A child’s drawing. Crayon on paper. A stick-figure house, a sun with a smile, and in the corner, a lopsided snowman with twig arms and big, hopeful eyes.
Leo ripped the data drive out and ran back to the Arctic Hare . He didn’t look back. As he blasted into the dark, the asteroid behind him was just a rock again—bare, gray, and silent. No snow. No shadow.
As the percentage climbed, the snow outside the station’s cracked windows began to fall harder . The wind howled—a sound that shouldn’t exist in a vacuum.
“Thank you.”
The Polaris Station was a mess. Wires hung like icicles from the ceiling. Every surface was frosted white. In the main computer core, a single screen glowed with a blinking prompt:
The scratching turned into knocking. Hard, rhythmic knocking on the hull of the Polaris Station . Leo realized: The download isn’t just data. It’s waking something up.
Outside their station, there was snow. And moving through the snow was a shadow. Tall. Thin. Antlers like a frozen tree.
The snow was thick, white, and silent, drifting past the cockpit window like a million tiny feathers. The Arctic Hare was supposed to be in the clear void between Mars and Jupiter, but instead, it felt like he’d flown into a snow globe.
The creature opened its mouth. No sound came out, but Leo felt the thought in his skull: “Don’t leave me cold.”
The knocking stopped. The snow outside the window coalesced. Two eyes, glowing a soft, mournful blue, opened in the blizzard. The shadow with antlers pressed its face against the glass. Its breath fogged the window from the outside .
Leo’s download hit .
The file name was:
Leo plugged his data spike into the port. “Download,” he whispered. “Begin.”