He doesn’t smile. His gaze drifts over my shoulder toward the dim glow of my laptop. “You keep your camera pointed at ice, and only ice. Don’t go chasing shadows.”
I laugh, light and dismissive, though the seriousness in his tone makes my skin prickle. “I’m a documentary filmmaker, not a ghost hunter. Shadows don’t pay bills.”
Still he doesn’t smile. Instead, he leans closer, voice dropping. “There is a guardian out here. Silent. Watching. Not man, not beast. The old stories say he keeps balance, but if you cross him, the ice will take you. Remember that, girl. Some things are better left unfilmed.”
The way he says it makes my throat dry. I force another laugh anyway, waving him off. “I promise, if I see a seven-foot-tall guardian stomping around, I’ll keep my lens pointed respectfully at the horizon.”
He narrows his eyes, then turns and disappears into the storm, leaving the words to stick like thorns in my mind.
Back inside, I sink into the cot, tug the blanket around my shoulders, and stare at the laptop screen again. The frozen frame glows faintly, those blurred eyes boring into me, fierce and mournful all at once.
My chest tightens. It isn’t just a spectacle. It isn’t just something to sell. There’s a story here, bigger than Gordon’scontracts or Jari’s warnings, and I can feel it humming through my veins like the cold itself.
I press the recorder to my lips and whisper, “I’m not deleting you. Not tonight, not tomorrow. I’ll keep filming until I know the truth. Whoever you are, whatever you are, you’re not staying a blur.”
The wind howls, the heater clicks, and my words vanish into the silence, but my gut knots with certainty.
I have seen something real.
And I am not letting it go.
5
CASSIAN
The sea has moods, and tonight it is restless. The floes slam together like bones grinding under giants, and the sound carries through the night air in hollow booms. I kneel on the ridge above the cove, breath steady, cloak pulled close, eyes fixed on the faint glow of lanterns moving below. At first glance, it looks like any fishing party coming late from the ice, but my nose tells me otherwise before my eyes confirm it.
The smell hits sharp—machine oil, solvent, pressed uniforms that stink of factories and cologne. Unsettlingly pristine and foreign. Not a whiff of brine or fish or woodsmoke. Outsiders.
The bear presses forward inside me, restless, claws dragging along my ribs. He knows what this means before I do. Trouble.
Two men climb the trail toward the bluff, their parkas stitched with a fake institute name. Their steps are precise, evenly spaced, military cadence dressed in borrowed boots. Clipboards hang at their sides, props for a play no one in this land will ever believe. They drag a sled behind them, and though a tarp covers the crate, I taste the truth of it on the wind—steel, sharp and oily, the smell of weapons packed tight in oil.
The one in front tilts his head toward the mast planted on the ridge, where a blinking antenna hums faint red into the sky. A third man crouches there, adjusting dials, his movements quick and precise. They are laying a net, but not for the weather.
The second man mutters something low. The wind carries enough for me to catch it.Harrow.
The name burns in my ears. Roman’s captain. His shadow. His discipline. My jaw clenches until my teeth ache, and the bear rumbles in warning.
Hunters.
I whisper rough into the cold, as if saying it aloud might anchor me. “Not our fight.”
My exile has rules. No entanglements. No brothers. No war. The North is silence and penance, and I chose it because it is the only place left where I can breathe without drowning in memory.
I sink lower, eyes scanning the camp below. The so-called researchers gather around crates and equipment, speaking in clipped terms about grids and heat signatures. One lifts a case and pulls out a drone, wings folding open like a dark bird, matte black to drink the light. Its hum is faint, but the bear bristles, knowing what it means. Surveillance. Tracking. Not of animals. Of me.
The Seal beats faint under my ribs, sharper now, a pulse I can’t ignore. Darius’s call. I shove it down, breathing slow. I won’t answer. Not now. Not ever.
I move along the ridge, watching as two more men break from the group and angle toward the bluff. Toward the camp.
And then I hear it.
A sound carried on the wind, light and unguarded, bright against the silence. Her laugh.
It slices straight through the night, through me. I freeze where I crouch, chest tight, the knife already in my hand without thought. I told myself I would forget it, that wild, broken laughwhen she came coughing out of the water. That softer one she gave her dogs after. I told myself it would fade. I lied.
The men hear it too. One tilts his head, smirks, mutters to his partner. Their path bends slightly, their interest sharpened by what they’ve heard.
