"Ian! Come look—waveform here!" "I see it," Ian panted, breath fogging against his visor. "That's not ambient. It's structured." Romeo stuck his head over Ian's shoulder and jabbed at the console. "What are you seeing, genius? A ghost song?" "Not a ghost," Ian snapped. "A heart pattern." Salvador's boots hit the metal grating three steps later. "Show me." "Waveform's spiking when the probe scans the pod," Romeo said. "Pulse response is... active." Salvador didn't smile. "Active inside a sealed cryo pod on a five-million-year-old site?" "Active inside a sealed cryo pod," Ian repeated. Metal groaned. The excavation arm above them thudded, then skittered as ice shifted in the tunnel. The sound came from everywhere. "Move fast," Salvador ordered. "We don't have the structural feed on that sector for more than thirty minutes once the thermal shift hits. We get one shot." "Thirty minutes?" Ian's voice cracked. "We just started core boring." Salvador's jaw tightened. "You found a pod. We bring it up now or we bury a living corpse under ice." "Do we even have clearance for a medical revival?" Romeo asked. "Medical teams respond remotely," Salvador said. "But they won't risk extraction under collapse. That decision is on us." The lights on the console blinked red. The drill's overhead camera shivered. "Is that heartbeat real?" Juliet's voice came over the comm from the support rig. "I can run a biometric sweep if you