The city was the colour of held breath at that hour.
Not dark — dawn had begun its work somewhere below the horizon, the sky above Frostilia shifting from black to a deep uncertain blue that hadn't decided yet what it was going to be. The snow on the rooftops caught the not-quite-light and held it, and the streets were empty in the specific way of a city that was asleep rather than absent.
Levi was dressed and downstairs before anyone else stirred.
He stood in the HQ's entrance hall with his pack at his feet and his mother's daggers at his belt and looked at the door. Behind him, the building breathed the slow breath of sleeping people. Ahead of him, through the door, was everything that came next.
He heard footsteps on the stairs. He turned.
Sylvia came down in full gear — fire sword at her hip, hair tied back, the particular composure of someone who had decided exactly how they were going to carry this morning and was carrying it. She looked at him. He looked at her.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"You checked your pack twice already," she said.
"Three times," said Levi.
She almost smiled. Almost. She crossed to where he was standing and stopped in front of him, close enough that he could feel the warmth she ran at even when she wasn't using her ability. She looked at him with the directness she brought to everything — not performing steadiness, just being it.
"How long?" she asked.
"Winters said a few days. Could be a week."
She nodded. Looked at the door. Looked back at him.
"You'll send word when you get there," she said. It wasn't a question.
"First thing," said Levi.
Another silence. The kind that had things in it.
"I know why I'm not going," Sylvia said. "I understand the logic. That doesn't mean I have to like it." She looked at him with something that had moved past anger into something quieter and more honest. "Just — come back. That's all I'm asking. Come back with something that matters and come back whole."
"Both," said Levi. "I promise."
She held his gaze for a moment longer. Then she stepped forward and hugged him — properly, the way she hugged people when she meant it, which was with her whole self and no performance about it. He held on.
They let go before either of them decided to.
"Go," she said. Her voice was even. "Before I change my mind about the logic."
He picked up his pack. He went.
✦ ✦ ✦
Upstairs, Winters was already moving.
He went room by room in the quiet of pre-dawn, knocking once on each door, waiting for the acknowledgment before moving to the next. Priscilla opened her door before he knocked — she'd been awake, sitting cross-legged on her bed with a book she hadn't been reading, and she looked at him with the alert calm of someone who had been ready for an hour. He nodded at her. She nodded back.
Kylie and Kiyandra were already dressed and standing in their room like they'd been waiting at attention, which knowing the twins was probably accurate. Kiyandra had her hair bound. Kylie had her chi already moving at the low idle frequency that meant she was awake in the deepest sense of the word. They looked at Winters and he looked at them and nothing needed to be said because nothing ever needed to be said with the twins, which was one of the things he valued most about them.
He left them to it.
He got to the bottom of the stairs and found Levi already in the entrance hall, which he noted without comment. He picked up his own pack — it had been ready since the night before, as his packs always were — and looked at Levi.
"Ten minutes," Winters said.
"I'll be outside," said Levi.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Frosty Love Café was dark at this hour except for the back kitchen, where a single light burned through the service window. Winters knocked on the side door twice — his knock, the specific rhythm of it — and heard movement inside.
Neve opened it.
She was in her work clothes already, flour on her forearm, her hair loose in the way it was before she tied it for the shift. She looked at him. He looked at her. She stepped back from the door to let him in.
The kitchen was warm. It was always warm. The smell of it — butter, something sweet already in the oven at this hour, the particular warmth of a kitchen that never fully cooled — settled around him the way it always had. He stood in it for a moment.
"How long?" Neve asked. She was already at the counter, resuming what she'd been doing before he knocked. Her back was to him. Her voice was even.
"few days. Maybe a week."
Her hands kept moving. He watched her work for a moment — the economy of it, the specific confidence of someone in their element.
"The cold won't bother you," she said.
"No."
"The others?"
"They'll manage."
She was quiet. Then she turned. She looked at him the way she always looked at him — the same flat assessment, the same sharp eyes, the same complete absence of any instinct to soften things. She'd gotten that from him or he from her; he had never been sure which direction it ran.
"Come back," she said.
"I will," said Winters.
She held his gaze for exactly the moment it required and then turned back to the counter. He stood in the kitchen warmth for another few seconds, filing it away.
She held his gaze for exactly the moment it required and then turned back to the counter. He stood in the kitchen warmth for another few seconds, filing it away.
He was almost at the door when she spoke again.
"Sit down," she said.
He sat at the small table in the corner — the one that had always been his, the one with the specific wobble in the left leg that neither of them had ever fixed because it had been there so long it felt like part of the furniture. He heard the familiar sounds of her working behind the counter. The specific sequence of the machine. The particular rhythm of someone who had made this particular drink so many times that the process had become automatic.
She set the large Frappuccino in front of him.
He looked at it. Then at her.
She had already turned back to the counter.
"You have a long walk ahead of you," she said, to the counter.
He picked up the cup. "I do."
"Drink it before you go." A pause. "I sealed it properly. It'll keep cold."
He drank half of it there at the table, in the warmth of the kitchen, with the smell of butter and the oven and the particular pre-dawn quiet of a café that hadn't opened yet. Neve worked with her back to him and said nothing else and he said nothing else and that was exactly right.
He left the rest in his pack.
Then he went back out into the cold.
✦ ✦ ✦
They left Frostilia at the hour when the sky was still deciding.
Five of them: Levi, Winters, Priscilla, Kylie, Kiyandra. Their packs were loaded for a two-week minimum in sub-zero wilderness. Winters had his list. Priscilla had annotated her copy. The twins had packed with the quiet efficiency of people who had done this before.
Levi walked at the front beside Winters, the city at their backs, the frozen wilderness of Blizzaria opening ahead in the blue-grey of early dawn. The buildings of Frostilia thinned at the edges and then stopped, and there was just the snow — vast and still and white in every direction, the kind of landscape that made the concept of distance feel like a different thing entirely.
He looked back once.
Sylvia was standing at the outer edge of the city, at the place where the last building met the open ground. She was watching them go. She had both arms folded and her chin was up and she looked, from this distance, completely composed.
He raised one hand.
She raised one back.
He turned and walked into the white.
✦ ✦ ✦
Sylvia stood at the city's edge until they were gone — until the five figures had become small against the snow and then smaller and then nothing, swallowed by the distance and the colour of the morning. She stood there a while after that, looking at the place where they'd been.
The composure held.
It held all the way back through the outer streets, past the early-morning citizens emerging for the day, past the guard post at the inner wall where the soldier on duty nodded at her. It held in the elevator at the HQ, and in the corridor on the second floor, and right up to the door of her room.
She closed the door behind her.
She sat on the edge of the bed.
She pressed both hands over her face.
The fire didn't come up this time — not the way it had when Melissa died, not the uncontrolled surge of something breaking. This was smaller and quieter and in some ways harder for that. Just Sylvia, sitting alone in a room in a foreign kingdom, crying without sound into her own hands because the person who usually sat beside her when things were hard had just walked into a frozen wilderness for three weeks.
She let it run its course.
When it passed — not resolved, just completed — she sat up. She wiped her face. She looked at the window, at the grey Blizzarian morning coming through the glass, at the city outside going about its business with the indifference cities had to individual grief.
She had work to do. There were Rogues somewhere in the countryside and a king who needed protecting and a squad that was three people shorter than it had been yesterday.
She stood up. She tied her hair back. She strapped on the fire sword.
She opened the door and went to find Curwyn.