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Brooklyn Sloane

June 2025

Thursday — 12:28 am

A fter eight hours of trudging through the ice cave, following hours of hiking up a mountain, Brook’s muscles felt as heavy as lead. Deep exhaustion weighed her down, threatening to blur her thoughts. Yet, intermittently, an infuriating whistle echoed against the icy walls. That sound scraped at her nerves, reminiscent of fingernails on a chalkboard. Though she couldn't identify the tune, the hollow notes reverberating through the ice made her skin crawl.

It was Victor who broke first.

“I swear to God, if you don’t stop?—”

“Just passing the time,” Jacob responded almost gleefully before coming to a stop. He had been whistling the same tuneless melody at irregular intervals throughout their excursion. She certainly didn’t view their journey as an exploration. After all, she had been right about her brother’s knowledge of the tunnels. “What do you think, Agent Brall. Left or right?”

The cave’s passageways curved and branched like the interior of some massive, crystalline organism. The temperature had dropped precipitously the deeper they had ventured into the mountain. While their breath still hung in clouds before their faces, it wasn’t as cold as it had been a few hours ago. That had to be a sign that they were nearing the other side of the mountain.

Still, Brook had lost sensation in her toes hours ago. Her thick hiking boots had proved somewhat inadequate against the relentless cold. She flexed the soles of her feet, willing the circulation back while coming to a stop behind Victor.

“Walk,” Victor directed Jacob, his patience at the snapping point.

“Stress is a silent killer, Agent Brall. Isn’t that right, dear sister?”

Victor once again instructed Jacob to keep walking, practically forcing him to select one of the two passageways. Brook had tried multiple times to figure out their route, but the cave’s complex network of tunnels had made it challenging. Despite her brother’s remarkable intelligence, memorizing all the passageways during his stay in Alaska would have been nearly impossible.

While Victor and Jacob entered the tunnel on the right, Brook intentionally hung back. Something about Jacob's whistling had been nagging at her for hours. She had gotten rather adept at learning to recognize behavioral patterns. There were tiny threads of consistency that even the most chaotic personalities couldn't help but weave into their actions.

She mentally retraced their journey, replaying each instance of Jacob's whistling. The first time had been right before they had encountered a fork in the cave system. The second had occurred about thirty seconds before another junction. The third...

The whistling hadn’t been random.

Jacob had deliberately been distracting them this entire time.

Brook’s gaze fixed on her brother's back. He hadn’t memorized the route from exploring the cave.He had marked them. As if sensing a shift in the air, Jacob glanced back at her, his eyes reflecting the light of her headlamp with an almost animal luminescence.

Brook forced herself to move forward, with Russell trailing behind, carrying one of the bags. She held the other, leaving Victor to focus solely on Jacob.

They continued in silence for another twenty minutes. The only sounds were their labored breathing and the crunch of their boots on the icy floor. Brook kept careful count of their turns—left, right, right, left—trying to build a mental map of their progress.

She felt fairly confident that Jacob was steering them clear of the mountain's deepest center. This path was safe for them, considering the risks posed by the frigid temperatures.

Then, like clockwork, Jacob began to whistle again.

Victor's patience snapped.

“Jesus Christ,” Victor muttered in irritation. “Not another sound.”

Jacob obliged, falling silent with that same enigmatic smile. Sure enough, within a minute, they approached another junction—this time a choice between two identical-looking tunnels.

“You really should take up meditation, Agent Brall. I’ve recently applied the practice of mindfulness in my daily routine. Given my current living conditions, you can imagine how useful the technique is for my mental health.” Jacob came to a complete stop, tilting his head to the right as he appeared to consider both passages. “The tunnel on the left, or the tunnel on the right?”

Jacob made a soft tsking sound with his tongue.

“Let’s try the right passageway, shall we?”

Jacob began advancing in the direction he had chosen, with Victor remaining close to his side. Russell, who had been bringing up the rear of their small party, moved to follow. When she stayed still, he frowned at her until she held up a finger to her lips. He hesitated briefly before nodding almost imperceptibly.

“Go ahead,” Brook mouthed, gesturing for him to follow Victor and Jacob so they didn’t question why there weren’t footsteps following in their wake.

As Russell reluctantly moved forward, Brook remained rooted in place, her headlamp trained in the area where Jacob had made his decision. Something wasn't right, and she needed just a moment to figure out what her brother had been doing for the past nine hours without their knowledge.

The beam of her light played across the ice, revealing nothing but smooth, glassy surfaces and the occasional crystalline outcropping. Jacob had been so certain in some cases—first wrong, then right—as if reading from a script only he could see.

Brook examined the walls a little more carefully.

What was he observing that they weren’t?

She finally had to relent this time around when she noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Propelling herself forward, she hurried to catch up before the distance between them grew too great. The sound of her brother's voice echoed back to her through the tunnel, casual and conversational, as if they were taking a stroll through a park rather than navigating an ice cave in an Alaskan mountain.

“Did you know," Jacob was saying to Victor by the time she was able to close the distance, "that ice has memory? Scientists say that if you heat it up and then refreeze it, it remembers its previous crystalline structure.”

