The Singing Labyrinth

Maya pressed her forehead to the oval window until the chill bled through the plexiglass. Below, the Arctic spread out in cracked porcelain: sheets of ice stitched by black water, snow like sifted flour. The turboprop’s engines muttered, and with each shudder the view drifted, the floating research station growing larger—patched-metal decks, wind turbines like thin white bones, a yellow crane hunched over a shipping container painted with a whale decal.

“First time up?” the man across the aisle asked. He wore a parka the color of traffic cones and a name tag that said Tarek.

Maya pulled back, embarrassed to have fogged the window. “Is it that obvious?”

“Your face is doing the thing—‘wow’ and ‘what have I done’ at the same time.” He grinned and buckled his harness tighter. “You’ll love Aqilluq Station. Smells like diesel and dreams.”

She laughed, though her stomach skated with nerves. She was nineteen, a design student who built sound sculptures for dorm galleries and coded messy, joyous synths at 2 a.m. Now she was about to spend a summer interning in an acoustics lab at the top of the world, listening to whales beneath ice where maps were mostly white.

The plane banked. Wind rippled the sea, a dark skin between floes. A flock of kittiwakes churned in their own weather. When the wheels touched the makeshift runway—a ribbon hacked flat on thicker ice—the fuselage squealed. The door clanged open, and the air came in like a slap, clean and salted, with a whispered metallic note she felt high in her sinuses.

On the deck, people moved briskly, breath unspooling. A woman in steel-framed glasses lifted a hand, the gesture crisp. “I’m Dr. Halvorsen. Welcome to Aqilluq.”

Maya’s mittened hand met leather glove. The scientist’s grip was warm. “We’ve been hoping for extra ears. The belugas are transiting, and something in the ice is… talking.”

Tarek rolled a barrel toward a crane hook. “Not like voices,” he said, winking at Maya. “Like a fridge groaning. But the fridge is the size of a city.”

Inside the main module, the station hummed with forced air, generator bass, vents ticking. Posters of whales shared space with evacuation maps and a whiteboard list: buoy calibration, plankton nets, liaison call with GlacioDyne. Someone had duct-taped a paper snowflake to a fire extinguisher. Maya tasted metal and coffee as the lab door sighed shut.

The lab was dim, awash in monitor glow. Hydrophone arrays mapped as blue nodes on a black grid. A waveform pulsed on-screen, sawtoothed traces of underwater song. Maya slipped off her hood. Her hair crackled with static.

“Beluga chorus,” Halvorsen said softly. “And beneath it, a subsonic hum we can’t trace. We’ve triangulated to the pack edge near the mining zone. GlacioDyne insists it’s their equipment, but the signature is wrong. Too regular, too… old.”

Old. The word settled like a stone in Maya’s pocket. She put on the headphones Tarek held out, the cups warm from his hands. Sound flooded her. Chirps like rubbed glass, whistles bright as tin toys, then the deeper thing—a rolling presence, the afterimage of thunder. The hum vibrated her molars, steady as a heartbeat she didn’t recognize, and in that steadiness she felt a pattern, as if someone had braided days together and dropped them through the water.

“Do you hear it?” Tarek asked.

Maya kept listening. The hum wasn’t pitch; it was place. She opened her eyes. “I think it’s the ice itself.”