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Alexa was not a scientist, though she’d guided plenty across the ice. Even so, she was ruled by scientific thinking as much as instinct; there was no room for wishful thinking on the ice, where the slightest misstep might kill not only her, but her entire team. The ice was not cruel, as human beings were cruel, but it was cruel in the way of the ocean: vast, forbidding, mercurial, and utterly indifferent to human suffering.
The rational, scientific side of her told her that the grim pyramid of black stone, so far beneath the Antarctic ice and the abandoned whaling camp above, was a mystery, its purpose unknown. The instinctive side of her, which had saved Lex from treacherous holds and rotten ice more times than she could count, told her that the pyramid was a temple.
But a temple to what?
She didn’t want to enter. Her nerves felt raw, screaming at her to turn around, to go back, to seek help. The expedition was unprepared for this. They’d known there was a geothermal anomaly below the ice, one putting out heat in a strange, gridlike pattern that almost resembled a structure, but Lex doubted anyone on the team had truly expected to find something of this magnitude. It was the discovery of a lifetime, Lex could see—quite likely the greatest archaeological discovery ever made, if it revealed the remnants of an entirely unknown civilization that had inhabited Antarctica before it froze.
And when the hell was that, exactly? Frantically, Lex cast back through her memory. She’d never been terribly interested in what she thought of as the ‘soft’ sciences—botany, biology, that sort of thing, things that squished and bled—but as an ice climber she’d collected knowledge about geology (and the geology of icy places in particular) with magpie-like keenness. Antarctica had once been warm, she knew that much, and rich with life. God alone knew how many fossils lay locked beneath the ice, forever beyond the reach of modern science. How much knowledge, forever lost.
“Thirty million years,” she whispered, as they mounted the stone steps. Antarctica had fallen beneath the ice long after the dinosaurs had crumbled to dust and stone, but long before the arrival of humans, or anything resembling them. “At least. Maybe more.”
Which begged the question of who had built the forbidding black temple beneath the ice. On the subject of the timeline of human evolution, Lex’s memory was frustratingly patchy. She was damn sure there’d been no humans wandering around thirty-or-so million years ago, though. Weren’t humans recent? Like, eyeblink-recent, geologically speaking? Like a matchhead flaring, soon to go out, or a car careering toward a cliff. Lex thought so.
So who had built the fucking temple? Lex thought she’d happily give every last cent she’d been paid to come on this expedition for the answer to that question, or at least for some cell service.
#
Time passed differently on the inside.
#
Time passes differently on the inside.
The thought drifted through Lex’s head for perhaps the tenth time, or perhaps the hundredth. She’d lost track of the hours—or had it been days? It could have been months, for all she knew. It certainly felt as though it had been months, or years. Only the shrinking level in their water bottles gave Lex any reassurance that time had passed at all, and that they hadn’t simply been wandering in circles for centuries.
What remained of the expedition team sat slumped on a low, uncomfortable sofa, waiting. They’d spotted one of the glowing red EXIT signs nearby and sent Weyland’s pet mercenary Stafford, armed with the strange rifle he’d found in a cardboard box with “JÄRVFJÄLLET” printed on the side.
Stafford reappeared shortly, shaking his head. “It’s only the rug section again,” he said, drearily.
“It’s always the rug section,” said Weyland. “Cow hide rugs! Who needs a cow rug? Who wants one?”
“The people who built this place.” That was Sebastian, the archaeologist. “If we could decipher a little of their language—”
“We’ve tried that,” Lex broke in. “It’s meaningless. The people who built this weren’t human—they couldn’t have been. Even if we could translate it, I don’t think we’d understand it. We’ll have to get out on our own.” FLÄRDFULL. SMÖRBOLL. GRÖNKULLA. The letters were familiar—most of them, anyways—but no one on the team had managed to puzzle out even a hint as to their meaning.
“It looks like we’re in a—” Sebastian began.
“We all know what this place looks like,” Weyland snapped. “Lex is right. We need to keep going. If we can retrace our steps, we can get out of here.”
