The fire was a living, greedy thing. It ate the precious, scavenged wood with a crackling, indifferent hunger, throwing long, leaping shadows against the canvas of the tent that danced like mad things. Solomon Tozer watched those shadows, but he did not see them.

It played on a loop behind his eyelids, a ghastly peepshow he couldn’t close: Henry Collins, good old, simple Henry, his feet stumbling on the shale. The air, suddenly thick and wrong, humming with a frequency that made the fillings in Tozer’s teeth ache. Then the shape, the thing—not bear, not man, not spirit, but a nightmare given form—erupting from the mist. It moved with a speed that was an insult to physics, to God, to sense.

But it was the sound he kept hearing. Not the roar, which was terrible enough, a shriek that tore the world in two. No, it was the other sound. The wet, sucking, rending noise that had followed. A sound that didn’t just suggest violence, but something far more profound. Something… evacuating.

It was the sound, Solomon Tozer was certain, of a soul being pulled out. Ripped from its mortal housing like a mollusc from its shell, and devoured. He had seen men die from shot and shell, from bayonet and disease. Death was a fact of life, a brutal, simple end. This… this was different. This was an erasure.

A bottle of something sharp and unrefined was pressed into his numb hand. He took it without looking, his fingers closing around the cool glass, a stark contrast to the sick heat of his own skin. He drank deep, the liquor burning a path down his throat, a clean, familiar pain that did nothing to scour the unclean one from his memory.

He was in Hickey’s camp now. The mutineers’ camp. The survivors’ camp, as the caulker’s mate had put it with that sly, knowing smile of his. The tents were a ragged circle, a fragile pocket of defiance carved out of the immense, crushing indifference of the Arctic. Here, the rules were different. The chain of command was a broken link, tossed aside. Captain Crozier’s voice, once the iron law of their world, was a distant echo here, drowned out by the wind and the new, seductive whisper of self-preservation.

Tozer’s gaze drifted from the fire, scanning the faces illuminated by its hellish glow. Des Voeux, nervous but resolute. Magnus Manson, a mountain of simple loyalty. And at the centre of it all, Cornelius Hickey. Small, sharp, and vibrating with a terrifying certainty. Hickey, who had looked into the maw of that monster and seen not an end, but an opportunity. He spoke of the creature not with the terror that still chilled Tozer’s marrow, but with a calculating, almost proprietary air. A problem to be solved. A god to be bargained with, or killed.

Sergeant Solomon Tozer of the Royal Marines was a man built on orders. On clear lines of authority. On knowing who to salute and who to shoot. That world had fissured under the pressure of the ice, and tonight, watching Henry Collins cease to exist in that unspeakable way, it had shattered completely.

What was left was this: the raw, animal need to not be next. To not have that silence, that absence that had been Henry, be his own fate. The King’s law was a world away. God’s law seemed to have no jurisdiction here, not where a thing like the Tuunbaq could violate a man’s very essence without consequence.

Hickey’s way was a foul thing. It stank of treachery and selfishness. But it was also a path. A direction. And in this featureless, white hell where every compass was dead, any path was better than standing still, waiting for the mist to gather and the air to hum.

Tozer took another long pull from the bottle, the alcohol fuelling a slow, smouldering anger. Anger at the Admiralty that sent them here. At the officers who had led them to die. At the beast that haunted them. At the sheer, stupid fragility of a man’s soul.

He looked at Hickey again, and the little man met his eye, giving him a slow, deliberate nod. It wasn’t a salute between ranks. It was a recognition.

Solomon Tozer, the Sergeant, was gone.

Only the man, Solomon, remained.