Read Chapter 20: Unmasking

“You’re going to tell me everything,” Caleb said, pressing the blade of his knife against the seam of Okafor's neck seals. “Or I leave you here with the chronometer running on full discharge. I’m told it does interesting things to ice. And to the people standing on it.”

Okafor's breath fogged inside his helmet. Sweat beaded at his temple, freezing in the creases. His hands were bound with a length of cable Caleb had stripped from the supply cache, his comm unit crushed under Caleb’s boot.

“You think I’m the enemy,” Okafor said, voice thin. “You think Helix planted me in that crater to hand you over. But if you kill me, you lose the only person who can tell you where your mother actually is.”

“You already told me. AF-7. Valles Marineris.” Caleb knelt, bringing his faceplate level with Okafor’s. “I just need to confirm you’re not lying before I put you on ice.”

Okafor’s eyes flicked to the chronometer, still humming on Caleb’s wrist. The ice beneath them had stopped flickering, but the data patterns had seared themselves into Caleb’s memory—readouts, facility schematics, a woman’s face. Mei Lin’s face.

“She’s not just frozen,” Okafor said, swallowing hard. “She’s the reason Helix built AF-7 in the first place. They didn’t capture her as leverage. They captured her because she nearly destroyed them.”

Caleb’s hand tightened on the knife. “She was declared dead fourteen years ago. Helix filed the report. My father wept over a sealed casket.”

“He knew better,” Okafor said. “Your father was one of the original terraforming engineers. He helped design the atmospheric processors that made Mars livable. But when Helix took control of the colonial charter, they rewrote the history. They erased the dissent. They made it look like the colony was their invention, their salvation story.”

“I know the cover-up. The fabricated origins. The Council of Colonies is a puppet board.” Caleb’s jaw was tight. “But my mother was a botanist. She studied algae in the southern basins. She wasn’t a whistleblower.”

“She was a lead systems architect on the cryo-stability protocols,” Okafor said. “She found the accounting irregularities in the life-support budgets. The missing colonists who never woke up. The ones Helix used as test subjects for their off-book cryo experiments. She documented everything and brought it to the Council. A week later, she was on a routine survey flight in the Valles Marineris. The flight never returned.”

Caleb felt the cold seep through his suit, numbing his fingers. “The official report said she was lost in a canyon collapse.”

“Official reports lie,” Okafor said. “Helix pulled her from the wreckage before the rescue teams arrived. Kept her alive. Kept her frozen. They wanted her research intact—and they wanted leverage against your father, who was starting to ask the wrong questions about the colony’s founding records.”

“So they killed him.”

Okafor’s silence was answer enough.

Caleb stood, pacing toward the crater’s edge. The dust storm had passed, leaving a crystalline clarity to the sky. Stars burned overhead, cold and indifferent. He thought of his father’s recorded message, the pressure suit he’d found in the cave, the careful trail of breadcrumbs left across a decade of silence. His father had known. He’d laid this path for Caleb to follow.

But he hadn’t told him about Mei Lin.

“Why didn’t my father say anything?” Caleb asked, not turning around. “Why did he let me believe she was dead?”

“Because believing she was dead was the only thing that kept Helix from hunting you down to use as leverage,” Okafor said. “Your father struck a deal. He stopped investigating, stopped asking questions. In exchange, Helix let you live. Let you grow up in the salvage yards, unnoticed. Unimportant.”

“And you?” Caleb turned. “What’s your part in this? You said you knew my father. You said you’d been investigating Helix for years. But you transmitted my location when the storm hit.”

Okafor’s face contorted. Guilt. Shame. Something raw beneath the diplomat’s polish. “My daughter. They have her. Twelve years old. They took her two years ago when I started digging into the cryo-transfer records. They said if I kept feeding them information on anyone who contacted the independent mediation network, she’d stay in a comfortable holding facility. If I refused—” He stopped, closing his eyes.

“They’d freeze her,” Caleb finished.

Okafor nodded.

Caleb stood frozen himself, the ice patterns flickering in his peripheral vision. He wanted to hate Okafor. The man had helped get Mei Lin captured. He’d likely helped Helix cover up the facility’s location for years. But there was a daughter in the equation now, a mirror of his own childhood—held hostage by the same corporation that had carved his father out of his life.

“AF-7,” Caleb said. “Tell me everything. Layout. Guard rotation. Weak points.”

“It’s a fortress,” Okafor said. “It’s built into the canyon wall of the Valles Marineris, half a kilometer below the rim. It has its own atmospheric shield, its own power grid, and a garrison of Helix security forces with orbital support. The cryo-bay is on the lowest level, and the only access is through a dedicated elevator shaft that can be remotely sealed. You can’t breach it solo. You can’t breach it with a squad. You’d need a small army and a week’s worth of planning.”

“Then I’ll find one.” Caleb picked up Okafor’s damaged comm unit, pocketed the remains. “You’re coming with me. You know the facility. You’re going to help me get in.”

“They’ll kill my daughter.”

“They’ll kill her if you stay useful,” Caleb said. “Helix doesn’t keep loose ends. You know that better than anyone.”

Okafor looked at him, and something shifted in his eyes. Not surrender. Recognition. The same cold realization that had driven Caleb forward for the past sixteen hours. There was no deal with Helix. There was only the mission.

“There’s a service hatch,” Okafor said slowly. “Forty meters east of the main elevator shaft. It’s used for waste removal—disabled by design, but the locking mechanism is old. Helix has never bothered to update it because no one’s supposed to know it exists. It leads to a maintenance crawl that runs parallel to the cryo-bay.”

“Good.” Caleb hauled Okafor to his feet. “Let’s go.”

He gathered the supply cache, slung the evidence crystals against his chest, and checked his father’s pressure suit for the third time. No trackers. No messages. Just the promise of a mission he’d never completed.

Caleb walked to the crater’s edge, the chronometer humming against his wrist, and looked out across the rust-red expanse toward the distant gash of the Valles Marineris.

His mother was alive. Frozen in the heart of a fortress built to hold her secrets.

He was going to tear it open.