The team trudged on, down endless aisles and corridors formed mostly of heaped, stylish yet sensible Scandinavian furniture, following gibberish signs that seemed to have no real meaning. They’d lost two of their number already. Rousseau had drifted away not long after Stafford found the rifle, following the warm, savory aroma of meatballs.
She’d screamed, long and loud and abruptly cut off. They hadn’t seen her since.
Thomas was the next to go. The team had ignored the occasional alluring whiff of meatballs after Rousseau’s disappearance, but the aimless, circular wandering had broken him down.
“The children’s play area,” he’d said, wild-eyed. “It cuts through to the front. We passed the entrance on the way in, I’d swear it.”
“It’s not a children’s play area,” Lex had objected. “This temple has been here for over thirty million years, Thomas, it can’t be an—”
But Thomas had hopped the low barricade, entirely disregarding the rather ominous array of circular red signs in that unreadable language, and vanished.
They’d heard his screams, too. Stafford had clutched the rifle he’d found tightly, his broad shoulders tense, and then relaxed with a sigh when Thomas’s screams cut off. “From now on, no one else leaves the group,” he’d said.
What he’d left unsaid: we’re not alone in here.
#
Not long after Stafford’s fruitless trip to the rug section, they caught their first glimpse of the creatures that were hunting them. The unpleasant artificial lights never dimmed, but the creatures didn’t need shadows to hide. Lex caught glimpses of them from the corner of her eye, flitting from bookcase to cabinet, hiding behind jumbled desks and slithering beneath futons.
Black. Shiny. Slippery-looking. Insectile and somehow serpentine at the same time. The team moved more quickly, navigating the increasingly cramped pathways between furniture at a jog. Occasionally their elbows bumped. Stafford wouldn’t stop stroking the rifle he’d stolen. The men he’d brought with him—Lex had never learned their names—stroked their own rifles, their motions jittery. Anxious. Lex feared them almost as much as she feared the slithery black things that must have taken Rousseau and Thomas.
At the clatter of falling, easy-to-assemble furniture behind them—much too close—the jog became a run. The creatures shadowing them to either side became more careless, the glimpses of their shiny black surfaces more frequent.
We’re being herded, Lex thought. She couldn’t voice the thought. All at once she felt breathless. They couldn’t run far, not with Weyland; the man was ill, quite likely dying, and Lex doubted whether he would be able to keep up this pace for long. Of all of them, Lex was quite likely the most physically fit. The thought of lengthening her stride and leaving them all behind never occurred to her, though. Lex had joined the expedition for their sake, to keep them whole, to keep them alive. Abandoning them was unthinkable.
Ahead of them, the aisle between now-towering heaps of furniture and corrugated cardboard boxes labeled in inscrutable alien jargon dead-ended in a solid wall of bookshelves. Lex had time to think that they were being chased into a trap when the black creatures—monsters, aliens, she didn’t know what—slithered up and over the wall of bookshelves and sprang at the party of would-be explorers, their jaws wide, their silver teeth flashing.
Lex and Stafford, in the front of the group, tried to halt even as the rest of the party tried to pick up speed. The effect was immediate and almost cartoonish; dreamy Sebastian, the archaeologist, piled into Lex and sent her sprawling, while Weyland tripped over Stafford and was caught (and nearly dropped) by one of his goons. Stafford himself managed to keep his feet, but he was still fumbling with the alien weapon, trying to work out how to shoot it, when one of the creatures took him down.
The group scattered. There was no thought of saving Stafford; his screams were mortal cries, and there was no standing against that onslaught of talons and ripping teeth.
For all that she’d tried to save them, Lex lost the rest of the party in their mad dash for safety. She would have saved them if she could—would have protected them, as she’d meant to when she led them here over the ice—but as she scrambled over and under furniture (God, so much of it, towering over her now) they fell away.
She heard their screams. And then something else—an explosion, the roar of a weapon unlike anything she knew. Had Stafford worked out how to fire that bizarre weapon he’d stolen?
Another explosion, and an impact near enough to her to send her stumbling and crashing into something soft and yielding. Lex slipped, collapsing into the pile. Soft, squashy—she scrambled for purchase, trying to shove herself back up and onto her feet, and realized she was clawing at a heap of stuffed sharks. Nearly a wall of them.