“Fascinating,” Victor murmured dryly.

Jacob began to whistle, and soon, they were once again given a choice of two passageways. The ritual wasn’t in her imagination. She motioned for Russell to proceed her a second time, waiting for Jacob and Victor to enter one of the passageways.

Brook quickly began to study the open chamber. Fortunately, this one was smaller than the previous one. Her headlamp sliced through the darkness as she examined every inch of the junction where Jacob had made his decision.She even ran her gloved fingers along the crystalline walls where the passages diverged, looking for any disturbance in the ice.

Nothing.

The surface was smooth. Unblemished save for the natural formations that had developed over centuries of freezing and thawing.

As intelligent as Jacob was, there were too many twists, turns, and identical-looking passages for anyone to memorize a single route. The task would be nearly impossible.

“So, how are you doing it?” Brook whispered aloud, her breath clouding before her face.

She crouched down, examining the ice floor.

Brook had learned long ago that crime scenes often held their secrets in plain sight. People tended to look straight ahead or down, but rarely up. She tilted her head back to inspect the ceiling of the junction. At first, she thought there was nothing to find.

It wasn’t until she straightened and went to take a step forward that the white beam caught a slight irregularity in the smooth ice overhead near a stalactite.

She narrowed her eyes, focusing on the spot.

The mark was barely visible unless one was specifically looking for it. It was a small notch in the ceiling. A deliberate groove gouged into the ice, pointing toward the right passage.

Directing her light more carefully, she examined the ceiling at the entrance to the left tunnel.No mark.

“Son of a bitch,” Brook breathed out as realization clicked into place.

Jacob had marked the route through the ice caves by creating small, easily overlooked grooves in the ceiling at each junction. The whistling was Jacob's way of distracting them so that they wouldn’t notice the marks.

It was ingenious in its simplicity.

No one looked up in a cave like this one. They were all too busy watching where they stepped.

Jacob’s patience in identifying an escape route didn’t surprise her in the least. The profile that she had spent years drafting on her brother had highlighted such resilience.

“Brook!” Russell called out, letting her know that Jacob had noticed her absence.

She hurried down the right passage after intentionally pulling the fabric of one leg up over her boot. The tunnel narrowed briefly before opening into another chamber where Russell, Victor, and Jacob waited for her. Jacob’s gaze fixed on her immediately, studying her with that penetrating stare that had always made her feel like a specimen under glass.

“Problem?” Jacob asked, his voice deceptively casual.

“My boot lace came untied,” Brook replied, adjusting the bag in her hand. Jacob’s gaze lowered slowly.

“Seems that your jeans are caught on the top of your boot,” Jacob pointed out, though she wasn’t sure he had bought her excuse.

Brook took her time leaning down and tugging the fabric free of her boot, using the time to compose her expression. A faint sound reached her ears that had nothing to do with the three men. She could only describe it as a subtle crack, like the click of a glass being set down too hard on a table.At first, she thought she had imagined the sound, but then it came again, slightly louder.

“Shall we continue?”

“Don’t move,” Brook directed as she slowly stood. She kept her voice measured to avoid startling anyone into sudden movement. “Everyone, stay perfectly still.”

Victor had already taken a few steps ahead of Jacob after her brother had nodded toward the left passageway. He had come to a complete stop when Jacob hadn’t directly followed behind. Her brother’s curious gaze was on her.

“Do you not trust me, dear sister?”

“Listen,” Brook murmured as she tilted her head to hear better.

In the ensuing silence, the sound became unmistakable—a creaking, groaning noise emanating from beneath their feet. The ice was under stress.

“What the hell?” Russell muttered as he stared down at his boots.

“We need to back up,” Brook said, taking her own advice with three steps. “Russell, come toward me. Victor, try to walk around, and bring Jacob this way, slowly.”

“We shouldn’t retreat,” Jacob advised, his voice unnaturally calm. He studied the ground with interest. “Allow me to slowly join Agent Brall near the entrance of the passageway. Doing so will relieve some of the pressure. We must be standing over a vertical shaft where the ceiling has thinned out over the years.”

Between the weight of the two men and the bag in Russell’s hand, it was no wonder that the weakness in the floor of the cave had begun to give way. She slowly took another step back in hopes that her weight wouldn’t add additional pressure, and she noticed that Victor had done the same.

“We can’t be sure about the size of the vertical shaft's opening," Jacob persisted, ignoring her instruction. In contrast, Russell made a tentative move toward her. "Stay where you are, Agent Houser.”

Before either Brook or Russell could respond, a sharp crack split the air.

The piercing sound became a loud roar as the ice beneath Jacob and Russell began to quickly splinter. She could only stand and observe in horror as a web of fractures rapidly spread outward from where the two stood. The solid floor had transformed into a network of breaking ice in seconds.

The final collapse happened with a ghastly swiftness.One second, Jacob and Russell were standing between Victor and her, and the next…they vanished into a gaping hole in the cave floor.

It was as if they had never existed at all.