The Code in the Snow

Jules hunched in the cramped storeroom, its ceiling so low that Linhart’s thick parka brushed the insulation foam overhead. The table between them was cluttered with artifacts: frostbitten colored pencils, glass plates scrawled with notations, the pile of battered, coded journals. The print in the snow outside still haunted her peripheral vision each time she closed her eyes—a phantom tread pressing at her sanity.

Linhart’s gloved hand steadying the lamp, her brow cut deep with worry, watched as Jules leafed through the topmost notebook again. There, among the pages of night-blackened equations, she found what she’d missed before: a cipher key, disguised as a weather log. It seemed innocuous—rows and columns, temperature measurements, wind speeds in three-hour intervals. But Jules recognized the subtle pattern, the improbable repetition of numbers, the mirrored digits at dawn and dusk, as if the weather itself were repeating a secret word.

Jules looked up. “Did you see these columns? It’s not just weather patterns. Look—the minuses line up with the letters from the margins. It might be a transposition cipher, or maybe… something more.”

Linhart squinted. “You think it’s a code within a code?”

Jules nodded, heart pounding fast. “Help me. If I’m right, it’s like those old one-time pads—each line uses the weather data as the key. Here, look.”

For the next hour, the two women whispered and scribbled. Their working rhythm—Jules’s fingers tapping across her own rough notebook, Linhart’s muttered calculations—became frantic and intimate as the puzzle started to yield. With each cracked row, a word appeared: PHASE CYCLE, LOCAL OSCILLATION, EXPERIMENT INITIATED, SUBJECT STATUS—none of it the language of a standard observatory. Their breath froze before it could reach the walls; the room itself, wretched and windowless, felt host to a dozen ghosts.

The next page, more difficult, forced them to cross-reference margins, skipping words as if avoiding tripwires. Linhart’s voice trembled: “This isn’t weather data. These are medical stats—pulse, temp, cortisol. Look, someone here was monitoring people.”

“Experiment initiated at 2200 hours,” Jules read aloud. “Subject: S. Ruvalcaba. Exposure, two-hour window. Catalyst administered.”

Jules’s hands shook. “There are dose logs. Chemical abbreviations. None standard.”

They made the cipher leap for another tense thirty minutes, working backwards, pausing only to listen for footsteps in the corridor above. Between two pages, Jules found a folded, yellowed photograph—five people standing on the surface tents, smiling stiffly, aurora borealis rippling behind them.

She blinked at the face second from the left; the jaw was familiar, slightly crooked, the heavy browbone oddly reminiscent. Her pulse skipped. She slid the photo cautiously toward Linhart.

“Look at this one,” Jules whispered, pointing. “Does he remind you of anyone?”

Linhart adjusted her glasses, frowning. “That’s impossible. He’s—he’s… That’s Gregor. Or his double.”

Jules’s certainty was ice-cold. The short, blocky man in the parka, chin lifted, jaw set with the same grim resolve. But the photo was dated: August, 1987.

Linhart stared until her lips pressed white. “Has to be a relative.”

Jules’s fists closed on the paper. “Or Gregor’s kept secrets deeper than any of us imagined.”

A low, ominous hum vibrated through the floor as the generator cycled. For a moment, the lights flickered. Jules tucked the photograph away in her sleeve and returned to the journal.

The next code she cracked was short, almost like a confession under duress. “Subject resistance increasing. Exposure effects unpredictable… Advised to terminate protocol Delta. Awaiting authorization. No response. Fearful… sabotage…"

She swallowed, exchanging glances with Linhart. “They knew someone was working against them. Maybe from the company. Maybe one of their own.”

“Or, more likely,” Linhart said, her voice rough, “something went wrong, and whoever survived scoured the records.”

The final page, messily decoded, simply read: “Ice holds everything. No exit. We are ghosts on the glacier.”

---

It was after midnight when Jules finally staggered to her bunk, migraine pulsing behind her eyes. The station was silent, save for the occasional spasm of the heating pipes. There was comfort only in the two thick walls between her and the snow outside.

Sleep was not kind. She dreamed of faceless men drilling holes in living ice, of black shapes shifting under a field of auroras, of her own breath fogging onto a one-way glass, observing what could never be unseen.

She woke to someone shaking her shoulder, breath fast and shallow; for a heartbeat, she thought it was Linhart, but it was Luca. “Jules. The lab. Something happened.”

Jules was up instantly. Together they hurried down the corridor, the air metallic and sharp. The door to the lab was ajar, its lock twisted, gouges fresh in the paint. Inside, sample vials lay shattered—chemical trace residue chalking the tiles. Data sheets ripped down the center. A single line was scrawled on the cabinet in thick, trembling black:

NOT YOUR SECRET

Jules’s legs nearly buckled. Luca stood by the ruined bench, dumbstruck. She felt her heart rattle. Whoever had done this knew she’d been digging—but worse, they’d wanted her terrified.

Luca touched her arm. “Who would—Why?”

Jules shook her head, but already, a sinking certainty squirmed in her chest. Whoever had left the print by the observatory—whoever might be related to that man in the photo—had moved from silent sabotage to open threats.

Linhart arrived, pupils huge with dread. “We’re out of time. Someone here is willing to do anything to make this vanish.”

---

That morning, Gregor prowled the halls, jaw bouncing as if grinding bone. Jules watched him from the galley, the photograph burning in her inner pocket. Now every word, every sideways look among the crew, felt thickened with menace. Had Gregor seen her in the snow? Or was it someone else—someone wearing a ghost’s face in the endless Arctic dark?

Aurora Station had always been shadowed, but now, with the coded truths beginning to unravel and the threat made real, the ice around them seemed thinner than ever, ready to crack. Jules stared at her cup, unable to lift it, lost in the way secrets echoed across time—cold, devouring, always unfinished.