Chương 40: 17-1.Sharing a Moment

The moment we went over the edge, I honestly expected to be rearranged into something deeply undignified. What hit me first wasn't stone or concrete. It was water. Ice water—cold enough to make a man sincerely question whether the entire pantheon had convened a private meeting specifically about him. The instant I went under, every half-formed thought I'd been desperately maintaining—Should I let go to save myself? Was Alvira's "idiot" aimed at me or herself? —was violently obliterated.

The cold didn't seep into my bones; it pried them open and poured itself directly inside. My chest locked up completely. My lungs felt like they'd been punched from the inside out, and I couldn't draw breath. Worse, I was still holding Alvira. So we plunged into that reeking black water together like a pair of discarded bundles, neither of us with any claim to dignity—just wet, freezing humiliation made manifest. What followed is fragmented in my memory.

I remember a long stretch where all I could hear was water thrashing, masonry collapsing, and that cursed broadcast song echoing from somewhere impossibly distant. Whatever dead nation had spawned that anthem, the fact that it followed us all the way down here made me want to crawl back up and detonate the entire mall a second time out of pure spite. When I finally regained my senses, the first thing I felt wasn't pain. It was cold. Cold so absolute that pain had to wait its turn.

I dragged in what I thought was air and got a lungful of damp, rust, mold, and stagnant water instead. The coughing fit that followed made my entire body feel like it had been dragged face-down across broken stone—which, considering recent events, wasn't far from accurate. Elbows, shoulders, knees, ribs—everything filed its complaint simultaneously. But it was honest pain. The kind that serves as proof of life. I pushed myself from hands and knees into something resembling upright.

The darkness around me wasn't absolute—not the pure black of a sealed tomb, but the layered gloom of vast ruined space pressing down from above. Far overhead, faint gray-white light filtered through a shattered glass dome, fractured further by broken railings, collapsed storefronts, and tilted support beams. Wind found its way through those unseen gaps, threading down through the dead levels of the mall before arriving here with nothing left to lose. That was when I realized I was still half-submerged.

Not in a pond or river. This was the inevitable result of structural collapse—a stagnant pool where groundwater, sewage runoff, snowmelt, and whatever had been seeping through these foundations for centuries had all gathered into one black basin. The water barely reached my chest when standing, which somehow made it worse. It wasn't deep enough to drown you quickly; it was just going to freeze you slowly.

"... Alvira." My voice came out wrecked, like I'd swallowed gravel. Silence. My stomach dropped. I forced my numb legs under me and stood. The moment I moved, my ribs seized with pain sharp enough to blur my vision—I nearly collapsed back into the water. Still intact. Probably. The bones were where I'd left them. My body was simply staging a unified protest against the decision to leap into an abyss after someone who had specifically called me an idiot for doing so. Stupid or not, I still had to find her.

I gritted my teeth and waded forward, mentally cursing myself from birth to present. The black water cut like a blade. My boots were completely flooded; each step felt like treading on something cold and dead that was actively siphoning heat from my body. The torch was long gone. My sword still hung at my waist, though right now it served more as emotional support than practical tool. A few steps further, I found her beside a half-submerged metal panel.

Alvira was half in the water, her silver hair soaked through and plastered against her face and neck, dulled to ashy gray in the gloom. She was conscious but clearly not all there yet—right hand braced weakly against the metal, breathing shallow, left shoulder hanging at an angle that made something in my chest go tight just looking at it. The breath I'd been holding came out slowly.

"... Hey." I reached out and tapped her uninjured shoulder. Her brow creased immediately, like she was already composing something unpleasant to say. Good. Very much a living person's reaction. After a beat, she opened her eyes. Those dark green irises found me, lost focus for a moment, then slowly connected my face to the concept of still alive. She was quiet for a heartbeat. Then her first words were—"You're not dead."

I almost laughed, then winced as the movement tugged my ribs and sent fresh pain shooting through my side.

"Deeply sorry to disappoint." Alvira looked at me for two seconds, apparently considered saying something else, and settled for a low exhale.

