The City Beneath The Ice - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 - First Impressions

Frankie had always thought there were two kinds of silence in Antarctica.

The good kind—the silence that came after a storm, where the world held its breath in a brief truce.

And the bad kind—the silence that came from numbers that didn’t make sense.

Sometimes the ice went quiet right before it revealed something it shouldn’t. Frankie had learned to trust that kind of silence less than the storms.

She stared at her monitor, forehead tight, one gloved hand tapping lightly against the metal edge of the desk. Satellite radar data scrolled in tight columns across the screen: density readings, return intervals, depth estimates.

None of it matched anything she’d expected.

A knot settled beneath her sternum. She’d spent years reading the buried architecture of glaciers—strata like pages, crevasses like punctuation marks. But this felt like picking up a familiar book only to find entire chapters replaced with symbols she didn’t recognise

The ice shouldn’t have been this smooth. Not at that depth. Not for this long.

“Still trying to make it fit the laws of physics?” Sloan’s voice came from somewhere behind her, low and dry.

Frankie didn’t turn. “Just giving it a chance to start behaving.”

Sloan stepped beside her, arms folded. The captain looked like she’d been carved from the same material as the ice outside—sharp, steady, and unbothered by cold or chaos.

Sloan’s calm was legendary. She could deliver bad news the way most people commented on the weather. That steadiness was half the reason teams trusted her with their lives.

“Anything new?” she asked.

Frankie highlighted a region on the screen. “This layer here—see the reflectivity? The ice folds around something with a perfectly flat boundary. That doesn’t happen naturally.”

“What kind of boundary?”

“Unknown. It’s not rock. It’s not void. It’s… something.” She frowned. “Like a wall.”

Sloan let out a slow exhale. “That’s what I thought.”

Frankie angled the display toward her. “There’s a depth anomaly too. The return signals here—” she pointed “—are too clean. Almost like the ice is growing around a solid structure instead of compressing it.”

“You think it could be a remnant of a previous station? Something covered by years of accumulation?” Sloan asked, though her tone suggested she already knew the answer.

Frankie shook her head. “No. Human construction leaves scars. Equipment, angles, anchors, anything. This is too perfect.”

Sloan rubbed a hand over her mouth. “Perfect makes me nervous.”

“Perfect means impossible.”

The puzzle thrilled her, but only in part. A larger part wanted to throw the data back into the system and force it to behave — the ice was not supposed to surprise her. Neither of them said the part they were both thinking. Impossible things under the ice were the only reason this mission existed.

Sloan straightened. “You’ll brief the team after dinner.” Her voice dropped lower. “Orders from the department. And the private funders are watching the timelines like hawks…”

Frankie suppressed a sigh. Government oversight she could tolerate; private investors were another beast entirely. They didn’t care about safety margins—only deliverables.

“…and the journalist. Make sure she sticks to the approved areas.”

Ah. Right. The journalist. Melissa Golding.

Too curious for her own good. Too open-faced for a place built on caution. Frankie shoved the thought away before it could root.

Frankie let her head fall back and stared at the ceiling. “I’m not babysitting her.”

“You don’t have to. Just don’t let her wander into a crevasse or a power conduit.”

“I’m assuming that’s a suggestion, not an accusation.”

Sloan gave her a look that said: with you, it could be either.

Frankie exhaled. She’d worked with reporters before. Mostly people chasing sound bites, angles, or drama where there wasn’t any. Occasionally someone was sharp enough to understand the science, but those were rare. This one… she wasn’t sure yet. Golding seemed nervous in a way that suggested she was in over her head, but she’d also asked one or two questions at the landing zone that stuck in Frankie’s mind.

Frankie pushed the thought away. She didn’t have time to babysit or worry about someone who wasn’t part of the science mission.

“Fine,” she muttered.

Sloan clapped her shoulder—a surprisingly gentle gesture for someone so stiff. “Good. I’ll get the others ready for the briefing.”

When Sloan left, Frankie pulled up a different set of scans—the older, preliminary ones taken weeks before they’d arrived. She compared them to the fresh data. Same unusual geometry. Same unnatural consistency.

It felt like staring at the bones of something that shouldn’t exist.

She pushed her palm against her eyes, exhaling through her nose. Eating would help. And maybe coffee. Definitely coffee.

She shut down her workstation and headed toward the cafeteria.

The corridor was a narrow metal tunnel, warm but claustrophobic in the way only modular research stations could be. Voices echoed from ahead—two people arguing softly, laughter from someone else, a kettle boiling in the corner.

The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly overhead, flickering in the perpetual twilight that lived inside all modular stations. The air tasted faintly metallic from the heating ducts.

Her own boots were loud in the hallway. Too loud.

She stepped into the cafeteria and immediately spotted Melissa at the far table, wrapped around a steaming mug like it was the last warm object on Earth. Her hair was escaping her beanie again, forming a soft halo of static. She looked like someone trying very hard to appear composed.

Frankie felt something tug in her chest—a tiny, unwelcome pull of recognition.

She doesn’t belong out here, Frankie thought.

Then, softer:

But she’s trying.

There was something unexpectedly brave about that — stepping into a world that could kill her in minutes, armed with nothing but a notebook and stubborn hope.

Melissa’s gaze swept the room and landed on her. For a second, something tightened in her face—relief, maybe? Or nerves?

Frankie forced herself toward the counter, grabbed a mug, and filled it with bitter black coffee, then took the seat across from her.

“Warming up?” she asked.

Melissa nodded. “Slowly. I think half my organs are frozen.”

“You get used to it.”

Melissa stared at her for a beat, then tilted her head. “Do you actually get used to it, or do you just pretend you do so new arrivals don’t panic?”

Frankie’s lips curved before she could stop them. “Both.”

A small smile answered her. It wasn’t confident—not really—but it was real.

Melissa toyed with her mug. “Sloan said there’s a briefing soon.”

“There is.”

“Anything you can… pre-brief me on? So I don’t look completely lost?”

Frankie raised a brow. “Reporters usually don’t admit when they’re lost.”

“I’m not a reporter right now,” Melissa said. “I’m a person trying not to make an idiot of herself.”

Frankie blinked. That was… surprisingly honest. She felt her defensiveness falter, just a fraction, like a notch of tension easing from a drawn bowstring.

She set her mug down. “Fine. The anomaly is bigger and stranger than the brief made it sound.” She hesitated, choosing her words. “And more dangerous.”

Melissa didn’t waver. That was new.

“Dangerous how?” she asked.

Frankie met her eyes. “You’ll see.”

A moment passed—quiet, weighted, neither of them looking away.

Then someone called Frankie’s name from across the room and the moment snapped like thin ice.

Frankie rose. “Briefing room’s down the hall. Five minutes.”

Melissa stood too, slinging her bag over her shoulder. “Got it.”

As they joined the flow of bodies heading toward the briefing, Frankie felt that same flicker of protectiveness rise again, uninvited.

She pushed it down as they walked.

There was no room for distractions in Antarctica.
And definitely no room for the kind of softness she’d felt looking at Melissa Golding’s hopeful, nervous face.

But the feeling lingered anyway.

Outside, the wind scraped along the siding of the station, a low, restless sound like the ice itself shifting in its sleep.

Like a hairline crack in solid ice.