Day 10. 9:42 AM.
-70°C exterior.
20°C inside.
Unit 1418.
Ji-yoo had been awake for two and a half hours and had spent every one of them being treated like a patient, like something fragile, like a girl who had died on a frozen mountainside and come back with silver traceries under her skin and a gravitational field she couldn't fully control.
Which was exactly what she was, but she didn't have to like it.
She sat on the porcelain tile with her back against the charcoal sectional and her black ponytail loose and frizzy from sleep she hadn't really slept, the blanket Alessia had draped over her legs having slid to the floor.
The IV was gone, pulled yesterday over Alessia's protests, but the small bruise on the inside of her elbow still ached.
She didn't need the IV because she was fine.
It was just that gravity kept leaking.
A pen was orbiting the water bottle on the coffee table in a lazy elliptical path four inches off the polished wood surface, rotating end over end like a tiny satellite around a plastic planet, the orbit stable for the last twenty minutes while Ji-yoo tried very hard to pretend it wasn't happening.
The IV stand in the corner was bending, not falling but curving gently toward her like a flower turning toward the sun, the chrome pole groaning softly under a force it had never been designed to resist.
And the pills, the four small white ibuprofen tablets Alessia had left in a neat row, had clustered together like baby ducks and migrated across the polished surface to huddle against the base of the water bottle in a tight trembling little family.
Nobody said anything for a while.
Then Alessia looked up from the medical supplies she was organizing on the dining table with her blue eyes tracking the orbiting pen.
"Ji-yoo, your gravity is leaking." Alessia observed, a patient concern softening her clinical tone.
"I know." Ji-yoo murmured, a defensive irritation pressing her palms flat against the porcelain tile. "I'm ignoring it."
"You're bending the IV stand." Alessia pointed out, a wry amusement tugging at the corner of her mouth.
"It's a bad stand." Ji-yoo countered, a stubborn defiance hardening her jaw.
Rico looked up from the Samsung TV where he'd been monitoring building communications.
"Control it." Rico commanded, a gruff affection roughening his baritone. "Or pull someone's spleen out through their navel."
"Uncle!" Ji-yoo gasped, a scandalized horror widening her black eyes.
"I've seen it happen." Rico continued, a dark nostalgia settling over his weathered features as he turned back to the screen. "Portuguese cargo ship. Gravitational anomaly. Three sailors. Two spleens. One kidney. Very messy."
"That is NOT helping!" Ji-yoo shrieked, a frantic anxiety speeding her pulse as she looked at the orbiting pen with fresh alarm.
She closed her eyes and reached for the field, the invisible shimmering humming thing that lived in her sternum and extended outward in a fifteen-foot radius, trying to pull it back and compress it and make it stop.
The field pulsed outward.
The pen shot off its orbit like a bullet from a sling and crossed the living room in a flat humming trajectory that embedded itself in the drywall next to the kitchen doorway with a sharp thunk, the ballpoint tip buried a quarter-inch into the painted surface.
The pills scattered like startled insects pinging off the coffee table in four directions and vanishing under the sectional, the IV stand snapped back to vertical with a metallic twang, and the water bottle fell over.
Everyone stared at the pen in the wall.
"Interesting." Yue noted, a cold fascination sharpening her marble eyes from her position against the wall. "The pulse signature is consistent with the discharge pattern from Day Nine."
Then she said nothing else because that was apparently the full extent of Yue's commentary on Ji-yoo launching a pen into drywall with her mind.
"Better." Alessia declared, a careful approval examining the pen wound in the wall.
"That was worse." Ji-yoo countered, a hollow disbelief flattening her voice. "That was definitely worse."
But the gravity was contained now, collapsed back to its resting radius of about four feet around her body and humming at a frequency she could feel in her molars.
And inside that radius she could feel everything, not see but feel as masses and distances and vectors, Alessia the densest and Rico the largest and Yue the lightest and Jae-min wrong with a signature too heavy and too deep like standing next to a well that had no bottom, and Jennifer barely there like a flickering gravitational candle.
'If I can feel them, they're still here. They haven't left.' Ji-yoo grounded herself, a fierce desperate relief anchoring her to the floor. 'I haven't lost anyone else.'