"... Idiot."

"You already used that line on the way down. Care to workshop some new material?"

"Keep talking and I'll come up with something very new." Good. Tongue still sharp. Brain probably intact. I started pulling her upright. The moment I touched her shoulder, she went rigid—lips pressing into a thin line.

"Where?" I asked.

"Left shoulder." Her voice stayed perfectly level, which only made it more obvious she was forcing it.

"What else?"

"Left foot. Landing impact. Some numbness."

"Some numbness?"

"... It hurts considerably."

"Now that sounds like an honest answer." She shot me a look. Under normal circumstances, that glare could probably flash-freeze new recruits where they stood. Right now, with her hair soaked flat, face drained of color, and water clinging to her eyelashes, it had lost approximately half its lethality. Not weaker—just carrying something that had no business being on her face. Something that looked almost like vulnerability. It felt deeply inconvenient to notice. So I didn't.

"Up," I said.

"If we stay in this water much longer, we'll become the most well-preserved archaeological specimens in Old Civilization history."

"I can manage—" She put weight on her left foot. Her balance went immediately. I caught her before she could finish the sentence, which neatly buried whatever "I can do it myself" nonsense she'd been about to utter.

"Manage what, exactly? Falling back in?"

"..."

"Don't push it," I said quietly.

"You can't out-stubborn this kind of cold." She didn't argue. That, more than anything else about her current state, was what I couldn't process. I pulled her arm across my shoulders and half-walked, half-carried her toward shallower ground. She didn't push me away—but when her weight finally settled against me, her breathing hitched. The shoulder, probably. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Tell me when it hurts," I said.

"You've become very talkative."

"Conversation is currently the only advanced medical treatment I have available."

"Tremendously reassuring."

"At least I know step one is 'get out of the freezing water.'" We made it onto a raised section of broken flooring—what had probably been some kind of sunken plaza or service area at the mall's lowest level. Shattered glass, collapsed metal shelving, and signage warped beyond recognition littered the ground. Further back, several Old Civilization machines lay on their sides in the shadows, black and inert, like beetles that had died without managing to close their eyes. The wind was still coming. Mercilessly so.

Even down here at the bottom level, it funneled through the fractured glass ceiling far above, dropped through the hollow spaces between collapsed floors, and swept across this flooded basin having shed every last degree of warmth along the way. This wasn't the capital's polite winter cold—the kind you could solve with an extra coat. This was Northern Reaches cold, the kind where your fingers and toes start negotiating among themselves about who surrenders first.

I took one look around and reached an immediate conclusion. We couldn't stay here.

"Can you move?" I asked. Alvira leaned against a tilted metal column, her color still poor, but her eyes had already started scanning—mapping terrain and exits, reading the tactical situation rather than checking whether she was going to freeze to death.

"There." She lifted her chin toward a row of storefronts half-swallowed by shadow.

"Enclosed space behind those." I followed her indication. A service corridor—employee rooms or back-of-house facilities, lower ceiling and narrower than the main concourse. Several doors hung at wrong angles; one metal door, though warped, had retained most of its structure. Above it, an Old Civilization sign I couldn't parse. More importantly: sheltered from the wind, slightly elevated, and the floor looked relatively dry.

"That one," I said.

"Go check it first—""Not happening." I cut her off.

"If I leave you here alone, I'll come back to a frozen elf and a great deal of guilt." Her brow creased.

"I'm not that fragile."

"Of course not." I nodded with complete sincerity.

"You're simply someone who can't take two steps without pain, can barely lift one arm, and happens to be as wet as something pulled from an ice bucket. Completely different situation."

"... Your mouth is genuinely terrible."

"Mutually." She looked at me like she had something sharper to say, then let it go with a breath. I crouched down and glanced back at her.

"Get on." Alvira blinked.

"What?"

"I said get on." I kept my voice patient.

"Your foot is in no condition for a performance of Northern military stoicism. Let's get you somewhere dry first."

