11:15 AM. Day 16.
The service corridor was a frozen throat. Low ceiling. Bare concrete. No wind, but the still air was worse — it pressed against the skin and settled into the lungs and didn't move, so the cold accumulated instead of passing through. Single file. No room for anything else. The walls were crusted with frost, and through a ventilation grate, Jae-min could see the snow canyon outside—ten meters of white, the packed surface carved by wind into ridges as hard as concrete.
Ji-yoo's breathing had become a metronome counting down. Each inhale shallow enough to miss. Each pause between breaths stretched longer — two seconds, then three, then almost four. Her face had gone from candle wax to something translucent. The man carrying her stopped twice in the first five minutes because her body shifted in his arms and he thought she'd stopped breathing entirely.
She hadn't. But the margin was thinning.
Alessia walked directly behind the carrier, hand on Ji-yoo's back. Counting. Monitoring. The only thing she could do with hands too cold to be precise.
Then she stopped.
Not gradually. Not with hesitation. She just stopped walking. The line behind her compressed. Uncle turned.
Alessia reached forward and put her hand flat against the back of Ji-yoo's neck. Held it there. Three seconds. Four. Then her jaw tightened, veins at her temples stood out like cables, and her other hand pressed against the wall because her knees had started to shake.
Ji-yoo's breathing changed. Not dramatically — just a shift. The intervals between breaths shortened from almost four seconds to two. The depth of each inhale increased slightly.
"Her pulse is stabilizing. Not normal. Not healthy. But no longer sliding toward failure." — Alessia, her voice flat and stripped of everything except the data.
She pulled her hand back. Her fingers were trembling. She was listing slightly left, as if the floor had tilted. The cost was immediate. No delay. No forgiveness.
Jae-min felt it through the twin resonance — a shift in the static at the base of his skull, like a signal that had been drifting off-frequency suddenly snapping back into lock. Ji-yoo's vital signs, transmitted through the bond they shared. Faint. Frayed. But no longer unraveling. The post-freeze resonance amplified the connection—her heartbeat synced to his, her breathing finding rhythm through his. The possessive undertone was still there, even unconscious: mine, stay, don't go. The resonance cascade stabilized for three seconds, four, then faded to its usual low hum. A temporary reprieve. Borrowed rhythm.
Yue's eyes sharpened. The cold-induced blur that had been slowing her perception had thinned. Not gone. But thinner.
The informant watched from the edge of the group. Silent since they'd entered the corridor.
"That won't last. Minutes. Maybe more. Depends on what she just did to herself." — the informant, his voice low. He looked at Ji-yoo. "You move fast, or she dies." — the informant
Jae-min reached.
The void didn't open cleanly. His hand hung in the air. Nothing. The void was there — cold and familiar behind his ribs — but the surface resisted. Like pushing against a frozen membrane.
"The cold has teeth here. Force the aperture." — the entity urged in his mind.
Then it gave. A rough, uneven tear. Edges stuttering instead of flowing smooth. His hand disappeared inside. He pulled.
Metal came first — front skis, then chassis, engine block, the whole machine sliding out of nothing onto the frozen concrete with a heavy, mechanical settle.
One snowmobile. Worn. Practical. Fuel above half. Two seats.
The informant stared at the machine. Then at Jae-min. Then at the empty air where it had come from. He didn't speak for three seconds.
"You're not normal." — the informant, quiet.
Jae-min didn't answer.
Uncle was already doing the math. Forty-seven people. A machine built for two. A time limit measured in minutes.
"I go. You hold." — Jae-min, his voice flat.
Uncle looked at him. The exchange lasted less than a second. Thirty years of command in a single glance — the understanding that sometimes the leader went forward, and this was one of those times.
"Understood." — Uncle, not explaining
Victor. Outside. Holding the perimeter. The radio was dead — cold had killed the battery. Uncle looked at Jennifer. She was already closing her eyes. The mind link hummed — thin, brittle, strained, but holding. Victor's position came through in fragments. Perimeter secure. No movement on the east flank.
As long as she held, they had coordination.
Uncle turned to the corridor.
"Everyone stay here. Consolidate in this bay. Alessia—" — Uncle. She was leaning against the wall, barely upright. "Do what you can." — Uncle, gruff but warm underneath
She nodded once.
The informant mounted the forward seat. His hands found the controls. His posture was slightly less relaxed than before.
"Then move." — the informant, quiet.
He accelerated. The snowmobile pulled forward, skis breaking frost-covered concrete, engine fighting the cold trying to kill it.
The corridor fell away behind them.
The informant had brought them to this point — the route, the timing, the assessment of what lay ahead. But the machine had been in Jae-min's void since the warehouse raid. Pulled from wreckage on impulse, shoved into spatial storage, forgotten. Now it was the only thing standing between his sister and the cold.
"Storage is storage. Even forgotten things serve when needed." — the entity observed in his mind.
The engine faded behind them, swallowed by the cold and the distance opening between the two halves of a group broken apart by the same mathematics that had broken everything else.
Time didn't fix anything. It just made the next decision immediate.