Vein of Darkness

7501 words

Maren’s breath caught in her throat as she leaned over the ice core, the drill bit whining to a stop just inches from the black vein. The lab’s fluorescent hum flickered above, casting jagged shadows on the steel table where the sample lay, a cylinder of ancient frost pocked with that dark thread running through it like a scar. Her gloved fingers hovered, trembling not from the cold—though the room sat at a bone-numbing minus ten—but from the way the vein seemed to twitch under her gaze. A pulse, faint as a whisper, but there. She swore it was there. “You’re gonna bore a hole straight through to hell if you keep staring like that,” Old Fenn’s voice rasped from the doorway. He stood with his arms crossed, his weathered parka hanging loose over shoulders hunched from decades of hauling gear across ice. His eyes, sharp under the brim of his cap, fixed on her with a weight she couldn’t ignore. The smell of old tobacco clung to him, cutting through the sterile bite of the lab’s air. “Didn’t hear you come in,” Maren muttered, not looking up. Her voice scraped against the quiet. She adjusted the magnifying lens clamped to the table, the glass fogging briefly from her breath. “It moved again. I’m not imagining it.” Fenn grunted, stepping...