The audio was thirty minutes of silence, punctuated only by the sound of rhythmic tapping—Morse code. It translated to a single sentence repeated over and over: The ice is thinner from the bottom.

Found on a corrupted server in a decommissioned research station under the Arctic ice, the file remained locked for years. The string "SD2N5" was a hardware ID for a long-discontinued quantum processor, and the suffix "Upd81320" suggested an update pushed on a date when the station had supposedly been offline for months.

The text document, titled simply "Lullaby," contained a list of names. Every person on that list was currently alive, scattered across the globe, and had no connection to the research station. But at the very end of the list was a name that made the lead investigator’s blood run cold: his own, followed by his exact GPS coordinates at that very moment.