Chapter Text
Her footsteps echoed through the empty plane. She tried very hard not to think about the store. Alternative locations flooded her mind: the cabin, Wynn's house, even her childhood home, people she knew flickering between them, darting about like dragonflies.
She thought of Rohan as she walked, and then tried very hard not to, for fear of separating herself from her completely. She hoped Rohan was still in the store. She figured she had to be. She briefly considered the alternatives before deciding she couldn’t.
She thought of the beach. She wondered if the ocean had frozen solid.
She made a plan as she walked. She would find Rohan in the store, take her back to the enclave, the annex—the storage room—and then set out with Rory, with the bear and the fox, whose names she hadn't bothered to ask, and they would search for her parents. They would find them, alive and well, happy to be reunited with their daughter. Things would return to normal. Rory would help her; he had no reason not to.
Seff considered the creatures Rory had warned her about. She would ward them off without trouble, she decided. It was dark, but not too dark. She took out the lantern, along with a box of matches, and struck one. A fragile flame danced on its tip, painting her claws a vivid orange. It flickered and sputtered threats of its own death at her.
She tried to light the lantern.
It went out immediately.
She tossed the match away into the nothing, returned the lantern to her bag, and kept walking in the dark. Her ears stung; wind penetrated the outer layers of her coat and stabbed through her fur. It hurt to breathe; she suspected her nose had frozen. Even outside the store, in the stinging cold and heavy snow, it hadn't been this bad.
She extended one paw in front of her to check for a wall ahead, and though it was met with only empty space, she kept her arm extended just to be sure. Her eyes were beginning to sting, and she saw no use in keeping them open, so she closed them and hoped they would not freeze shut.
Someone shuffled about. Someone whispered. Someone howled. Her footsteps grew louder, and a second set joined them, then faded away, then returned again. A third pair echoed forth from all around her.
Someone screamed. She could not discern the origin of the sound.
She was taken with the urge to open her eyes and see, and another, louder urge, which insisted that she keep them shut at all costs. She reached for her hunting knife. Its handle felt smooth and cold and rubbery, and its blade felt even colder and smoother as she tapped her claw against it. She pulled it out and kept it tightly gripped in her paw.
Her footsteps took on a hundred different qualities; the crunch of snow, the click of tile, the scrape of unpolished wood. She felt one boot sink into sand. She felt another pass through impossibly deep water, and then kicked it up with a faint splash and found her foot had landed on stone, and when she reached back with her other leg towards the same spot there was nothing but solid ground.
She thought of the store again and began to quietly count aloud.
"One."
Her voice was low and hoarse. She felt something cold batter her eyelashes. It would be absurd for there to be snow within the storage room. She was still indoors, after all, regardless of Rory's insistence, regardless of the sand and the water. There were walls somewhere lined with boxes. There was a crate of canned soup somewhere. A whole pallet of processed meat. She hoped she'd live long enough for it to kill her.
"Two."
Every footstep echoed as though it were projected off the edge of a cliff. Her paw, still reaching out in front of her, trembled. Wind sounded off in the distance. She felt a voice in her ear and swore for a moment it was Wynn’s.
"Three."
“Come home,” the voice said. “That cabin is no place to wait out the winter.”
Waves crashed on some distant beach and lapped at the soles of her boots.
“Four.”
“Come home,” it repeated with identical intonation, like a looping audio track or a stuck record. “Come home. Come home."
“Five."
The hot beach sun burnt her ears, which were rapidly going numb from the cold. Her breath lay heavy in her lungs and froze in her throat. The wind chased her from all directions. The polar ice sheets crashed against each other and shattered. The disparate pieces refracted the light of a full moon.
"Please."
She gritted her teeth and squeezed her eyes tighter shut. It was snowing. Her boots sank into the ground. The tips of her ears cracked and froze. The air smelled like cold blood and saltwater.
"I miss you," the voice continued.
Seff's outstretched paw made contact with something solid, and she felt for a handle or a seam. She felt around until she was sure it really was the edge of a door, and then found the handle, and pulled it open with one paw while she tore the ice away from her eyes with the other and opened them. Light flooded her vision; she stepped out into the store and it washed over her completely. She slammed the door, or rather, it slammed itself, pulled shut by the difference in pressure. The echo of her footsteps abruptly quieted, no longer as cavernous as it had been before. Her ears stung.
"Rohan?" she called, wiping off her nose. "I'm back. Sorry I took so long."
No response.
