Chapter 105 - The Arctic Ghost
The Arctic Ocean was an endless desert of jagged, shifting white plates. The snowmobiles had carried us across eighty miles of pack ice before the sea ice buckled and forced us onto the lower cargo bay of the *Isbjørn*, an infiltration achieved through three suppressed rounds and twenty thousand euros dropped into the captain's bloodstained snow.
Clara sat beside me in the belly of the vessel, wrapped in wolf fur, watching the red emergency lights of the engine room pulse against the rusted bulkheads.
"Mommy?" she asked softly.
"I'm here, baby."
"Did Grandma Eleanor hate you because you looked like that lady on the radio?"
I stopped cleaning the snow from my rifle's optic. The engine's deep, low hum vibrated up through the floorplates, mimicking the heartbeat of a mechanical monster.
"Eleanor was afraid, Clara," I answered gently, brushing a strand of dark hair from her forehead. Her face held the sharp, aristocratic jawline of the Sterlings, but her eyes possessed the warmth Arthur and Eleanor had tried to beat out of me. "When people are afraid of the dark, they blame the person holding the candle."
"She said I'm a key," Clara whispered, looking at her small, pale hands. "Does that mean they're going to take me apart?"
The rage that sparked in my chest was not the frantic panic of Thanksgiving night, when Arthur had smashed my head into the dining table while the gravy boat tipped and Eleanor calmly wiped her mouth. It was a cold, absolute, cosmic certainty.
"Nobody takes you apart," I said, holding her gaze with iron resolve. "I destroyed their houses. I burned their bank in Zurich. I drowned their submarine in the channel. And whoever is waiting beneath that ice will learn that the blood they tried to own is the blood that ends them."
Vance stepped through the water-tight door, his breath steaming in the chill of the unheated hold. "Twenty minutes to the ice shelf. The captain says the radar shows an automated signal from the Nunatak peak. Coordinates match the Ninth Vault. But Emily... there's a problem."
"What problem?"
"The perimeter sensors on the Nunatak aren't sending passive beacons," Vance said, his face pale under the grime of battle. "They’re broadcasting a live broadcast. To every Archon terminal on earth."
"Broadcasting what?"
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"A liquidation order," Eleanor said from behind a stack of crates, her voice trembling. "Victoria isn't waiting for us to enter. She knows we took the bait. She is going to bury the Ninth Vault—and everything inside it—under two hundred feet of detonated glacial ice."
***
