novelraw Chapter 154: Gone
Chapter 154: Gone
Elias flinched against the wind as the hiss inside him laughed.
When will you realize you don’t feel the cold anymore?
He tightened his scarf anyway. His skin was too warm under the wool, his breath too steady for the sting he pretended was there. He counted the inhale for four, the exhale for four, the way you do when your hands want to shake and you can’t let them.
"Eyes up." Zubair’s voice carried along the rope like current.
Elias lifted his chin, unconsciously cataloguing what was in front of him.
Horizon: white, ridge, glare. Two half-buried cranes to the west. A bent sign iced flat to the east. The black smear of their tower window behind them. He mapped those points the way he always did, reduced the world to bearings and edges and lines that obeyed.
His pulse didn’t obey. Too fast. Too shallow. It was all wrong for how it should be.
Not wrong, the hiss inside of him purred. Tuned. Better.
He ignored it.
He had a list to run.
Harness tension good. Carabiner gate closed. Grease pencil in left pocket. Test kit right. Knife spine to palm. He brought his weight onto the balls of his feet, letting the rope hum barely in the hardware, syncing to Sera’s steps in front of him. That part helped. The hiss sank into a low hum whenever she was close; he could measure his calm by the distance to her shoulder blades.
Alexei turned his head once and caught him watching her. A brief smirk cut across the man’s mouth like he knew something that Elias didn’t.
Elias cataloged that too, because he cataloged everything.
Alexei didn’t poke, he didn’t prod. Zubair never did either. Lachlan did, but only when he thought laughter could cut a knot. Sera didn’t poke at all; she made knots into a shape you could live with.
She is center, the hiss warmed, unhelpful but correct.
"Spacing," Zubair called, gloved hand flattening to the surface. "Twenty meters apart. Spread out."
They fanned out without discussion. Lachlan drifted left, Alexei right, Elias back, Sera forward in the clean path where wind had polished the sheet to hard gloss. The rope ran through their harness points with a soft purr. A good sound. The opposite of glass chatter.
The compass in Lachlan’s pocket ticked uselessly. No one brought it out. A joke was waiting in there; no one pulled it.
Elias crouched at the first seam he didn’t like. Frost had feathered thin, crystalline hairs along the join. He brushed them away with the backs of his fingers, watching for spidering, for the whisper of air through a pinhole. Nothing. He pressed his palm flat and listened through glove and bone. The tone that came back lived in a register he trusted. Wind and weight. Not the other thing.
He stood, legs tight, and kept moving. He could feel the healed arm wanting to prove itself with every push against the rope. He refused to let it. He kept his movements small and neat and necessary.
You heal now, the hiss chuckled. You are stronger. We like the pull.
"Shut up," he breathed out, unconsciously speaking aloud.
Sera glanced over her shoulder at nothing in particular. The hiss quieted like someone had set a hand on its head and told it to lie down. Heat slid through his chest. He hated that relief and took it anyway.
-----
Alexei let one smirk curve his mouth at Elias’s twitch earlier because habits are habits and a man should enjoy his work. Then he put the humor away and listened to the ice.
Light feet, Psycho nudged from inside. Don’t trust the shiny skin. It looks strong because it wants to be touched. Don’t touch it.
Psycho was the name of the creature living inside of his body. Alexei never questioned him, never doubted him. They were two sides of the same coin, and the creature would never steer him wrong.
Alexei shifted right and took the ridge on his knees, spreading his weight.
He brought sound into his bones the way his grandfather had taught him on forests that creaked like ships. The ice here carried no long hum. Good. The seam ahead looked honest. He didn’t trust honest-looking things. Good again.
Elias breathed wrong even when his feet were right. Too fast. Too shallow. Alexei noted it, stored it, didn’t pry. Secrets were a type of currency that he had grown up collecting. Even now, it was a habit he wasn’t willing to stop.
He did not tell Elias that Psycho had taught him how to count the wind by the taste of the air at the back of his throat. He did not tell him that Psycho watched Sera like a worshipper and a thief both.
He did not tell anyone that Sera felt like the shape around which all the other shapes wanted to arrange themselves.
Heart, Psycho agreed, warm. She is center. We are tethered there. We don’t go far.
Alexei smiled with his teeth at the horizon. Da.
He had stopped asking why two days after the world ended. It hadn’t helped then, and it sure as how wouldn’t help him now. He no longer needed to know how he got the creature, or what it was. It was part of him, and that was enough.
He checked Sera’s line without looking directly at her. Her weight was set right. Her rope ran clean. The light on the gloss of the ice threw up tricks; he ignored them.
Lachlan bumped against his own tide on the left, restless even when he behaved. Zubair did that thing with his palm and the ice where he pretended he wasn’t listening and listened anyway. Elias watched everything and flinched at nothing except the music in his own head.
Psycho liked the day. It liked the burn in the air and the way sound carried through steel and bone. It liked the smell of Sera’s heat even through snow. It liked the stretched moment before the good thing or the bad thing you already knew was coming.
Ready, Psycho breathed. No jokes now.
No jokes, Alexei answered.
"Spacing," Zubair called. "Test center."
"On it," Sera returned.
Alexei’s rope tugged once with the adjustment. He took up slack and kept the line soft. He felt the wrong tremor half a heartbeat before the crack reached his ear.
He didn’t shout. He just moved—flat to the ice, chest down, weight spread, palm sliding to the edge in a line that wouldn’t push his mass onto the part that wanted to fail.
The plate went out from under Sera like someone yanked a tablecloth. There wasn’t even a scream. She was there one moment, and gone the next, the hole swallowing her like a trick.
In less than a second, Sera was gone.