"I can walk with support."

"You could," I agreed.

"But I'd rather not spend the next half hour watching you silently curse yourself with every step."

"I don't—""Are you getting on or not?" Silence. Two, maybe three seconds. It felt longer than the fight with the Graftling. Finally, she placed her right hand on my shoulder and, with movements that were slightly too careful, let me take her weight. She was lighter than I'd expected. Which wasn't reassuring. The moment she settled against my back, what I registered first wasn't weight—it was cold.

Soaked cloak, ice-cold hair, and breathing pressed deliberately low, controlled, clearly managing pain she had no intention of announcing. My back went rigid without permission.

"... Do you actually eat regularly?"

"That's your first comment after picking me up?"

"What else should I say? That you're lighter than you look?"

"Then I recommend shutting up."

"As you wish, Lady Alvira."

"Don't use that tone when you say my name."

"You're the one forbidding me from stating facts." She probably meant to rap me on the head. Her shoulder caught mid-motion and she made a short, pained sound instead. The rebuttal died. She settled her chin against my shoulder with obvious reluctance, conserving energy rather than continuing the argument.... Right. If Jessi ever saw this, my next month was already forfeit. I held a brief funeral for my future peace of mind and started picking my way across broken glass and wet stone toward the service corridor.

The deeper we went, the more the wind faded. The acoustics changed too. The vast, hollow echoes of the concourse gave way to something closer and more intimate. Only occasional fragments of that broadcast drifted through from far above, mixed with the slow drip of water finding its level somewhere in the dark. The darkness pressed closer—close enough that reaching out felt like it might touch the rotting lungs of this dead mall.

I reached the warped metal door, eased Alvira down against the wall, then put my shoulder into it. It didn't move at first. I tried again with more conviction—and the accumulated ache of the entire evening behind it. The door produced a long, ugly groan, the sound of something ancient being dragged unwillingly from sleep, then scraped inward far enough to admit us. Inside: complete darkness. But no wind. I stood in the doorway and tested the air. Dust, damp, old paper, the chemical decay of aged plastic.

Unpleasant, but no standing water and no immediate stench of occupation. Good news: this didn't currently appear to be anything's nest. Bad news: in a place like this, currently was doing heavy lifting in that assessment. I looked back at Alvira. She was studying the darkness beyond the door. Still pale, still soaked, but that blade-sharp focus was slowly reassembling behind her eyes.

That was the most terrifying and simultaneously most reassuring thing about her: no matter how badly she'd been knocked around, as long as she was breathing, that edge always found its way back. Like a weapon that resharpened itself.

"Clear," I said. She nodded once. I helped her through the gap, then pulled the door back into its frame as best I could. The warped metal caught with a dull grinding sound, and most of the wind stopped. The world went much quieter. Not silent. Just a different kind of dead—closer, more intimate, pressed right up against the ear. I stood in the dark, listening to our breathing slowly even out, and let a long breath fog out in front of me. For the moment, we had shelter.

The door groaned shut behind me with the sound of metal that had abandoned all pretense of dignity. It wasn't much of a door—just a warped service hatch I'd forced open with my shoulder, now held in place mostly by its own damaged frame. As security went, it ranked somewhere between folding your last will into your breast pocket and outright wishful thinking. The psychological comfort it provided vastly exceeded its structural contribution. But the wind had stopped. I set Alvira down against the wall.

She made a sound when she landed—low, compressed, the kind of sound someone makes when they've decided pain doesn't get an audience. Whether this woman was a soldier or some kind of mechanical device specifically engineered to be difficult with herself, I honestly couldn't determine. The faint torchlight caught her face: wet, pale, cold. Her left shoulder still hung wrong. Her boot touched down at a compensating angle that confirmed the ankle had suffered alongside everything else.

I wasn't in pristine condition myself. My whole body felt like it had been processed by a freight convoy, one wheel at a time. My back burned. Both elbows and knees were seeping. My right ribs issued a formal complaint with every breath. But the bones were where I'd left them. Being upright after all of that entitled me to some gratitude toward whatever gods, ancestors, and accidental bodies of freezing water had conspired to keep me from landing somewhere worse.

