The Ice Cellar

The coach stopped hard enough to throw people into the seats ahead of them. Metal scraped somewhere under the floor. Outside, the blue sky over our team-building retreat turned red. People screamed. I held on to the armrest and stared through the window. I had seen that sky before. The cold came next. A holographic screen flickered to life in the center of the aisle. [Welcome, players. You have been selected for the Arctic Survival Game.] A woman shrieked, "Is this a prank, Derrick? It's not funny!" [This is not a prank. To prove our sincerity, a small welcome gift.] A digital shower of gold coins filled the screen. Every phone on the bus chimed at once. The game had opened a ten-million-dollar prize pool, and the money could be claimed immediately. Screaming gave way to frantic tapping as everyone checked their accounts. "Oh my God, it's real! I got two hundred thousand dollars!" "This is insane! What do we have to do?" The system answered in a flat, genderless voice. [Survive for seven days. The last team standing shares one hundred million dollars. Your first task: choose a safe house. You have five minutes.] A list of five shelters appeared. Four were awful: a flimsy tent, a half-buried shipping container, a cave marked structurally unstable, and an abandoned ranger station with no doors. The fifth option could keep all of us alive. *5. The Summit Villa: A fully automated luxury home with geothermal heating, a three-month food supply, and reinforced walls.* Shoulders dropped all over the bus. We had fifty people. The villa looked big enough. One more line appeared. [Note: The Summit Villa has a maximum capacity of 49 people.] Fifty people and forty-nine places. Everyone looked from me to Derrick. He was the CEO. I was his COO and his fiancée. Derrick was watching Lia. The new intern had folded herself into the corner of her seat and was shaking hard enough for the whole bus to see. "I can't do this." Lia pressed a hand to her chest and looked straight at Derrick. "I have a congenital heart condition. The cold could kill me." Derrick was out of his seat at once. He walked down the aisle, took off his thousand-dollar jacket, and wrapped it around Lia's shoulders. "You're okay. We'll protect you." He stood and addressed the bus. "Lia is the most vulnerable person here. We protect the weakest member first. That's what a team does." Only then did he turn to me. "Yara, you're the strongest one here. You know what has to happen. Give Lia your place." He had made it an order and given me an audience. A colleague chimed in, "He's right, Yara. You're tough. You can handle one of the other shelters for a bit." I had believed them last time. I took the ranger station and waited for a rescue that never came. While Lia played the villa's piano, I froze alone beside a doorway that could not close. Lia peeked over Derrick's jacket. The tears stayed on her cheeks, but the corner of her mouth moved. I smiled back. "You're right, Derrick. For the good of the team." The bus exhaled as one. Derrick nodded, satisfied, and turned back to Lia. I faced the main screen. My name, Yara, moved away from the Summit Villa. A few people smiled as I scrolled past the tent, the container, and the cave. At the bottom sat an unlisted option available only through top-tier executive admin rights. *0. Abandoned Underground Ice Cellar: Sub-zero temperature, no supplies, structurally sound.* A few people gasped. "She's just being dramatic to get Derrick's attention." I let them talk. With their attention on the main screen, I opened the company's core servers from my COO terminal. *Encrypted data transfer started.* *Target: All files related to Project Nightingale.* *Recipient: Secured offshore server.* Project Nightingale was Derrick's private slush fund. For months, he had used company money to buy Lia a penthouse, a sports car, and the life I thought we were building together. The progress bar reached 100% just as the system spoke. [Time is up. All choices are locked. Good luck, players.] White light swallowed the floor. Derrick still wore the solemn expression he saved for press conferences.