[POV: Nardia]

  The hatch snapped open, and Nardia went flying.

  She hit the ice-hard ground shoulder-first, bounced once, and skidded through a dusting of black flakes that looked like soot pretending to be snow. Her suit’s servos shrieked in protest—then went dead. No status chirp. No diagnostics. Just silence.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.” Her voice echoed inside her helmet. She jabbed at the control panel on her forearm. “Move. Come on. Any time now.”

  Nothing.

  The kind of dead response that made you start picturing a missing power core. Or sabotage.

  From the cockpit above, a wet, miserable voice quavered. “M-my lady… I’m… I’m sorry… I couldn’t disobey the mistress… I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

  Nardia craned her neck. Through the half-open hatch, she caught a glimpse of the man’s hunched back. Household Servant Number Three. That was how she thought of him, because learning his name had never felt necessary.

  He was the apologizing type. The kind who could say sorry like it was breathing. Somehow, that made her want to strangle him more than if he’d been smug about it.

  “Don’t you ‘sorry’ me!” Nardia slammed a fist into the floor—suit still locked up, pain flaring up her wrist. “What is this? Why can’t I move—”

  Servant Number Three didn’t answer. He moved fast—too fast. One second he was stammering, the next he had both hands on her suit and heaved.

  Nardia’s stomach lurched.

  “Wait—HEY!”

  He threw her out.

  The hatch hissed shut behind her with the finality of an executioner’s blade.

  Cold hit like a hammer. Not postcard cold. Titan-cold. Methane-atmosphere cold. The kind that would turn lungs into broken glass if the suit failed for even a minute.

  Her visor fogged at the edges, then cleared as emergency heaters kicked in. The suit still wasn’t responding to her commands, but at least it had enough autonomy to keep her alive.

  For now.

  Her boots scraped for traction on frozen rock. Black snow—hydrocarbon ash baked by solar wind—settled on her suit like the universe had decided she needed a personal insult.

  Above her, the sky was a thick, murky bruise. Somewhere beyond it, a sun existed. Down here, all she got was a slow fall of soot.

  A speaker crackled. The hatch reopened a fraction, just enough for the servant’s face to appear—pale, sweating, pathetic.

  “I-I’m sorry! Truly! The control unit… I had to hand it over to the mistress… but—” He shoved something through the gap. A thin card. “I made a copy. Please. Run.”

  Nardia snatched the card on instinct. “You stole my—”

  “I-I didn’t—” He flinched like she’d slapped him. “I… I just… I made a copy…”

  Nardia slammed the card into the emergency slot on her suit.

  A green line flashed across her visor.

  [SUIT CONTROL: LIMITED ACCESS — ONLINE]

  Her joints loosened. Servos whined back to life.

  “Oh. It works.” Relief lasted half a heartbeat before rage filled the space it left. “You little— Get back here!”

  Too late.

  Servant Number Three vaulted into the snow-loader. Engines roared. The machine lurched away in a spray of black flakes and exhaust, vanishing into the haze like a guilty thought.

  Nardia stood there, alone, in a place no sane person walked without an armored crawler.

  And she knew exactly whose idea that was.

  “That woman.” Her teeth clicked together even inside the helmet. “I knew she was trouble the second she walked into the house with that painted-on smile.”

  The “mistress.” Her stepmother. Officially the First Lady of the planet. Unofficially… something else. Something that smelled like perfume over rot.

  Nardia’s father—the President of the dome-city—had collapsed weeks ago. An “accident,” they said. A tragic mishap. A coma.

  Nardia had believed the coma. She’d never believed the accident.

  And now she had proof. Her suit’s control unit had been taken. Someone had planned to brick her life support out here and let the cold do the work.

  Villains on old Earth holodramas had more subtlety.

  She pulled up a rough map on her visor. Dome-city was behind her. The spaceport too—both places where her stepmother’s people would be waiting with polite smiles and very impolite restraints.

  The only route that wasn’t suicidal was also annoying.

  “Emergency port,” she muttered. “Of course it’s the emergency port.”

  Her boots crunched as she started walking. The black snow didn’t crunch. It just clung.

  The terrain sloped toward a dead forest—if it counted as a forest. The “trees” were twisted black wires bent into the idea of plants, brittle spines reaching up from the ice. Every so often, one of them puffed a cloud of dark spores that drifted like ash.

  Nardia didn’t trust any of it.

  She doubled the filter strength on her suit. “If this turns out to be poison, I’m haunting somebody.”

