone—the ones left behind by the surveyor's blue pulse—were dark, almost indigo against her pale skin."Up," a voice grunted above her.Marcus grabbed her left shoulder with his bare hand, his grip rough but solid. He dragged her to her feet. His own wool coat was scorched along the back, the insulation ruined, but he didn't seem to notice the cold. His focus was entirely on the massive, dark shape of the mountain wall behind them.The station’s discharge pipe was forty feet above them, a black circle leaking a

"Leave it," Gideon said, yanking Vance’s hand back from the line. "Leave it!"Vance pulled Marcus’s heavy iron shears away from the brass valve. His face was splattered with black grease, his hands trembling violently. The needle-thin jet spitting from the brass petcock was still hitting the far wall, but the world inside the ice crevice had already changed.Drip. Drip. Slush."The wall is sweating," Amaya said, her eyes tracking upward. The micro-fractures inside the blue ice were no longer hair-thin. They were widening into dark veins, weeping streams of freezing water down the rock face. "We need to move. Now.""Where?" Marcus spat, wiping his brow with a bloodied sleeve. "Outside is the howling dark. Behind us is a freeze. And right here is a collapse."Gideon strapped his leather tool bag shut with a sharp yank. "Down."He pointed toward the base of the crevice, where the uninsulated pipeline plunged into the floor. The intense, unvented heat had aggressively melted a cavity into

The dark didn't just fall; it dropped like a heavy iron shroud.The low, rhythmic thumping of the turbine below didn't stop, but its pitch changed, warping into a deep, groaning vibration that rattled the fillings in Vance’s teeth. The amber bulb overhead died with a wet pop, leaving only the faint, dying afterglow of the heating filament in the corner.Then came the sound from the corridor outside the maintenance shack.Clack. Clack. Clack.It was a cold, rhythmic snap of heavy iron relays tripping down the line. It sounded like a row of cell doors locking one by one, fast approaching their section."Gideon, light!" Marcus barked into the pitch black, his voice tight.A match flared, casting long, monstrous shadows against the tin walls before Gideon managed to guide the flame to the wick of an old oil lantern he pulled from a shelf. The yellow light leaked out, revealing a grim scene.Amaya wasn't just breathing heavily anymore. Her body went rigid as a board, her chin snapping upwa