novelraw Chapter 123: Testing The Ice
Chapter 123: Testing The Ice
The first step outside was always the hardest.
Especially when it was so cold out that all you wanted to do was go back to bed and curl up under a crap ton of covers.
The window groaned open with Zubair’s help, his heat causing the ice to curl away from the frame in hiss and steam. The air that pushed its way inside of the building didn’t carry any scent.
Well, that wasn’t strictly accurate. Everything smelled like a cold so deep that if froze your nose hairs the moment you breathed in the outside air. But that wasn’t to say it wasn’t clean.
It was clean in the way of untouched places, sharp enough to cut a lung.
Sera ducked through first, her boots crunching against the ledge before she lowered herself onto the ice. The moment her weight landed on the freshly formed ice, the frozen sheet answered with a massive bang. Like the sound of a rifle shot—one sharp crack, then a long, rolling groan that faded into the distance.
She waited, still as stone. The creature told her that she wouldn’t fall in. That the ice was too thick for her to plunge into the icy depths of the ocean. But that didn’t stop a lifetime of conditioning when it came to walking on frozen water.
Even the others held their breath behind her.
The ice held.
"Clear," she said, and her voice was small against the white world.
Zubair followed, moving with soldier’s caution, anchoring the rope line from the window frame to the stairwell as he went.
The static rope hissed against his gloves. He set his boots wide, listening, feeling. Then he nodded once, the same kind of nod he gave before ordering men into fire.
Lachlan came next, swinging down like he’d been born for this kind of frontier. He landed light, grinned, and spat out a breath that ghosted white before him. "Hell," he muttered, turning in a slow circle. "Feels like we’re walking on the roof of the world."
Elias slid down after him, his scarf pulled high, eyes already cataloging the surface, the way fissures feathered away from their landing point. "Pressure’s distributing," he murmured, his gloved fingers sketching invisible lines. "Thick. A meter, maybe more. Should hold us."
Alexei was last, dropping with a thud, his laugh echoing too loud.
He crouched to run a hand across the surface. Frost bloomed where he touched, spidering out in a lace that glittered. "Da," he said, rising, his grin wicked. "Is strong ice. I like it."
They stood together in a small knot, five black shapes against a white horizon. The city that had once stretched around them was gone. Only the tips of towers and the broken ribs of cranes pushed through, black teeth gnawing at a sky washed bone-gray.
The silence was not silence. It was ice speaking: the pop of expanding seams, the whale-song of deep fractures shifting under weight, the faint tink of snow settling on snow.
Zubair tugged the line once, testing the anchor, then let it be. "We move," he said.
They set off in a slow fan, boots crunching, rope trailing between them. Each step made the world complain underfoot. The ice didn’t give, but it spoke with every move.
Lachlan lifted his chin, eyes narrowing against the glare. "Bright as noon out here, and it’s barely even dawn."
"Albedo effect," Elias replied automatically. "Light bounces off ice, amplifies itself. Snow makes it worse."
"Translation?" Lachlan asked.
Elias glanced at him, eyes squinting against the pale glow. "Don’t look too long, or you’ll go blind."
Lachlan smirked. "Good thing I look damn good in sunglasses."
The joke died quickly. Out here, sound didn’t travel the way it should. Words felt small against the horizon.
They stopped at the shadow of a half-submerged bus, its roof pressed flat to the ice. One side of it had torn open in the flood, and inside, frozen bodies stared with wide, milky eyes.
Sera studied them for a moment, her head cocked. Frozen didn’t mean gone. She knew that as well as breathing. "Keep moving," she said. "We’re not the only ones testing limits."
They walked on.
Elias lagged, his gaze darting from one man to the next. Finally, he spoke, his voice low but steady. "I need to ask again. After our conversation last night...have any of you noticed... changes? Strength, resistance, anything unusual?"
Zubair’s jaw clenched. He didn’t answer at once. He bent instead to tighten a strap on his boot, buying time, then rose slow. "Didn’t we already answer your questions?" he asked after a moment. "We feel... good. But we don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing."
"I asked again because if your body is shifting, adapting, we need to understand it," Elias said. "I don’t think that this is a one time thing. You might continuously be changing. We don’t know and that is part of the problem."
"We’ve already promise you that we will tell you when something happens," Zubair said flatly. "But until then, everything is fine. We aren’t the biggest problem. The outside world is."
Elias nodded once. He could take that boundary. He never had a problem keeping to the line in the sand when he found it or were told where it was.
They reached the open expanse of harbor ice.
Nothing stood.
There were no towers, no cranes, no wreckage.
Just a plain of white stretching farther than sight could follow. It felt ancient, like they had stepped off the edge of their own time and into another.
Zubair drove the butt of his rifle into the surface. The sound carried in a strange way—sharp, then swallowed, like the ice had eaten it. "Solid," he said.
Sera crouched, her gloved hand brushing the slick, hard sheen. Her reflection looked back at her, ghost-pale and broken by fissures. The creature inside stirred, satisfied.
Behind her, Lachlan let out a slow breath. "Well, boys," he said, his voice low, reverent in spite of himself. "Welcome to the new frontier."
And for the first time, none of them laughed.