"Still alive?" I managed, panting.

"... Temporarily." She looked up at me with that same professional detachment—like she was reporting unit casualties rather than confirming her own continued existence.

"Same here," I said.

"Looks like neither of us has immediate plans to meet our ancestors tonight." She didn't smile. Just turned her gaze away and drew a careful breath against the wall. The room was some kind of back-of-house storage—service area, probably. Not large. Overturned metal shelving, wooden crates rotted to their frames, plastic containers of indeterminate original purpose, and a smell compounded of damp, mildew, rust, and something that had once been cleaning solution.

Compared to the sulfur, putrefied flesh, and dried blood of the concourse above, this qualified as luxury accommodation. Lacking only hot soup and a bed. Actually—if someone materialized right now with a bowl of that sludge they called stew from Nest 144, the kind dense enough to patch masonry, I would probably weep without shame. Human dignity is a remarkably negotiable commodity when hypothermia is doing the bargaining.

"Don't sleep," I said, crouching beside her and touching her uninjured arm.

"Wet clothes will kill us before anything else does."

"I know." She tried to push herself up using the wall. Her shoulder caught mid-motion and her face twisted. I steadied her before she could slide back down. She stiffened at the contact—reflexively ready to pull away—then stopped herself. Not surrender. Just tactical reassessment. Stubbornness with no strategic value had been quietly decommissioned.

"Stay down," I said.

"Are you giving me orders now?"

"Yes. One person who is almost frozen solid and actively bleeding is giving another person who is also almost frozen solid but has more functional limbs a highly constructive directive." She held my gaze for two full seconds. Then, without argument, she said quietly:"... Then be quick about it, Cedric." I paused. Not at the words. At the name.

Down here—in a place where something with three heads might still be circling above us, where a dead nation's anthem played through ancient speakers, where we'd both been deposited by a collapsing floor like things the world had decided to discard—she had used no title, no rank, no tone sharpened to strike sparks. Just my name. Right. My brain was probably starting to freeze. That was the only reasonable explanation for why something that small made my pulse do something inconvenient.

I wedged the torch into a gap in the wall for stable light and started looking for anything that would burn. The problem with a place like this wasn't scarcity—it was that ninety percent of everything present was either soaked, rotted, or visibly toxic when combusted. Cardboard boxes disintegrated at a touch. The wood was saturated. Several rolls of what looked like promotional banners had molded on the outside but retained dry material within.

I cut them open with my knife, extracted usable sections—dry packing paper, cloth strips, wood fragments—and located a broken stool in the corner, kicking its legs free for kindling. Thank the gods, at least the Legion-issued marching pack still included waterproof tinder and flint. The Northern Reaches doesn't believe in romance, but it has absolute faith in your ability to freeze to death without warning, so the survival essentials were packed with genuine conviction.

I crouched on the floor and struck three times. First strike: the spark flared and died, as if personally mocking me. Second strike: smoke, no flame. The mockery continued. Third strike: I gritted my teeth, hunched my entire body over to block the draft, and carefully nursed that feeble ember—no larger than a dying man's last breath—into the shredded cloth and dry paper. Finally, it caught. Small—just a pathetic cluster of orange-red light. But down here, it commanded more authority than any crown I'd ever seen.

I stared at it for two full seconds and came very close to kneeling down and claiming it as my legal guardian.

"We have fire," I said, turning back.

"I can see that."

"You know, that tone really kills a person's enthusiasm for rescue work."

"Then you can put it out."

"... My apologies. I spoke out of turn. Please continue surviving." Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Faint, but I saw it. I coaxed the fire into a stable burn, then returned to her side. Alvira's hair and jacket were still dripping, and the shoulder buckles had seized completely—soaked through and slammed by the fall, they'd locked themselves shut. She tried twice with her right hand and couldn't generate enough leverage to work the left side free.