The box sang, and Jenkins wept.

  Not metaphorical tears—actual saltwater streaming down his cheeks in rivulets that steamed where they hit the floor. Elias stared at the puddles, his breath fogging in the suddenly frigid air. The thermometer had shattered at -100°C, but the room wasn't cold. It was empty. Like all the heat had been sucked into the glowing blue mass inside the lead-lined crate.

  "It's not singing," Eleanor murmured, her gloved fingers hovering over the vibrating metal. "It's repeating. Listen."*

  The sound resolved into words—their words, played back in wrong-order fragments:

  "—polarity—" (Elias, five minutes ago)

  "—fucking math—" (Rourke, with feeling)

  "—wrong, it's all wrong—" (Jenkins, now, except his lips weren't moving)

  Rourke hefted the fire axe. "I vote we—"

  "No." Elias grabbed his arm. "You can't axe murder a chemical reaction."*

  "Watch me."

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  They'd lied in the initial report.

  "Minor anomaly," Elias had radioed to basecamp, while Jenkins scrubbed blue fingerprints off his skin. "Possibly piezoelectric. Requires further study."

  Eleanor had arched a brow but said nothing. Now, as she scraped a sliver of the crystal onto a glass slide, her voice was too calm. "This isn't just growing. It's communicating."*

  "Great," Rourke said. "So it's evil, sentient ice. Next you'll tell me it pays taxes."

  The microscope lens cracked as the sample shifted under it. The image resolved for one second—a lattice structure too perfect, too symmetrical—before the slide melted into blue ooze.

  Eleanor sat back. "...It learned. Fast."*

  Outside, the Arctic wind howled through the ruins of a 19th-century research station they'd "forgotten" to mention finding. Its logs spoke of a "bleeding glacier" and a man who'd carved his own eyes out with an icepick.

  Inside, Prometheus Solutions' latest telegram burned in the stove:

  "DO NOT DESTROY SAMPLE. HELICOPTER EN ROUTE."

  Elias wondered if the crystal had intercepted their messages. If it knew.

  Then Jenkins spoke—except it wasn't Jenkins anymore. His voice dripped with the same liquid wrongness as the box:

  "You should have left us buried."

  The helicopter arrives at dawn. Its shadow stretches longer than physics allows, and the man who steps out wears a lab coat stitched with silver thread—the same pattern as the ice.

  Rourke loads his revolver. "I told you we should've used the axe."