After a sabotage strike cuts power to an Arctic extraction city, a widowed ice-road convoy chief must haul the only reactor core that can keep twelve thousand people alive across collapsing sea ice while being hunted by the son she abandoned - the engineer leading the attack. The city of Aurora Verge was built to survive anything: polar night, whiteout storms, offshore pressure ridges, months without sun. It was not built to survive betrayal from within. When a coordinated sabotage strike cripples the city's heat grid, the only backup reactor core sits two hundred miles away on a fractured supply route no one has crossed this late in the season. Mara Sutter knows that road better than anyone alive. She also knows ice can smell fear. It cracks under hesitation. It punishes guilt. So she takes the convoy north. Then the first ambush hits, and Mara sees a face she knows before the rifle fire even starts. Her son, Eli - the boy she left behind after her husband died - is now the tactician leading a campaign to let Aurora Verge freeze. He says the city deserves to die. He says his father died proving what it really is. With every mile, the ice thins, the attacks sharpen, and the truth gets worse. To save the city, Mara may have to kill her own child. To save her child, she may have to let thousands burn their last fuel and freeze in the dark.