She took a step further into the store and looked around; the lights were on and she could smell at least a little past the rot. It wouldn’t be impossible to find her; still, she called out again, “Rohan?” as she walked.
Seff tucked her knife away into the bag and took the matchbox back out, then removed a match and struck it. It lit and crackled between her fingers and burned until she sharply blew it out. She pulled out the lantern and another match, lit the lantern, and watched the flame dance inside it, watched it twirl, free to reach out and grab the light, unafraid of being choked out.
She doused that, too, and made her way through the aisles; she tried not to slip on the water pooled by the freezers or trip over cans of things someone had knocked over days before. Her boot knocked against a tin of spinach and sent it rolling across the floor, and she picked it up and stuffed it in her bag.
It seemed futile to call Rohan's name a third time, but she did anyway, her voice taking on a frantic note. The store was silent apart from her calls and her footsteps and the faint hum of the lights, and her voice echoed against the wall and came back to her three or four times and ebbed away. She listened carefully for tiny footsteps but heard none, and weaved through the aisles, in and out and in and out. A memory came to her, silly and trivial and stupid: she was playing a game on an old brick of a cell phone, weaving a little snake along the grid. Her claws dug into her palms. The aisles were full of food, rotting, preserved, fresh, canned, inedible and old and wilted and frozen.
She called out again. Her voice became a bark; it gained a harshness and a roughness. The "-han" was swallowed by the meandering aisles. Her heart pounded in her chest, behind the heaviness of muscle and her thick winter clothes, travelling through layers of bone and flesh and fur and up into her throat. Her breathing was ragged; she tried to steady it. Rohan would be fine; she would live. She had survived this far. Seff had promised things to her she hadn't yet delivered on; she had not found her parents.
Rohan's parents were probably dead, she realized. Rory, even with his gang, even with his plays at knowledge and wisdom, wouldn't be able to fix that. She should have understood that earlier, she thought, even before Rory told her anything. Rohan had warned her of monsters, after all, though she had said they were just foxes. Maybe they were just driven to hatred from hunger; maybe they were supernatural manifestations. It didn't matter; the outcome was the same.
Seff made her way to the entrance and looked out the shattered glass door. Moonlight washed across the dead trees.
"Rohan?" she called out through the hole in the glass. Her breath collected in clouds in the dark and disappeared into the frozen air. She stepped closer, and the door slid open. A flash of light flared along the moving glass and vanished. Her boot crunched against a shard of glass. Her teeth cut into her lower lip. "Are you there?"
Seff pulled away from the door and felt warm blood bead up by her mouth; she licked it away. It tasted like smoke and her table saw and hot food. Her stomach growled. She swallowed down a lump of air and ignored it. "Rohan? Where are you?"
She looked down at the snow outside; no fresh footprints led away from the store. She turned away from the door, took another cursory look around the aisles, and considered where in the store Rohan could have gone; she didn't think it particularly likely she'd be hiding, and so her mind drifted back instead to the storage room. She hoped there weren't too many exits in the store; she hoped she could find her, if she really was outside, in the dark. She hoped she hadn't just gone crazy.
She was, she noted, doing a lot of hoping for very little in the way of results.
The store, at least, was fairly self-contained, with just the door to the storage room. She ducked quickly into the bathroom, first the women's, then the men's, just in case, and called Rohan's name both times, found them empty, then returned to the threshold where there was ostensibly a storage room and hoped she would find Rohan there, wandering in the dark; she hoped, ceaselessly, that she would at least find her at all.
She placed a paw back on the handle and opened the door.
The open passageway was a gaping maw, the metal framing it formed lines of straight omnivorous teeth, and it exhaled bitingly cold air from its living throat. She entered without hesitation and felt the wind slam against her like a brick wall. She resisted the urge to call Rohan's name, and instead listened for small footsteps; she strained her ears to try and hear things desperate to remain unheard, and then finally the silence became unbearable and she called out into the darkness.
"Rohan? Are you here?"
She choked; she felt sand and water pour into her open mouth and then come out in sputtering breaths. Tendrils of fog wrapped around her ankles; she could not see them, but she was sure they were there, pulling her in. There was no light in the room, though she felt the sun on her back, soothing her frostbitten body and drawing her away, cut through by the fog and the water that pooled around her ankles. She knelt and placed a paw on the floor; it felt like dry, cold steel. She pulled away immediately and rested her paw on her knee instead, afraid it would freeze to the ground and trap her there forever.
She had seen classmates touch their tongues to poles on freezing days and tear off layers of flesh trying to get free. Warm water would have helped, she knew, but she said nothing from the corner where she sat. She waited out the minutes until her next viola lesson.