  The further she went, the quieter it got. Not calm quiet—wrong quiet. Wind should have been whining through the branches. Her boots should have been loud in her ears.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Instead, sound fell away like the world had decided to stop listening.

  Or worse—like something else had started.

  “Yeah. No. Hate this,” Nardia muttered, and kept moving anyway because stopping was how people died.

  A flicker on the edge of her visor made her pause.

  A structure.

  She blinked, then zoomed in. It wasn’t a rock formation. It had edges. Angles. A doorway half-buried in ice.

  “That can’t be…” She checked the map. The emergency port was still kilometers out. There shouldn’t have been anything here except frozen nothing.

  Nardia’s pulse kicked up despite the cold. Curiosity was a dangerous habit. She’d inherited it from her brother.

  He was fifteen years older. Fifteen years and an entire life ahead of her. Always stepping outside whatever cage etiquette and bloodline tried to build around her.

  He’d shown her the wider galaxy and made the planet’s rules feel smaller. He was the first person who’d ever said, outright, that their noble life was a prison wearing nice clothes.

  Now he worked for the Galactic Development Corporation—GDC, the galaxy’s most suspicious “private company.” The kind of outfit that “bought” planets and “sold” them, like worlds were just plots of land.

  Everyone with half a brain knew it was a mask—an arm’s-length way for Earth governments and colonial alliances to expand without spooking local alien powers. A fake company to do real, quiet work.

  And her brother lived in that world, smiling like the danger was a joke he understood.

  Right before he left last time, he’d pressed a thin metal token into her palm—like an old commemorative medal from some dead era. Its rim held a snowflake pattern and something like a feather.

  “If you get in trouble,” he’d said, voice light, eyes not. “Use the phrase.”

  “What phrase?” Nardia had rolled her eyes so hard it hurt.

  He’d grinned. “‘The Black Snow Princess crosses the Sea of Ice.’ Say it, and someone from the Coalition will pick you up. Doesn’t have to be me.”

  She’d shoved the token into her pocket and clicked her tongue like she wasn’t secretly warmed by it.

  Back then, she hadn’t imagined she’d ever be the one needing to be “picked up.”

  Now, standing in front of a mystery building in a dead forest, she felt the token like a weight against her thigh.

  The structure wasn’t human-made. The material wasn’t steel or stone. It had that strange, half-solid sheen that only one thing in the galaxy matched.

  Ancient tech.

  Relics.

  “Please tell me this is an abandoned shed,” she muttered.

  It wasn’t.

  Her studies had focused on alien technology. The old ones—the Ancients, the First Builders, whatever name people used when they didn’t want to admit they were afraid of the past. On this planet, scans from orbit didn’t work right. Exotic matter veins scrambled sensors, leaving entire regions as blank spaces.

  Nardia had spent her free time poking at those blanks, stubbornly refusing to accept that everything worth finding had already been found.

  She hadn’t expected to be right today.

  Of course she found a relic site on the same day she got exiled into a methane blizzard. Her luck didn’t do small.

  She slipped through the security like it was a classroom exercise. The Ancients’ standard locks were old, elegant, and allergic to improvisation. Her suit’s computer chewed through the language patterns, the door sighed open, and she stepped inside.

  The interior was dim. Cold air hung still. Lights—faint, sour-white—ran in lines along the floor like veins.

  And seven machines waited in formation.

  Small unmanned tanks. Compact bodies, low profiles. They looked like armored beetles with weapon mounts that had no business being that refined.

  Dwarf drones.

  Nardia’s mouth went dry. “No way.”

  They weren’t dead. The relic’s systems still hummed under the ice, and that meant the drones’ self-repair routines hadn’t shut down. The Ancients didn’t build disposable toys.

  She approached the nearest unit, heart hammering, hands steady because panic was pointless. A panel accepted her touch like it had been waiting.

  Diagnostics poured across her visor. Power stable. Weapon systems intact.

  She almost laughed.

  “All seven,” she whispered. “You beautiful little monsters.”

  A soft chime sounded from the unit. Text scrolled in an alien script, then shifted into a broken machine translation.

  ‘ARE YOU… MASTER?’

  Nardia lifted her chin. Her stepmother had thrown her out to die. Her father was in a coma. The city was lost to her.

  But this?

  This was leverage.

  “Yes,” she said, and her voice came out sharper than she intended. “I’m the new master. Follow.”

  The drones’ optics flared. One by one, seven sets of lights cut through the gloom, and their engines awakened with a low, hungry hum.

  Outside, black snow fell in patient silence.

