They worked the plan that only Zubair really understood.

The other three men did everything they were told to do without question. Plates were taken from the freezer room. Webbing was cut into straps. The secondary line coiled and staged.

Zubair laid it out like a drill: who carried, who set, who watched. Sera had come to know by now that words to Zubair were like money.

He never spent a penny more than he had to.

There were no speeches, no building moral. Just tasks for everyone to do.

It might have occurred to Sera more than a few times that a lot of these things were ’make busy’ tasks that she used to do with her parents... where you were always moving, always doing something...

But the reason why they needed to do it always seemed to fly over her head.

At the landing, Sera eased the door a hand’s width, enough to bleed the pressure without waking the hinge. The ice cold wind tried to needled their shins, seemingly more and more upset when no one reacted to it.

The glass chattered, and the rope hummed in the threshold like a quiet wire.

"Anchor two first," Zubair grunted, his eyes never leaving any potential threats in the horizon.

Elias braced the new plate against the frame, pencil tucked under his glove, fasteners lined in his palm in order of bite. Lachlan fed him hardware without looking, the rhythm already learned: washer, nut, wrench. Alexei put his shoulder to the slab and took the wind so Sera could keep her hands free for the seals and lines.

"Count me," Zubair said, his voice quickly snatched away from the wind.

"Two bolts live," Elias answered. "Three and four seat now." He tightened until the frame’s complaint dropped a pitch. He preferred frequency to words; this made more sense in his head than anything soft. Pencil out. A small 3 and 4 on the steel where his eye would go first next time.

Lachlan looked resignedly happy. "This is the worst spa day I’ve ever had." 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

"Less noise," Zubair snapped, but Sera could see the smile on his face that he was holding back.

"Yessir," replied Lachlan, giving him a salute that wouldn’t pass any sort of military precision.

Sera touched the seal where it had started to frost over again. The frost stopped creeping and lay down like it had changed its mind about being in the way. Elias pretended he hadn’t seen it.

"Next," Zubair called out.

They shifted. The light fixture ticked its chain. The rope throbbed once under a hard gust. Elias put a hand flat to the plate to feel the transfer of weight through metal into wall.

It was clean. There was no give.

He was about to call it when the frame under his palm vibrated with a different tone.

It wasn’t the vibration of the wind. Instead, it was a longer vibration, almost deeper somehow.

"Stop," he snapped, holding up his hand. Everyone else froze at his words, not daring to do anything more.

Elias set the wrench down, reached into his kit, and came up with the battered metal cup he kept for tests he didn’t want to explain to anyone.

He set it on the ice just inside the threshold. It rang once, then went quiet. The surface of the water inside was smooth. Then it wasn’t—tiny ripples started at one edge and crossed to the other.

He timed out loud because Zubair would need numbers, not impressions or gut feelings. "Nine seconds between. Then seven. Six."

They listened and felt it: a low push, a pause, another. Not the sharp bang of settling. A body moving under the sheet.

"Direction?" Zubair asked.

Elias watched the ripples arrive. "East to west." He didn’t like how sure he sounded.

The light fixture knocked its chain again, off rhythm with the water.

Sera stiffened in that tiny, contained way that wasn’t fear. Alexei’s hand came up to the small of her back and stopped there, not touching, just ready. Lachlan’s grin dropped; he shifted his weight so he could pull, not look at what everyone else was looking at.

The next pulse was stronger. The water climbed one side of the cup and fell, a flat slap.

The ice under the plate answered with a slow, bass hum Elias felt in his teeth. A fan of frost feathered outward on the pane from the bottom edge like breath from the other side.

"On me," Zubair said, his voice calm like he had everything under control. "We keep the door where I want it. We don’t let the line go tight."

They held their positions. Elias put his palm back to the steel plate. The long wave came and passed. Then another, closer. The cup trembled against the ice and walked a millimeter to the side.

"It’s getting bigger," Elias announced. He didn’t know why he said it. He didn’t know what number would be big enough to matter.

The next pass carried a sound with it, not through the air but through bone: a slow thud that was not a strike and not an echo. Displacement. A large volume pushing through a small gap. The glass ticked a high, ugly note and the light fixture went still as if the building had decided to listen too.

Sera’s creature was a felt thing, not a heard one. It rolled once in the room like distant thunder. While everything inside of her was shifting, getting ready for whatever was going to happen next, her face didn’t change.

"Pull-back drill," Zubair said. "Not running. Clean."

Elias collected the cup with a clumsy grab he hated himself for and shoved it into his kit.

Lachlan gathered slack with fast, small motions, not letting the rope sing. Alexei let the door travel a hair with the next gust and brought it back with the same pressure. Sera’s fingers left the seal and found the frame, exactly where Zubair would have told her if he’d had breath to spare.