Where am I—?
Lex discarded the questioning thought almost as it formed. The sharks were the least of her concerns. There was something wet on her hands, something dark and red, leaving sticky streaks and smudges on the sharks’ plush white bellies. Shot. She’d been shot, and in her shock she hadn’t even felt it. Lex’s shaking hands fisted in the sharks, staining them. She caught her lip between her teeth and tasted tart sweetness, reminiscent of cranberry.
Lingonberry. I ’m not shot. It’s fucking lingonberry jam.
Something caught her then, snatching at the back of her shirt and dragging her up and onto her feet.
#
“Can you read that? That…language?”
The alien with the scarred face didn’t answer. Lex had no idea whether it could understand her at all, in fact, nor whether it was capable of producing sounds like human speech. It wasn’t one of the creatures that had attacked her, and looked far more humanoid than the slithery black things—it wore clothes, even—but its mouth was…complex. A vicious-looking fence of fangs and mandibles. I bet he’s not much of a kisser, Lex thought. This thought was promptly followed by the fear that she’d completely lost her mind.
It hadn’t been long since Scar pulled her out of the shark avalanche. An hour, Lex thought, or maybe two, but not much longer than that. Scar had accepted the gun Lex retrieved from what remained of Stafford, and had resigned himself—or itself—to Lex tagging along after him. She thought he’d been impressed by the way she’d turned on him when he set her on her feet, prepared to fight even wildly outmatched. He hadn’t exactly asked her to come along, but he hadn’t protested, either.
Lex wasn’t thrilled about joining forces with the alien herself, but at least he seemed to know his way out of this endless, miserable fucking Scandinavian furniture store buried beneath the Antarctic ice. If that was what it was. Lex thought it was a maze, one meant for rats…and right now, she felt very rodent-like.
At least they’d made their way to somewhere new. The room Scar had led them to was cavernous. The walls to either side of them were lost in the dim, grey distance. Around them, skeletal black racks rose toward the ceiling, and rose, and rose, and rose, all of them packed with dusty cardboard boxes.
Furniture, waiting to be assembled. They were in the warehouse. And ahead of them, above them…
A circle of light. No, a hole, set into a dull colorless wall Lex’s eyes couldn’t quite settle on. A circular hole, bored through the wall of this place, just like the hole in the ice Lex and the team had headed down to reach the temple in the first place. Maybe it was how Scar had gotten in.
Scar let out a volley of urgent-sounding clicks and trills and purrs. He gestured at the hole, the motion remarkably universal: he was pointing, though the hand was broader than a human’s and the fingers clawed. There. They had to go there.
“Right,” Lex said. “So how the hell do we get up there?”
Another gesture, this time at the heap of cardboard boxes Scar had tossed into the shopping cart he’d found somewhere. Bowing to the law of shopping carts, even in this unnatural place, it had one rattly wheel.
“What are we supposed to do with that? Pile them up? They won’t reach!”
More clicks and purrs Lex couldn’t follow. She understood quickly enough, though, when Scar wheeled the squeaky cart to the wall beneath the hole and began dumping the contents of those boxes out onto the floor, raising puffs of dust.
To get out, they’d have to build their way out.
#
Time passed in a haze of pinched fingers and steadily growing panic. Lex could hear the ugly, serpent-like things hunting them. The walls seemed to echo with their calls, now distant and now near. The creatures hadn’t found their way to the warehouse, but it was only a matter of time.
Lex leaned into Scar without quite meaning to, subconsciously taking comfort from the only other living creature around that didn’t seem hellbent on tearing her limb from limb. Scar, perhaps succumbing to the same urge despite his ferocious appearance, didn’t seem to mind.
Scar seemed to understand the strange language printed on the largely useless booklets inside the boxes, but it didn’t do him much good. By the time they’d finished the first bookcase Lex and Scar were comfortable enough with each other—and frustrated and terrified enough at their situation—to squabble over the instructions, swatting at each other’s hands when things went awry, as they did all too often.