  Nardia climbed onto the lead drone like it was a throne she’d stolen. The metal beneath her boots vibrated with contained power.

  She pulled the drone line out of the relic and into the wasteland.

  “Alright,” she said, eyes fixed on the horizon. “Round two.”

  The first sign her stepmother had noticed she was still alive came as a holographic comm window snapping open in the air ahead of her.

  A face filled it—heavy makeup, smug lips, eyes sharp with the kind of cruelty that never had to earn itself. Even the distortion of the signal couldn’t make her look less pleased with herself.

  “Oh,” the woman purred. “So you crawled out after all. I wondered why your life signs wouldn’t disappear.”

  Nardia’s stomach tightened.

  “I questioned that useless servant—Handa,” the stepmother continued, savoring every syllable. “And wouldn’t you know it? He’d made a copied control card. Petty forger’s habit. I should have expected it.”

  Handa. So, Servant Number Three had a name after all. Nardia filed it away for later, mostly so she could decide whether to thank him or hit him.

  “You’re enjoying this,” Nardia said. “That’s the part that makes you really disgusting.”

  The stepmother smiled wider. “Your father was so stubborn. The conditioning didn’t take. So I let the oxygen scrubbers ‘malfunction.’”

  Concrete. Casual. Like she was talking about changing a filter.

  Nardia’s hands curled around empty air. “You—”

  “And now,” the woman went on, “all I need is you gone. Then this planet belongs to us. The Witches’ Family doesn’t share.”

  So she admitted it. Just like that.

  Nardia almost admired the confidence. Almost.

  She didn’t waste breath replying. She pinged a command through the drone link.

  The dwarves moved.

  A free-electron laser mounted on the lead unit pivoted, spat invisible death, and sliced into the armored snow-loader behind the hologram—right where the fuel lines ran.

  The loader’s side glowed, then bloomed into fire.

  The stepmother’s smile faltered. “What—?”

  “Got you,” Nardia said, satisfaction tasting metallic.

  Missiles streaked up from the other loaders in the convoy—real ones, not toy fireworks. Nardia saw the trails even through the dirty atmosphere.

  Her drones tracked without hesitation.

  Laser fire snapped in rapid pulses. Every missile disintegrated into glittering fragments of burning metal before it could get close.

  Nardia’s grin was feral. “Your gear is trash. Mine is ancient war tech. Do the math.”

  A figure moved inside the burning loader. The stepmother—alive, furious, scrambling.

  Then she did something Nardia hadn’t expected.

  The comm window flickered. A new icon flashed on Nardia’s visor—an unauthorized handshake request.

  “What…?”

  A warning tone screamed in her helmet.

  [ALERT: SUIT INTEGRITY COMPROMISED]

  [OVERRIDE: EMERGENCY VENT — OPENING]

  “No. No no no—”

  Of course. The copy card had only given her limited access. The stepmother still had the original unit—meaning she still had the keys.

  Cold punched in through her collar. Her suit’s emergency valves hissed open like someone had stabbed her life support. Frost crawled across the inside of her visor in spiderweb patterns.

  Nardia tried to close the vent manually. Her fingers felt thick, clumsy. The suit fought her. The cold didn’t care.

  Her drones kept firing, kept moving, but the link started to stutter as her brain slowed.

  She staggered off the lead unit and hit the ground on one knee. Black snow drifted onto her glove, melting for a split second on the warmed plating before turning to crust.

  Stupid. Stupid. She’d gotten cocky.

  Her thoughts smeared. Her heartbeat sounded distant, like it belonged to someone else.

  But she wasn’t dead yet. Not if the suit’s nanomedical systems did what the manuals promised. If the body froze cleanly, revival was possible. Hard. Ugly. But possible.

  If anyone found her.

  She fumbled at her thigh pocket and felt the edge of her brother’s token.

  The phrase.

  Her tongue felt too heavy. The words wanted to stick.

  “The…” She coughed, and it sounded like glass scraping metal. “Black Snow Princess…”

  Her vision went gray at the edges.

  “…crosses the Sea of Ice.”

  The wasteland blurred. The drones’ optics became distant points of light.

  Somewhere in the back of her slowing mind, an old Earth fairy tale surfaced—princess asleep in ice, waiting for a kiss.

  Nardia would have laughed if her lips still worked.

  A prince. Sure.

  If anyone came for her, it wouldn’t be some storybook hero. It would be someone like her brother. Someone who knew what it meant to survive by lies and nerve, and still draw a line in the dirt and refuse to step over it.

  The cold swallowed the last of her breath.

  And the black snow kept falling.