The Arctic was never empty. It was only waiting.

When enhanced operative Ace Morrison and the Fieraru twins investigate a distress signal from the frozen north, they expect a dead program’s remnants. Instead, they find a Yeti village under siege — and an enemy who knows exactly what Ace is.

Echo-13 has a vendetta nine years in the making. The Order has a plan to shatter prisons older than human civilization. And the only thing standing in their way is an alliance that has never been attempted: enhanced soldiers, werewolf packs, vampire courts, Yeti shamans, and troll warriors who have spent millennia avoiding each other.

The cold kills without mercy. But what is waking beneath the ice is far worse.

Some things lost to the ice don’t stay lost.

Five weeks after Echo-13’s emergence, the coalition holds — but barely. The transformed vessel has vanished into the Arctic dark, and Vienna hasn’t given up. They’re building something in the northeast. Something patient. Something designed specifically to bring Echo-13 back under their control.

When Ace Morrison authorizes contact with the three percent of Julian Webb still fighting inside the thing Echo-13 has become, he’s betting the coalition’s survival on a single question: can transformation be reversed?

Tia-Marie Fieraru has a theory. She calls it family mathematics. Vienna calls it a weakness.

Some enemies can be defeated. Others must be understood. And some can still choose to come home.

The Old Ones are dreaming. And a defector from Vienna knows how to wake them.

Deep beneath a chamber called Site Five lies a mechanism built to shatter every prison seal at once. Echo-13 is the only one who can dismantle it — if the three percent of him still fighting can hold against everything the device was built to say.

Katrina Fieraru’s telekinesis is only just answering her call. It may be the only thing standing between the coalition and catastrophe.

The Arctic does not forgive. And this time, it answers.