Dr. Yuki Tanaka has spent twenty-three years drilling ice cores in some of the most remote places on Earth. She knows what ice sounds like, feels like, resists like. She knows the difference between young ice and ancient ice, between a clean horizon and a contaminated one, between a normal anomaly and something that doesn't belong in any taxonomy she's ever seen.
At 40 metres depth in the Siberian permafrost, her drill encounters something that stops.
Not a mechanical stop - a patient stop. The core sample they recover contains a structure: not organic, not mineral, not anything in any classification system. It has internal geometry that repeats without pattern, organization without a unit cell, complexity at every scale of resolution. It's three-tenths of a degree warmer than the ice that has enclosed it for sixty thousand years.
Yuki is the first to examine it. By the next morning, she is dreaming in geometries that don't exist in any mathematics she knows.
*Permafrost* is supernatural horror about what's buried and what's waking. It follows the five-member research team at Yuli-3 station across eleven days of scientific investigation and gradual deterioration, as the thing they've pulled from the ice turns out to have been waiting for exactly this moment.