She leaned her head back and closed her eyes and felt the room breathe around her.
Then she opened her eyes and looked toward the storage room with the door open a crack, scanning the shelves of canned food and water reserves and emergency supplies.
No scythe.
'Soulcleaver. The eight-foot reaper scythe with the obsidian frame and purple crystal highlights. The weapon that converted from scythe to rifle.' Ji-yoo recalled, a cold dread settling into her bones as she scanned the room again. 'Gone. It doesn't exist.'
"Kuya." Ji-yoo called, a careful dread anchoring her low voice.
"Yeah?" Jae-min replied, a quiet attention lifting his gaze from beside Alessia on the sectional.
"I need my scythe." Ji-yoo pressed, a rising desperation creeping into her careful tone as she sat up straight with her hands flat on the tile. "Soulcleaver. The big one. Eight feet. Obsidian frame. Purple crystal highlights. Converts to a rifle."
Jae-min looked at her, then at the storage room door, then back at her.
"Ji-yoo, there's no scythe in the storage room." Jae-min answered, a gentle sorrow weighing down each word.
"Then where is it?" Ji-yoo demanded, a wild hope cracking her voice as she scrambled to her feet with the gravity field pulsing and the sectional cushion sliding three inches toward her. "Did you put it somewhere else? The bedroom? The balcony?"
"Ji-yoo." Jae-min breathed, a cautious patience grounding his tone as he stood and crossed the room to stand in front of her.
He was taller by four inches, and she had to tilt her chin up to meet his eyes.
"The scythe doesn't exist in this timeline." Jae-min declared, a quiet heartbreak softening his steady voice.
Ji-yoo stared at him.
'My body remembers a weapon that was never awakened. My muscles know the weight of something that was never carried.' Ji-yoo grieved, a raw hollow ache settling into her palms. 'How can something that's in my body not exist?'
She raised her hands and looked at them, turning them over and studying the smooth unmarked palms with no calluses and no grooves.
Then she air-scythed.
Feet planted and swinging an invisible blade through a horizontal arc that would have cleaved a man in half at the waist, the gravity pulse launching the cushion off the sectional in a lazy parabola that struck the kitchen island and flopped to the porcelain tile.
Rico watched the cushion fall.
"Was that supposed to happen?" Rico questioned, a dry skepticism.
"No." Ji-yoo admitted, a mortified frustration burning her cheeks as she lowered her arms.
'The Ji-yoo who carried Soulcleaver was someone. A warrior. A weapon.' Ji-yoo mourned, a cold hollow grief for an identity she had lost. 'The Ji-yoo standing here with empty hands is less. Diminished.'
She knew she was whining and she didn't care.
— • • • —
Rico pushed off from the kitchen counter and walked to the storage room, emerging thirty seconds later with a rifle in each hand.
"Here. Take your pick." Rico offered, a practical generosity extending his weathered hands. "Both are sighted, cleaned, and loaded."
Ji-yoo looked at the rifles like he was offering her toothpicks. "Those are toothpicks." Ji-yoo dismissed, a withering flatness.
"These toothpicks have killed forty-seven confirmed hostiles across three theaters of operation." Rico countered, a proud indignation stiffening his posture.
"Uncle. I've killed things that eat things that eat things that would eat your rifle." Ji-yoo declared, a cosmic exhaustion weighing down each word as she ticked the levels off on her fingers. "Three levels of eating, Uncle. Your rifle is on level zero."
Rico stared at her and she stared back.
"Level zero." Ji-yoo repeated, a mournful certainty sagging her shoulders. "Deer rifle. Good for deer. Bad for gods. I need a weapon that can kill gods, not deer."
"We don't have god-killing weapons." Rico replied, a weary realism lowering the rifles to his sides.
"Then I need to awaken another." Ji-yoo resolved, a stubborn determination hardening her black eyes. "I need my scythe. Or the right conditions to manifest one. Or a really aggressive spatula. Something."
"Eat first." Alessia ordered, a doctor's authority allowing no argument as she stood and walked toward the kitchen.
