-40 DEGREES

CHAPTER 1

2 HOURS AGO

The freezing, winter wind tore through the weaving of Maya Lin's threadbare coat as she scrambled down the alleyway behind her apartment complex, her boots skidding on the slush. She wasn't running from a person yet, instead she was running from the plastic rectangle in her laptop bag.

Her fingers were numb, stiff claws of red as she fumbled for her phone. It slipped from her grip, clattering into a drift of dirty snow.

"No, no, no."

She dropped to her knees, ignoring the wet seep of ice water into her jeans. She clawed the device out, wiping the screen on her sleeve. She dialed Ben.

One ring. Two. Pick up, damn it.

"Maya?" Ben's voice was thick with sleep and irritation. "It's Christmas Eve. Go home."

"I have it," Maya choked out. She was hyperventilating, the adrenaline hitting her system like a shot of dirty amphetamines. "Ben, I swear to God, I have the smoking gun."

"You're maniac, Maya. Go to sleep."

"This is not a rumor, Ben! The source code. The Black Box." She looked over her shoulder . The alley was empty, just shadows stretching like oil slicks but it felt like somebody was watching her. "I found the backdoor in a gaming forum. He sent me a link, Ben. The whistleblower I told you about. He sent it. I have the drive."

A beat of silence followed, and then the shift came. Ben knew she wouldn't be making this up. The irritation vanished, replaced by the sharp edge of a newsman smelling blood, like sharks. "Where are you?"

"Three blocks away. Walking."

"Don't Walk. Run."

At 9:20 PM on Christmas Eve, the bullpen of the Ledger's newsroom was mostly empty, save for the lifers and the outcasts who had nowhere else to be. Maya speed-walked towards the glass fishbowl at the far end, clutching her bag to her chest. Her heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs.

"Look at that." a voice drawled from the cubicle wall. "The gnat is working late."

Maya didn't stop, but her jaw clenched. Senior Political correspondent. He had a pulitzer on his shelf, something he never failed to remind everybody while justifying his bullying.

"Chasing another conspiracy theory, Lin?" Miller leaned back, spinning a pen. "I heard the lizard people are freezing the Great Lakes this year."

"f**k off!" Maya thought to herself, keeping her eyes forward and ignoring him even though the sting had landed. It always did. She thought of her father's voice on her last birthday. "When are you going to get a real job, Maya? Your brother just made Chief Resident." She thought about the eviction notice magnet-clipped to her fridge and her maxed-out credit cards, thanks to her s**t ex-boyfriend who had stolen her identity and decimated her credit score before vanishing.

She was the failure. The black sheep. The Gnat.

Not tonight, she thought, her grip tightening on the strap of her bag. Tonight, she was going to save the world.

Ben Cohen, the only person who believed in her, looked like he hadn't slept since the Reagan administration when she walked in. He was standing by the window, staring out at the snow-blind city with an unlit cigarette in his hand.

"Lock the door," he said.

Maya did. Then without a word, she slammed her laptop on his desk, bypassed the login, and opened the file named PROJECT_ICEAGE_TEST_04.mp4.

Ben sat down and watched.

On the screen, grainy footage showed a glass observation chamber. Inside a naked man was banging on the walls, screaming but the audio was cut. A digital thermometer in the corner of the feed was plummeting.

70 degrees Fahrenheit.

20 degreees...

-40...

-100...

It happened in seconds. The man stopped screaming. He slumped against the glass, frost blooming rapidly across his open eyes, turning them white. His skin cracked like porcelain.

"Jesus Christ..." He swallowed the bile worming up his throat, his face slack already. The blood had drained out of him, leaving him gray. He reached out and slowly closed the laptop lid.

"There are fifty other tests in there. What I showed you was the most benign."

"If this is real," Ben whispered with a trembling voice. "Cassian Grant is worse than I thought."

"I'm uploading it," Maya said, opening the laptop. "I'm sending it to the server. Right now."

"No!" Ben's hand shot out, grabbing her wrist. His grip was painful. "Are you insane? You can't upload this here. You can't upload this anywhere."

"Why? The public needs to-"

"Grant owns the ISP. Maya! He owns the cloud infrastructure and the routing nodes." Ben released her, standing up to pace the small room. "His algorithm is hunting for the file hash. As soon as those packets hit the open web, the system flags it, deletes it, and pings your location within three meters. You'll be dead before the progress bar hits ten percent.

Maya slumped back, the adrenaline crashing into nausea. "So what do we do? I have the drive."

"We need the Clean Room in Seattle," Ben's mind was moving at ten thousand thoughters per second. "Total hardline broadcast. Analog override. You have the hardware encryption key and the data. You need to be in that room, offline, to merge them and push the signal."

"Seattle?" Maya laughed a brittle, hysterical laugh. "Ben, I have twelve dollars in my checking account. And even if I didn't, the airports are-"

"Grounded." Ben finished. "'Unprecedented turbulence over the Rockies.' That's the official line. It's bullshit. All because NASA said something about the Carrington 2.0 Event possibly happening tonight."

He typed furiously on his keyboard. "The roads are iced over. The passes are closed. There's only one way through the mountains."

The printer whirred and Ben snatched a sheet of paper and shoved it to her.

"The Northern Star Express," he said. "Departs Union Station at 11:30. I got you a sleeper. First class."

Maya looked at the ticket. The price made her stomach churn. It cost more than her rent. "Ben, I can't pay you back for this."

"You pay me back by staying alive," Ben said, grabbing his coat. "I'll take the morning train. We meet in Seattle. DO NOT TRUST ANYONE, Maya. And do not open that bag."