Ellsworth by Abir M Sen

The quietest room in the house is the one nobody will say the name of.

For three years Dr. Elin Kavanagh has stood at the glass of three subglacial lakes and watched what waits on the other side. Now she has the one thing she went back for: a seat at the table that decides which doors get opened. And the table has chosen Lake Ellsworth — the only sealed lake ever surveyed with no life in it at all. Sterile. Silent. The perfect room, the board says, to test a weapon where the network can't watch.

But a fourteen-year-old maintenance log says this lake was never virgin ice. Somebody stood a drill down four hundred metres above it and walked away. The water doesn't circulate through Ellsworth — it goes around it, the way a family goes around a bedroom at the end of a hallway, cleaning past the door, never once saying the name.

The network didn't lose this room.

It sealed it. Three million years ago. And it has spent fourteen patient years manoeuvring one clumsy species into opening the one door it could never bring itself to open itself.

Ellsworth is Book Four of the EREVOS series — where the horror stops being what humans open, and becomes what the ice has been waiting for someone else to open for it. For readers who want their science cold, their corporations colder, and their monsters patient enough to have been grieving in the dark since before there were human beings to grieve at all.

The house is quieter now. Not emptier. Quieter. There is a difference — and it is going to reach the water.