Page 63 of Burning Ice
He pressed his palm to the ground. The chill moved up his arm, cold and sure. He was twenty-two, but the years felt heavier, carried in the quiet of places like this. Frost gathered around his hand, rising as if answering an old call. He lifted it and watched the thin white lines hold, trembling.
The ice did not glitter. It remembered. It kept whatever his body could not carry. It did not ask permission. It took the shape of his fear and laid it down where anyone could see. He hated it for that. He needed it for that.
Vandor’s voice was low. “Careful.”
“It’s fine.” He stayed where he was, eyes searching the dark.
The hospital beacon blinked again, its pulse steady and rhythmic like a distant heartbeat. Each flash seemed to sync with Mirel’s rising breath, a warning that kept echoing inside his ribs. The world felt hollowed, as if someone had cleared it of sound. Mirel listened for Geron’s laugh, for the click of a bottle, for any breath that remembered him. Nothing. Only the wind gnawed at the quiet.
The frost thinned under Mirel’s fingers and disappeared into dirt. The ache in his chest grew sharper, the kind that made him want to fold into walls. His palms were wet and cold at once.
A scrape behind them. The sound was sharp and dragging, metal on stone, too deliberate to be wind or animal. It cut through the silence like something waking. Vandor straightened, his hand shifting automatically toward his weapon. The fog parted, and for a moment Mirel thought the night itself moved. A figure stepped forward, shoulders hunched, a limp in his gait.
Geron.
Mirel’s chest caught. The air seemed to stop around him. He took a step forward, then another, half-reaching before he could stop himself. “Geron. I missed you.”
“Mirel? What are you doing here?”
“R-returned.”
Geron’s face was half shadow, half hollow. His clothes hung loose, damp from the fog. For a moment his mouth curved, the ghost of the smile Mirel remembered. Then it faltered.
“Your stuff’s gone. We took it. The bread. The crackers. Everything. We had to. You’re no longer welcome here.”
Mirel blinked. “W-what do you mean?” His voice cracked. “This is my h-home.”
Geron’s eyes glimmered, wet with regret. “Not anymore. I’m sorry, Mirel. I can’t stop them. Go before they come.”
Vandor’s jaw tightened. “We’re not alone.”
Sound fell flat. Even the wind seemed to listen. A bottle knocked once, twice, then settled somewhere out of sight. The fog moved against itself in long folds, like breath trapped under cloth.
Then faces began to surface, cheeks hollow, eyes rimmed red, wire glinting at sleeves and wrists. One man’s scarf was hospital gauze; another had taped a shard of mirror to his arm. The reflection caught Mirel’s pale outline, then vanished when the arm swung.
The fog was already stirring. More shapes slid out of it one by one, faces pale, eyes hollow, climbing from the tunnel mouths like the dead rising to walk. Vandor swore under his breath, tapping a command on his multislate, though Mirel barely heard it. The sound of blood pounded in his ears. He took a step toward Geron, confusion and grief flooding him at once.
Geron backed away. “I’m sorry.”
The crowd began to move.
Mirel’s throat tightened. He turned in the fog, trying to find Geron again. The space where he had stood was empty, just mist and movement, the shape of him already swallowed by shadow. The realization hollowed him. Even the air seemed to draw back from his body.
The words you’re no longer welcome echoed until they felt carved into his bones. The wall that had once kept the rain off him, the ground that had remembered his weight. All of it had turned its face away.
He had come home to breathe, and instead found the world choking him. Every face that once shared warmth now burnedwith hate. His throat closed around the truth. There was no home, no safe corner left. His foster parents hadn’t wanted him, and neither did these ghosts. He was unwanted everywhere, a mistake made of frost and light.
“Geron!” he called, but his voice broke, lost under the growing noise. The crowd was swelling, spilling from the tunnels and cracked doors. Faces he half recognized blinked through fog, strange and pale, eyes lit with hunger and fear. They looked less like the living and more like the forgotten climbing up from their own graves.
Hollow faces stepped into the beacon glow. Hunger had carved them thin. Vandor raised one gloved hand, palm out. “Back off. We’re leaving.”
They didn’t move. More shadows spilled from the tunnels and broken sheds, voices overlapping?—
“Monster.”
“Imperial pet.”
“Kill it!”
