Chapter Text
Seff felt the floor with her paw to check if it had warmed at all, then set Rohan down in the aisle; she was dry but freezing and breathing slowly. She pulled Rohan's hood off her head and unfolded her ears; they felt cold, but not brittle and frostbitten. She pushed her muzzle beside her ear, to the gap made where it folded just before it touched the floor, and spoke softly.
"Rohan," she said, then pulled away and repeated herself, then ran a claw gently by her eye to feel if the lid would twitch at all. She lifted Rohan up and searched around for a source of heat; finding no radiator, she took out the lantern and lit it and left it open, set it beside Rohan, and placed a paw on her chest. "Please wake up."
She stood and looked around for anything at all to help; chemical hand warmers, self-heating meals. There had to be some trick, she thought, some secret tactic she could use to call back the warmth the dark had sapped from Rohan. Physics, she recalled, decreed as such: energy could not be created and could not be destroyed, and so, she thought, all the warmth and heat that had been pulled from the young hare was hiding out in some obscure pocket of reality, some burst of light and fortune and music and life.
She started walking, wandering the aisles stacked high with frozen food and canned goods and meat and fish and poultry and other inconsequential things in search of some source of heat, until eventually she came to rolls of butcher paper and tore at them greedily, clutching bundles of wax paper, stacking them beside Rohan and lighting them in the open lantern.
The fire grew quickly as the wax melted and the paper caught. She hoped it would be close enough to warm Rohan but not too hot to burn her; she hovered one paw over the flames that shot up and danced violently and threatened her with each thrashing twist.
"Please live," she muttered. Her other paw rested over Rohan's heart and felt it beating slowly. "Please."
Seff wondered what she'd tell Rohan's parents, if they were alive. Selfishly, she hoped they weren't; she hoped she'd never have to tell them. She had known their daughter for a few days. She told herself she would trade all the warmth in her body for her. She promised some god somewhere this much. She would give all the life and joy and love in the world and rip it string-by-string from her own heart and give it to Rohan. All the heat ensconced beneath the bulky layers of her body, trapped in the pockets of her fur, held in ripples of rough musculature, she would give away.
Her tongue tasted metal and seawater. She narrowed her eyes. She prayed to no one in particular, and bargained, and screamed without opening her mouth. She hunched over Rohan's body. The lights flickered off; she guessed they were taking a shift letting the generator rest. The wax-paper fire threw a vivid amber glow over them both for just a moment, before it burned quickly away and smoldered to nothing.
She lifted Rohan's body in one arm, closed the lantern and held it with her other hand, and set off back to the cabin.
When they arrived, she set Rohan down on the bed and threw the blankets over her, doused the lantern and the backpack and set them beside her, and then lit the fireplace and scratched impatiently at the bricks while she waited for the flames to grow. Her claws left thin white lines. Blood dripped down her chin. Finally, the fireplace erupted into a shuddering blaze, and she left it and turned back to Rohan. She peeled back the blanket from her injured leg and removed her shoe and got to changing the bandages again, even though the wound had mostly healed. The clocks ticked over the roar of the fire. She checked Rohan's heartbeat again; still quiet, still slow, still there.
"Rohan," she half-whispered.
Rohan didn't respond. Seff slipped her other shoe off and pulled the blankets back over her leg and put the shoes down and settled into the armchair. She thought about Rory again. His offer was tempting, him and his men (and all of them were men, and all of them were carnivores, though that wasn't saying much, given how few there were), the last bastion of society, it seemed. The last group she had met. Certainly the only others. The only strangers. More eyes would undoubtedly help the search. They could cover more ground. They would have food. Rory seemed kind enough, she considered.
And yet Rohan had gone missing the moment she left. She had spent an eternity wandering in the dark, and in the pitch-black of the path to the storage room, Seff couldn't shake the feeling that one of the voices muttering through the nothingness was Rory's. He couldn't be a shadow; he had too much of an affinity for light and comfort and the real. Yet Seff felt somehow that, on the way to that storage room, in the dark, freezing cold passageway, with its thin air and crashing waves and rustling trees and metallic ripples, Rory had died a thousand times.
Her train of thought was interrupted by quiet shuffling from across the room; she turned and, without thinking, jolted at the sight of Rohan, seated upright in bed and sleepily glancing around the cabin.
"You're awake," Seff said, immediately collecting herself.
"Yeah," Rohan muttered. "Um. I have to use the bathroom."
"Lucky for you, I don't have an outhouse." She pointed to the door, across the cabin from the main one, which led to the bathroom. "Go do that. Then you can tell me what happened."
Rohan returned after a few minutes.