By the third bookcase, they’d fallen into a rhythm and had stopped stopping to snarl at each other.
By the fourth bookcase, they’d more-or-less figured out what they were doing and no longer had to stop to unscrew things that they’d screwed on upside down or back to front.
By the fifth bookcase, Lex’s fingers felt sore and almost raw. Her hands, still sticky with the lingonberry jam she’d taken for blood, were shaking. The calls were closer now, as was the strange, illusory scent of spiced meatballs that had lured Rousseau to her death.
“We won’t make it,” she said to Scar. “We don’t have enough.”
The hunters were too close. Lex could hear their voices clearly now, calling to one another. They’d picked up the trail. Scar could hear them, too, and he abandoned the sixth bookcase, still in its box, and started dragging the ladder they’d made—five bookcases, crudely lashed together end to end with a climbing rope—towards the wall.
Watching him struggle to lift the awkward thing, Lex had time to wonder how they could possibly climb it, and just what they thought they were doing. Even if it held together, there was no way it would hold their weight. Scar was taller and much more solidly built than Lex, and Lex didn’t know whether she would have trusted a collection of bookshelves tied together with rope to hold her alone.
Then the hunters broke into the warehouse, their shrieks echoing in that vast space, and Lex was on her feet and hauling the bookcase towards the wall before she realized she’d moved. There was no time for doubt. There was no room for hesitation. There was only the climb.
They scrambled up. Up. The makeshift ladder shifted and creaked alarmingly, leaning to the side. Lex’s footing was precarious and the corners of the shelves themselves bumped jarringly into her ribs, her knees, her elbows. Looking down was not to be thought of. If the hunters reached them before they made it to the top, the creatures would only have to knock their crude ladder over. Somehow, Lex doubted they would. They’d want their prey alive and struggling.
Up. Up. Lex, both lighter than Scar and buoyed by years of experience as a climber, made it first. She reached up, up, straining to catch the lip of the hole blasted into the wall. Her fingers scrabbled helplessly at the rough cinderblock of the wall, inches below the ledge.
Then Scar was there, his wide, clawed hands gripping her easily around the waist and hoisting her roughly up. Lex’s chest felt too tight to draw breath. Her stomach knotted. She let out a pained, terrified squeak and clawed at the ledge—yes—found purchase. Hauled herself up and over, ignoring the sudden flare of pain as the the lip of the ledge caught her in the ribs and belly. There was plenty of room; though Lex had thought of the hole as a window, a tunnel stretched before her, curving upwards at a slope gentle enough to walk, bored through the ice and lit by something Lex couldn’t see.
Behind her, the alien’s fingertips caught at the ledge and faltered. Lex heard the creak of the bookcase-ladder and the earsplitting howl of one of those slithery black things beneath. The hunters had caught up.
“No!”
Lex turned with an effort, scrambling onto her knees and then falling flat again, reaching for Scar over the abyss. Below, the warehouse floor was a boiling black mass of alien flesh as the serpent-things converged on the ladder. They surged over the fallen shopping cart and tore it to pieces for the sheer joy of it, sending the rattly wheel spinning off into the darkness. Lex’s hand caught at Scar’s alien wrist and Lex had time to think that there was no way no way absolutely no WAY she could pull him up and over—
But her tug, or maybe the stability of her grip, was enough to help him catch a proper hold. The alien dragged himself up and over the edge, as graceless as any ordinary human. Lex backed up, maintaining her grip on his wrist and hauling at him until they were both inside the chilly tunnel.
A resounding crash and a wild, desolate shrieking rose from the warehouse below.
“It fell,” Lex wheezed.
Scar replied with a quick series of clicks that sounded just as breathless. He rose to his feet, regaining some of that predatory grace, and pulled Lex up after him, startling a gasp from her.
“We need to work on your manners,” Lex panted. Rude, yes—but Lex found she didn’t mind. He’d saved her, after all…and she supposed she’d saved him, too. She found she didn’t mind the way the alien’s clawed hand lingered on hers.
Now to get the fuck out of here.
They fled along the tunnel, leaving the serpents behind.