Aurora’s Verdict

CHAPTER ONE: THE DELETION

December 24, 9:47 PM | The Gherkin, London

The forty-first floor of the Gherkin was a cathedral of silence. Outside, London glittered like a spilled jewel box, festive and oblivious. Inside Stella Shen’s corner office, the only light came from her computer screen, casting a cold, clinical glow on the lacquered mahogany.

Her finger hovered over the trackpad.

On the screen: a final confirmation dialog box.

[Permanently delete ‘Wei v. Wei Family Trust’ case files?]

[All associated documents, correspondence, and financial records will be irrecoverable.]

Below the stark white text, two options glowed: [Cancel] and [Confirm].

Stella’s breath fogged a faint circle on the darkened window beside her. She watched the condensation form and vanish, form and vanish. A pointless, rhythmic testament to the fact that she was still alive, still breathing, while so much else was already dead.

Three years. It had taken three years to muster the particular cowardice required for this moment.

Her phone vibrated on the desk. Not a work phone—that corporate lifeline had been ceremoniously surrendered two hours earlier, along with her keycard and the last pretense of her identity as a rising star at Cromwell & Vale. This was her personal phone. The caller ID displayed a single word: Mother.

Stella let it ring. On the third vibration, she picked up.

“Stella.” Her mother’s voice was cello-rich, measured, and utterly calm. It was the voice that had guided her through childhood piano recitals, university applications, and the first time she’d had to fire an incompetent paralegal. It was not a voice that tolerated unanswered calls.

“Mother.”

“I have just received a registered parcel from Reykjavík. It contains a key.” A pause, perfectly timed. “It is for a safety deposit box held in your name at Landsbankinn. It was arranged by your father three years ago, with instructions to be delivered to you upon a… triggering event.”

Stella’s eyes remained fixed on the deletion dialog box. Triggering event. Her father, the Cambridge don who spoke in sagas and geological epochs, would have chosen that phrase deliberately. He was a man who believed in narrative structure, even in death.

“What’s the triggering event?” Stella asked, her own voice flat, a professional mimicry of her mother’s composure.

“Your professional derailment, I assume.” Another pause. This one felt different. Softer, almost. “John Cromwell called me an hour ago. He said you were ‘extraordinarily brave.’ He also said the firm would provide a generous severance and an impeccable reference. Which tells me you didn’t just get made redundant, Stella. You did something.”

Stella closed her eyes. John Cromwell’s face, ruddy with Christmas port and paternal disappointment, swam behind her lids. “It’s not the lost case, Stella. It’s the arrogance. We could have settled Wei quietly. You insisted on a public, scorched-earth victory. The client is family, for God’s sake. Now the mother is destitute, the papers are calling it ‘ruthless efficiency,’ and the firm’s reputation for… discretion… is ash.”

She hadn’t defended herself. What was there to say? That she’d discovered the truth halfway through the trial? That the father of her client—her opponent—had secretly paid Cromwell & Vale a bonus, a bounty, to ensure his son lost catastrophically? That she’d taken the money, won the case, and then used the stained bonus to buy the earliest possible ticket to Reykjavík three years ago, only to arrive four hours after her father’s heart had stopped beating in a sterile hospital room?

She’d bought the ticket. She’d just been too much of a coward to board the flight.

“Stella?” Her mother’s voice pulled her back. “The key. What do you want me to do with it?”

Triggering event.

Her gaze drifted to the single physical photograph on her desk, framed in silver. Her father, grinning wildly on a black sand beach, wind whipping his grey hair. He looked more alive there, in that frozen moment in Iceland, than he ever had in the hushed libraries of Cambridge. She’d found the photo tucked in his old copy of the Poetic Edda after the funeral. On the back, in his meticulous script:

“For Stella—When you discover who took this photograph, you will finally understand why I had to leave.”

She had never discovered who took it.

“I’ll come get the key,” Stella said.

“And then?”

“And then I’ll go to Iceland.”

A long, silent exhale traveled through the line from London to… wherever her mother was. Her Kensington apartment? Backstage at the Barbican?

“Your father always said the wind there sounded like a cello,” her mother said finally, the words uncharacteristically wistful. “A low, mournful note the earth holds against the sky. Listen for it.”

The line went dead.

Stella placed the phone gently on the desk. She looked at the photo of her father. She looked at the deletion dialog box.

Her father had left her a key to a secret.

Her mother had just been informed of her professional suicide.

Her career was a smoldering crater.

And the man whose life she’d helped dismantle in court three years ago—Hunter Wei—was out there somewhere, probably hating her with a purity she had earned.

It felt, suddenly, like the most logical thing in the world.

She moved the cursor.

She clicked [Confirm].

The screen flickered. A progress bar zipped from left to right. In less than a second, three years of meticulous work, of buried guilt, of a victory that tasted like ashes—vanished into the digital void.

A strange lightness filled her chest. Not relief. Not freedom. The lightness of a plane just before it stalls, the moment weightlessness becomes a prelude to the fall.

She stood, walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, and pressed her forehead against the cold glass. Forty-one floors below, the Thames was a slick black ribbon. She imagined jumping. Not to die, but to see how long the fall would take. To calculate the velocity, the impact force. Her mind, the relentless machine she’d cultivated, still worked.

A new email notification chimed softly.

It was from her mother. No subject. One attachment.

Stella opened it. It was a scan. A single, aged page of vellum, covered in her father’s tight, scholarly handwriting. The ink was brown, like dried blood. The heading read: Auroras and Sagas: Seeking the Entrance to the Ninth World – Fragment #7.

Beneath the Norse runes and geological sketches, a paragraph was circled faintly in pencil:

“The inheritance we spend our lives fearing is seldom the one that awaits us. The true bequest is not what is left in a will, but what is left unresolved. The unanswered question. The un-kept promise. The path not taken that still, somehow, leads directly to your door. To find the Ninth World, one must first get utterly lost in this one.”

At the very bottom of the page, in a fresher, darker ink, as if added much later, were five words:

“The photograph was his salvation.”

A cold sharper than the window glass shot through her.

His. Not mine. His.

The photographer was a man.

Her phone vibrated again. A text, from an unknown number with an Icelandic country code (+354).

[Unknown]: Flight SU247. Heathrow Terminal 5, 06:15. Seat 4A. Check your inbox for the e-ticket. Do not bring a return booking.

[Unknown]: And Stella? Pack for a storm.

She stared at the message. Then, slowly, she walked back to her desk, opened the bottom drawer, and pulled out her personal passport. Tucked inside the back cover, hidden behind the blank pages, was the unused boarding pass from three years ago. London to Reykjavík. December 28. The day after her father died.

She had kept it as a penance.

Now, she laid it flat on the desk beside her glowing screen. She took a silver pen from its holder—a gift from her father upon her graduation from law school, engraved with the Old Norse word for “truth-teller”—and drew a single, dark line through the date.

Then she booked a taxi for 4:00 AM.

As she shut down her computer for the last time, the screen went black, reflecting her own pale, sharp face back at her. For a fleeting second, superimposed over her reflection, she thought she saw the shimmering green curtain of an aurora.

It was just a trick of the light.

It was always just a trick of the light.

But as she rode the elevator down into the bowels of the silent building, the final, unbidden thought surfaced, clear and chilling:

What if the storm you’re packing for isn’t the one outside?