A woman running from her magic.

A man who's given up.

Mutant culture colonies.

A doomed ship.

After violent, out of control magic killed her sister and drove her father mad, Kayna Quan ran as far and as fast as she could from the mixture of Chinese and Celtic power boiling through her blood. Fresh out of residency, she opts for a tour in Antarctica. Money is short, so she hires on as medical officer aboard a Russian research vessel headed for McMurdo Station.

Brynn McMichaels' stint on remote South Georgia Island is a fancy, probably overplayed, escape from a crappy breakup. He may have left an irate woman behind, but he could have picked somewhere closer to get away.

When cultures of the single-celled organism, archaea, begin shifting into another form, overgrowing the bins in his lab, he's convinced the isolation got to him until a call from an old buddy at McMurdo reveals a similar phenomenon. Intrigued, Brynn agrees to lend a hand. The weather's too uncertain to send a plane, so he hitches a ride aboard Kayna's ship, bringing his mutant culture colonies with him.

And that's only the beginning...