“Sir, did you hear something?”

Thompsom didn’t falter. “Hear what? The wind?”

The snow pulled my boots in, slowly. My goggles had clouded, but I stared past the fogginess and into the gaping hole.

“I… don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe.”

Wind whipped through the valley, fluttering the thick fabric of our clean-up suits, designed to withstand temperatures even as skin-biting as these.

The ice had frozen over this unidentified object, a cocoon our team had been working to chip down. Now I stood near the entrance - or at least, what we thought was the entrance.

Something lower than the wind called from inside there. Not out to me, I didn’t think, but out to the world.

I pulled my boot out and stepped forward. It sank, slower this time. I took another one, and another.

The calling grew louder.

“Evans?” someone said somewhere behind me. Possibly Thompson. His voice distorted like words under water, and the features of his face blurred in my mind.

I stepped close enough to the doorway Sanchez and a few others had pried open with the crane. The gaping hole, jagged edges and all, was impossibly dark in this light. I had to get closer - I had to see more.

Whatever called me, it needed help.

Was it hurt?

Was it trapped?

In the corner of my eye, the metal walls, dark grey and rusted, began shifting.

For the first time since hearing the calling, I blinked.

All movement stopped.

“Evans!” shouted the people behind, voices blended together. “Evans, get back here! It’s not safe!”

I would not let them stop me.

My boot set down and connected with metal, and it released a strange whine, like I’d stepped on something living. The calling raised in volume, raised in intensity, like a thousand voices howling at once.

The walls moved again.

And they didn’t stop.

The hole moved downwards, towards each other, closing in.

The sunlight behind me dimmed.

The light inside glowed where it hadn’t closed before.

Somewhere within, the calling stopped, a choir cut short of their grand finale.

I turned, weighed down by my snow suit, and looked at the veins of where metal had melded together, not seamlessly.

I didn’t turn back to where the calling came from.