"You ever seen a frozen toilet?" she asked, looking significantly more awake. She jumped up and sat back down on the bed, which was clearly too big for her.
"Yeah. Obviously," Seff replied.
"I was just curious."
"I, um. I figured. Have you not used the bathroom at any point in the past…" Seff hesitated. "In the past stretch of time?"
"No. I have. I saw it before, at my house," Rohan replied. "Just felt like you should hear about it." She laughed, kind of nervously.
"Well. Thanks for sharing." Seff sat down in the chair.
"No problem."
"So."
"Yeah?"
"What happened? At the store."
"Oh." Rohan shrank back a bit. Her ears tilted back. "Um. I went looking for you. Because you took a long time to come back."
"Do you know how long?"
"There wasn't a clock, and I'm not good with time off the top of my head. It felt like a few hours. Maybe a lot of hours, but I don't know. I was reading the labels off stuff for a while. I ate some of the hay left over, you know. The parts of the bales we hadn't brought back." Her voice quavered. "I promise I didn't mean to run off. Really. I didn't want to cause trouble. I'm sorry that I did. I think after a while I got worried. That the lynx had hurt you or something. Or that you'd given up on me. And left for good."
"I'm not mad at you."
"Oh."
Seff sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, where her muzzle sloped up to meet her furrowed brow. "But."
"Yeah. There's always a but," Rohan said.
"But I'm upset at myself for disappearing like that. I should have known you'd go looking. It was… stupid. It was stupid of me to do that. I shouldn't have left you in the store alone. I should have gone back for you immediately. I promised—" Seff swallowed hard. "I told you I wasn't going to leave you. I told you that I would follow you if you left. I shouldn't have lied."
"Well, it was… also stupid of me to look for you."
"It wasn't stupid," Seff replied. "You're a kid. And you couldn't have known what was in there."
Rohan was quiet for a long while. Then, in a tiny voice, she asked, "What was in there?"
"You don't remember?"
"No," Rohan replied. "I do. I think. But I don't…"
"You don't understand it?"
"I never said that," she said, a little indignant. "I just want a second opinion."
"Right," Seff said. "You weren't… Rory explained this all, but you weren't there for it." She ran one paw over the crest of her skull, between her ears and down the shaggy, half-matted fur covering the back of her neck.
"Rory's the lynx, right?"
"Yeah."
"Okay. Go on."
Seff took a breath. "God. Have you ever… looked up at the moon? In the past few days."
"No."
"Well. If you look up at it, it's up there right now. Bright and shining and full. Just as full as it's been for… a week. Maybe a month. Maybe longer. I don't know. You… you know how the moon works, right? Like, the phases?"
"Yes," Rohan said. "I think you've asked me this before. We learned about it in, like, elementary school. In Inquiry."
"What's Inquiry?"
"It's just science. But they named it a different thing. I don't know why. It's stupid."
"You think everything is stupid, don't you?"
"Just school."
Seff nodded and got to her feet. "I'm going to make some food," she said, and turned to face a mid-sized can of processed meat product sitting with the rest of the food. "Do you want anything? Spinach, chickpeas, um… hay." Without waiting for a response, Seff hooked a claw into the pull tab of a can of spinach and tore it open, then passed it to Rohan. "You should eat. You've got to be hungry."
"Are you going to finish explaining the thing with the moon?" Rohan eyed the water sloshing around at the surface of the can with some suspicion and took a hesitant sip.
"Right. So, you know it's really weird that it's been the same shape for a while, right? And that it's shining at all?"
"Did Rory explain it?"
"Not exactly," Seff said. "But he told me some interesting things. He's sort of… stratified the world, I guess. You know what that means? He's split it into layers. Categories."
"Like, people?"
"The place itself. The world. The whole shebang."
"Shebang?"
"He said some places are 'inside' and some are 'outside'."
"Well, duh. Next he's gonna tell you that there's such a thing as grass."
"Well, I guess the weird part is, like, it's become a law of reality. Not just words we use. Like gravity or something. And it doesn't adhere to what things actually are, so there are some places that are inside that are actually outside. I guess maybe vice versa too, but I don't know for sure." She took a breath. "All I know is apparently, the outside places don't like light. Some of them are weird, and larger than they'd be in the light. And in there you hear and feel things that aren't real. And that's the hall. An outside place that ended up inside."
Rohan tilted her head. Seff turned back to the pile of food.
"I sound insane." She sighed. "And I haven't even mentioned the ghosts."
"Are you trying to freak me out?" Rohan asked. "Because I feel like that's kind of an asshole thing to do after all that."
