Page 6 of Burning Ice
Mirel counted what he had. From what was left of the loaf, only a hard crust and two dry crackers in the tin. He clutched the crust as if it were worth gold, knuckles stiff, unwilling to let go of the last proof of survival. Enough to stretch for two nights if he broke them carefully, half tonight, half tomorrow, water between. Hunger turned once in his gut and went flat, a small rule that kept him alive and empty at the same time. He obeyed it because it obeyed him back. The Imperial family had made Helion into a beautiful planet of glass towers, engineered gardens, and shining arenas, but beauty cost dearly. For those left outside its warmth, life was stone, ash, and hunger.
Others moved in the dark. Scavengers with cuffs still on their ankles. Families hidden under brown canvas. No one spoke. Silence was the only safe language. They looked up when he passed. He nodded. They nodded back. That was all. One child lingered, thin arms hugging a crust like his own, watching him too closely. The sight tugged something sharp in his chest. He’d been that age when Geron found him in this same dirt, too hungry to cry, shivering under tarp until a patched coat covered him just outside the space shuttle. He pressed the memory down, ashamed of it, and it stayed.
Mirel crouched at the pond and washed only his hands, the water cold enough to split skin along old cracks. Headstones leaned nearby, their carved names catching faint light, reminders of those mourned long ago, still missed by someone once living. He kept glancing over his shoulder, breath fogging in the chill, afraid someone might’ve followed him. But the Luminary never came to the graveyard, never to the Wastelandsas people called it. The thought both steadied and unsettled him. It comforted him to know their boots wouldn’t pound these paths, but it also meant if they ever did, there’d be nowhere left to hide.
Then he looked up at the Hospital of the Living Dead on the hill, its windows white and blank, no faces. Only once a week did he see common cars groan down that lonely road to its gates. The Imperial hover car came more often, sleek and certain, its glow slicing the dark.
Inside the hospital was Celia Fandi.
He pictured a mother he’d never met, an invention he built for himself. Hands steady on a chipped cup, a voice soft enough to calm a fever. He’d never heard her speak because he’d been given up as a baby, so he knew it was only imagination. Yet the ache in him made him linger on that window each night, wishing against reason that she might appear. Sometimes he thought he saw a shadow move behind the glass, a shape shifting quick through the light, and he cursed himself for hoping. He resented her for leaving him and craved her in the same breath, and still he looked up, because some part of him hoped. The hospital’s glow was clean and cold, cars polished, its gates tended. Here in the dirt, hunger gnawed. They saved the dying but abandoned the living.
He thought of the father buried under stone, the one he had frozen with his own hands. The face still lived behind his eyes, caught mid-breath, terror turning to glass. He had wanted that ending. He had begged for it. And yet the memory hollowed him. Pride and guilt sat side by side, a pair of wounds that refused to close.
And while the Imperials rode their hover car past the graveyard gates, bright in their cloaks and jeweled smiles, they never looked down at the ones starving in the dirt. They never saw him at all. To them the graveyard was only Wasteland, ashadow to pass, a silence to ignore. Yet every stone here held more truth than the glass towers they polished above.
A shadow moved close, not with the stealth of hunters but with the tread of someone who belonged here. Geron’s voice came low, gravelly with age. “You’re late.”
Mirel shrugged and showed the bread he’d stolen.
Geron stepped into the thin light, a tall figure bent by years, shoulders broad under a coat patched at the seams. His beard was iron-gray, his skin the color of stone and weather. One eye milky, the other sharp as a blade. He’d been here longer than anyone remembered, keeper of the pond and the tarps, the one who gave Mirel shelter when he was no more than a toddler left in the graveyard dirt.
Geron eyed the bread in Mirel’s fist. “Always running. Always stealing.”
Mirel’s jaw clenched. The word came rough, caught on breath. “Needed.”
“You need more than crusts, boy.” The old man lowered himself onto a broken slab, joints creaking. “One day they’ll catch you.”
Mirel’s gaze dropped, his voice a rasp. “Not tonight.”
Geron huffed, neither laugh nor sigh. “We’ll see. The city shifts. The air says trouble. Keep your head down.”
He wanted to answer. The words came rough, broken in the middle. “Eyes open.” He swallowed. “Head down is when they step.”
Geron’s eye lingered on Mirel’s twitching fingers, the way he kept counting cracks in the stone as if the numbers steadied him. “Always chasing order in the dirt. Sometimes it keeps you alive. Sometimes it makes you too loud in your own head.”
He reached out, not quite touching, just a hand hovering near Mirel’s shoulder, the closest he ever came to comfort. “Youhear me, boy? Keep to shadow when the air feels wrong.” The words sounded like warning, but the pause after them was care.
Mirel nodded once, short and sharp. His throat worked, but no sound followed. He traced the same crack three times before stopping himself. Numbers rose in his head unbidden, the count of steps from pond to tarp, the pattern of sounds that made the graveyard’s code. He didn’t speak them aloud, but they sat in him, steady as breath, a way to keep order when the world frayed. The counting soothed him, though it carved a wall between him and others. They spoke in words, he in numbers and marks, and it left him alone even in company.
The older man studied him a moment longer, then looked back toward the hill. “The hospital lights are still burning.”
Mirel only nodded, throat closing on the answer.
From the dark, a woman’s voice carried soft but firm. “Geron. Come in, love. The air’s shifting.”
Geron grunted, gaze still on Mirel. “You heard her. She feels it too.” He laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder, brief and solid, then pushed himself to his feet with a creak of joints. “Don’t stay out long.”
He turned toward the shadow where his wife waited. Her tone meant retreat, his meant worry. When he was gone, the graveyard felt emptier, the silence heavier, the stones seeming closer.
Noise from the city came thin, then thinner, until it sounded like another world. The graveyard carried its own sounds. The sun sank behind the hospital hill. Shadows lengthened and the scavengers grew restless, small noises shifting through the stones. Mirel caught each sound and wondered what stirred them tonight, why they shifted with unease.
The light went lower and the sky darkened. Mirel listened to every signal, heart racing, and understood the graveyard spokewith more voices than the living city ever did. Tonight they all meant the same thing.
Ready.
Mirel counted them in his head the way he always did. One snap. Two taps. Three strokes. Each mark a tally, each tally a warning. Patterns told him more than words ever could. To others it was just noise, but to him it was code as clear as speech. He read them, heart hammering, and felt the dread coil tighter. Someone else caught the signal too, the faint scrape of boot against gravel, a rhythm that meant caution, wait. Their eyes met briefly in the half-light and the code was clear.
Trouble was here.