She called out again, all the sand suddenly gone and replaced again with bitter air, "Rohan?"
She heard footsteps, and then a familiar voice. "Seff?"
She stood. "Rohan? Is that you?"
"Yes—yes, where are you?" the voice asked.
"I'm over here," she replied, hunting for the source of the sound and aware of how unhelpful her response was. She inhaled sharply, trying to catch her scent; her nostrils stung like they had been bitten into, like she was breathing water, like she was drowning. Her lungs swelled.
She tried counting again, silently this time.
"Rohan?" she called. One.
"I'm here. I'm here." The voice took on a tinny, distant quality. It repeated itself like a stuck record. "I'm here." The vowels felt oddly rearranged. Two.
Seff took a step back and listened again for tiny footsteps. They came from behind her, shuffling on sand; the voice came from in front. She took a breath. Three.
"Rohan?" She took another step back, but still called in front.
"It's Rohan," the voice repeated. Seff sensed hungry desperation in it. She fretted for the Rohan behind her; she tried not to fret for the voice in front. Four.
You're not real, she wanted to say. Where is she?
She extended a paw behind her and hoped it would find something. She bit her lip; her teeth were icicles against it. Her blood was warm. It froze in a trail down her chin before it could even really soak into her fur. Salt stung the wound.
"Rohan," she whispered. "Rohan. Listen to me."
"It's me," said the voice in front of her.
"Seff?" said someone behind her, and she turned around and knelt and reached out her arms until they made contact with a body, small and warm and shaking and breathing, and she pulled Rohan in until she was certain it was really her.
"Don't think about getting out," Seff said, her voice quick and frantic. Her lip stung as she spoke. "Don't think about it. Think about someplace else. Think about—think about, I don't know, the beach. The woods. Someplace else."
"What?" Rohan said. She sounded tiny and weak and afraid.
"This place knows if you do, so you can't. It can tell where you're trying to go, and it wants to keep you from getting there." Seff hesitated, then took a step, then another. "I'll make it easy, okay? I'll talk the whole way."
"It… what?" Rohan said, and curled into a ball in Seff's arms. She felt for Rohan's ears and tucked them into her hood; both were ice cold, though she could hardly tell with her own numb paws.
"Think about the beach. We're going to the beach. We'll stay out here and go to the beach. That's where we really want to go. Nowhere else, really," Seff began. The ground felt intermittently like sand and water and snow and dirt and concrete. Her footsteps clicked and shuffled and sloshed and echoed. "There'll be shells to crunch under our feet and waves to wash us all away. And maybe I'll lie down in the water and let the tide carry me someplace else. Someplace cold. The water's full of ice now, all dark and glittering with moonlight. We'll drink the salt until we choke. We'll feel the sand between our toes. Warm sand. Cold sand. We'll swim away. Everyone we love will be there."
Rohan shuddered; Seff began walking faster, then broke into a full sprint, panting, one arm clutching Rohan tight to her chest and the other feeling out in front of her for a door. In between frantic gasps for air, she continued speaking.
"We'll go down to the beach—" she gasped—"and swim around in circles until we drown. We'll go into the forest. We'll get lost and we'll never come back. We'll be happy about it because that's what we really want." Her words barely felt like her own. "We'll be there with everyone. We can't keep going. There's no point to it. There's no use in continuing, so we'll wander around forever. So what? We'll die. We'll live forever here until we die, okay? That's all we'll do. That's all we're looking for."
Her paw trembled and her heart pounded in her center. "I'm reaching out in front of me to touch the air. I'm reaching out to touch the water—to touch a tree. We'll stay here forever. We'll stay here forever, and we won't ask about the moon, because there's nothing wrong with it. It's a normal night. It's a beautiful night, like last night, and like tomorrow will be. There's nothing else we're looking for. We'll sing songs for you. We'll howl with you. We're—" she said, choking and coughing and gasping for air as she ran—"already dead, so there's no use hunting for us. We're already gone and lost, so you can bother someone else. Give up the chase. If we see an exit, we won't take it."
The water around her ankles receded.
"There's no use looking. We're here and we intend on staying. There's no need to keep us trapp—"
She froze in her tracks.
Her paw made contact with impossibly cold metal.
She pushed the door open and stepped out into the light.
Her boots were dry, she noticed, though Rohan's ears were still freezing; there was no water soaked into her ankles. No sand or snow came off their treads as she walked out.