"I'm not. I promise. Rory says there are… shadows. That's what he called them, but really, I think they're ghosts. Most like ghosts, at least. Or they pretend to be ghosts."
"Why do you think that?"
Wynn's voice echoed in Seff's thoughts. "Just a hunch. They're… it's unclear. I guess they look and sound like anything, really, but they don't like the light. That's what they have in common. The light keeps them away."
"Oh."
"So, I was thinking. About those foxes."
"The—"
"The ones who separated you from your parents, right?"
"Mhm."
"What if they weren't really foxes?"
"Maybe," Rohan said. "Does it matter? They killed my parents either way."
"You don't think they're still alive?"
"I don't know."
Seff realized she had been staring at the can of processed meat for an extended period of time. She knelt down and picked it up and peeled open the lid and stared at its gelatinous pink contents, feeling all of a sudden not hungry at all. She glanced back at Rohan, who had eaten about half the can of spinach.
"Do you want a lemon drop?" Seff asked.
Rohan nodded. Seff knelt down and rummaged through the backpack, then pulled out the bag of lemon drops and handed them to Rohan.
"I heard my parents," Rohan said, her mouth half full of lemon drop. "In there."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. So if they're really ghosts, I guess that… answers some questions." She sounded resigned, like she'd done all her processing while unconscious.
"It's not just dead people you hear," Seff replied. "Don't… give up hope like that."
"How do you know?"
"I heard you in there, too."
Rohan blinked.
"Oh."
The fire crackled. Seff looked down at her claws, chipped and broken, and licked the dried blood from the fur on her chin.
"I think it's just… people you miss," Seff said, finally. "Things you regret. I don't know if it's trying to tell you anything beyond how much it sucks, that they're gone."
"It does suck."
"Yeah. It's kind of like an angler fish, maybe. Luring you into the dark." Seff sighed. "I don't know. I think that's kind of a stupid metaphor." Rohan swallowed and took out another lemon drop.
"These are kinda stale," she observed.
"Does candy go stale?"
"Maybe." Rohan shrugged. "They're cold."
"I'm sorry I can't appeal to your exacting standards. May I remind you that it is literally the end of the world?"
Rohan grumbled a bit and flopped back onto the bed. "Do you really think that?"
"I don't know." Seff looked back at the can of meat product. Her appetite had returned a bit, though it didn't necessarily make the contents of the can any more appealing. Internally, she had already given up on attempting to dress it up like a proper meal and was now quite regretting that decision. "I hope it's temporary, I guess."
"But you've given up?"
"I mean, you're not supposed to tell kids when you've given up. But kind of."
"Okay," Rohan said. "So why won't you let me give up about my parents?"
Seff hesitated for a long while. "I don't know what you're going to do without them."
"Stay here?" she offered. "I mean, you're nice."
"No," Seff said immediately. "You can't. I mean, you have a family. And I couldn't even keep you from wandering off. I'd be a terrible replacement."
"Oh."
"I guess I could go back and ask Rory. He offered to help find your parents earlier. If we meet back up with him and his group, maybe they can help take care of you, even if we don't find them."
Rohan said nothing but shifted in her seat.
"Good plan?" Seff asked.
"There were riots," Rohan said finally. "In the city. After the sun went away."
"Yeah? I guess that makes sense," Seff said. "People tend to do that when bad things happen. They lash out and panic. And steal stuff. Stupid stuff, like jewelry and flatscreen televisions."
"I found out because we could still get TV. For a day or two. Then the signal went away, and then the power went out and we didn't have a generator. And it never came back on."
"Did you see any of the monsters?" Seff asked.
"No," Rohan replied. "Just people."
Seff nodded. "So, are you going to answer my question?"
"I was trying to. I don't know if I trust him."
"Neither do I," Seff said. "But what's the alternative?"
Rohan didn't reply.
"Are you tired?" Seff asked.
"Do I look tired?"
"I don't know. I'm asking because I'm tired."
Rohan shifted. "Kind of, I guess."
Seff looked back down at the can of meat she was still holding. She held her breath and quickly finished it; it wasn't too bad, really. She had anticipated worse. "You done eating?"
Rohan nodded. Seff took the empty spinach can and set it down by the fire.
"If you're tired," Seff said, "you can take the bed. I'm okay sleeping in the chair."
"Are you sure?" Rohan asked. "I mean, I'm smaller. I can fit in the chair."
"Yeah," Seff replied. "I'm sure. Go ahead."
Rohan pulled the blankets over her head and disappeared into the bed. Seff slumped back in the chair and closed her eyes.
It was a long, silent moment before she fell asleep.