Every time I climbed the stairs, the ice around my ankles cracked.
It was a faint noise. A dry, snapping pop echoed beneath my soles, like the crunch of treading on glass shards. The freezing air of the Depths was still stitched into my clothes; with every movement, the frost crystallized in the fabric fibers flaked away.
I looked down at my sleeve. A fine white powder coated the surface. When I blew on it, the dust took flight and vanished instantly.
Upon returning to the ground floor of the Repository, the three of us stood frozen for a long while.
Asahi leaned his back against the wall, his greatsword propped against the floor and his forehead resting against the hilt. His eyes were tightly shut.
Kuon sat at the corner of the corridor, the Catalog spread across his knees. His hand had stopped mid-turn; the light in his prosthetic eye was dimmed, and he stared at something with his right eye alone.
I sat on the floor between them.
The things I had seen in the Depths still flickered behind my eyelids.
The mass of layered names. Dozens of identities forced into a single block of ice, their outlines crushed against one another. The blue-black walls, illuminated by a pale cerulean glow, stretching on forever.
Every inch of those walls had once been someone.
I opened my notebook. My fingers were so chilled from clutching the pencil that I could barely find the strength to write. Even so, I forced the words onto the page.
—The Depths. Layered Names. Countless. Order slips found. Coordinates recorded in Kuon’s Catalog.
The letters shook. The handwriting was so unstable I could hardly believe it was my own.
I set the pencil down.
“...Asahi.”
There was no answer.
He remained with his eyes closed, his breathing shallow. He wasn’t sleeping.
I decided against calling out to him again.
In the silence, the sounds within the Repository began to surface. The groan of something shifting deep within the walls. The faint rustle of paper on a shelf. It was the noise of an ancient building straining under the weight of its own existence.
Kuon finally spoke.
“I’ve copied the coordinates from the Order slips into the Catalog. But not all of them.”
I looked up. “You couldn’t read them all?”
“What I could read is already a substantial amount. However, among them—”
Kuon cut himself off. He snapped the Catalog shut.
“I’ll speak once I’ve cross-referenced them with the Master records.”
I studied Kuon’s profile—the right side of his face, where his natural eye was. His mouth, usually devoid of expression, was pulled into a tight, thin line.
He had found something. Something he couldn’t bring himself to say just yet.
Asahi opened his eyes.
“...I’m hungry.”
Kuon and I turned to look at him at the same time.
Asahi pushed himself off the wall and hoisted the greatsword onto his shoulder.
“Let’s eat. We can think after that.”
As we stepped outside the Repository, the air of Nakaoka brushed against my skin.
It was morning.
A mist had rolled in. A thin shroud crawled across the ground, swirling around our feet as we walked.
The air felt warm. To a body acclimated to the biting chill of the Depths, the morning air of the hillside felt almost like a warm bath.
I took a deep breath. It smelled of earth. It was the scent of living ground—so different from the Depths, which smelled only of stone, ice, and paper.
Beyond the mist, the roof of the station came into view. The lanterns were still lit, their weak orange flames struggling against the morning light.
Asahi led the way. Kuon followed, the Catalog tucked under his arm. I tucked my notebook into my breast pocket and trailed after them.
Inside my drawstring pouch, the Droplet pulsed gently. It wasn’t the violent thrumming from when we were in the Depths, but a calm, steady beat that seemed to match the rhythm of my stride.
The morning mist thinned our shadows. The shapes falling at our feet dissolved into the fog, their outlines blurring away.
Still, we kept walking. Even if the shapes of our shadows were uncertain, our footsteps remained sure.