"Can I manifest a legendary Soulbound weapon on a half-empty stomach?" Ji-yoo questioned, a theatrical desperation.
"You can eat on a completely empty stomach, which is what you have." Alessia countered, a maternal firmness opening the cabinetry and retrieving a can.
"What if I promise to eat after I align my Trinity?" Ji-yoo bargained, a desperate hope.
"No." Alessia refused, a flat finality.
"What if I eat half now and meet the condition later?" Ji-yoo pressed, a cunning desperation.
"You're not manifesting food." Alessia corrected, a weary amusement.
"What if I eat an eighth now?" Ji-yoo urged, a mathematical desperation.
"No." Alessia refused again.
"A sixteenth?" Ji-yoo pushed, a fractional bargaining.
"Ji-yoo. Eat." Alessia commanded, a tender authority setting a bowl on the counter and fixing her with a look that had silenced ER patients twice Ji-yoo's size.
Ji-yoo ate, grudgingly and dramatically and with the air of a martyr being fed to a lion who happened to be made of rice and canned meat.
"When I get Soulcleaver back." Ji-yoo murmured through a mouthful of rice, a vengeful promise lighting her black eyes. "I'm using the rifle mode to flip enemy heads like burgers. A really aggressive spatula."
"Chew with your mouth closed." Alessia instructed, a reflexive older-sister instinct overriding her doctor composure.
— • • • —
Ji-yoo set the bowl on the coffee table and leaned back against the sectional.
Her eyes drifted to Jae-min and Alessia, settled beside each other with Alessia's shoulder against his and her hand finding his like it was the most natural thing in the world, his thumb tracing a slow circle on the back of her hand.
'Two timelines overlapping. In one version Alessia was just the doctor. In the other she was someone else entirely.' Ji-yoo realized, a disoriented confusion freezing her features as the memories collided. 'Which is which?'
"Wait." Ji-yoo started, a confused hesitation freezing her features as her black eyes flicked between them. "Are you two —."
Then the current-timeline memory surfaced like a bubble breaking through thick water, sudden and complete and mortifying.
The master suite.
Alessia stumbling out with her hair in disarray and her face flushed.
Jae-min behind her with the particular satisfied blankness of a man who had been interrupted.
The waggled eyebrows.
The sounds through the walls.
"Oh. Right." Ji-yoo said, a hot embarrassment flooding her cheeks. "The master suite. The sounds through the walls. The eyebrow thing. I already knew that. Never mind."
"What just happened?" Jae-min questioned, an amused suspicion narrowing his eyes.
"Nothing. Brain glitch. Two timelines, remember?" Ji-yoo deflected, a defensive breeziness waving a hand. "Sometimes they overlap and I forget which one I'm in. You two are together. I know. I've known. I was there. I waggled eyebrows. It was a whole thing."
"You waggled eyebrows." Alessia murmured, a cautious amusement tugging at her crimson ears.
"I'm being supportive." Ji-yoo declared, a defensive pride lifting her chin. Then softer: "Ate, for the record, he hasn't stopped staring at you since I woke up."
Alessia's ears went a shade of red that Ji-yoo hadn't known was anatomically possible.
Jae-min's hand moved from Alessia's hand to her knee, natural and established and the kind of automatic contact that happened between people who had already memorized each other's bodies, and Alessia's hand settled over his and squeezed once.
Ji-yoo looked away because the memory glitch had shaken her more than she wanted to admit.
— • • • —
Alessia waited until Ji-yoo had stopped looking at the wall.
"Ji-yoo." Alessia called, a careful calm belying the weight of what was coming.
"What?" Ji-yoo questioned, a distracted curiosity pulling her attention from the pen wound.
"We're already at the level that I might be pregnant." Alessia announced, a quiet certainty delivering the words like a surgical strike.
Ji-yoo choked on her own spit.
Her gravitational field spiked, and the water bottle on the coffee table launched itself straight up, hit the ceiling, bounced off the ballistic polycarbonate, and ricocheted into the kitchen where it knocked over a row of cans with a series of metallic clangs.
The pills shot out from under the sectional like white tracer rounds and pinged off three different surfaces before disappearing into the hallway, and the cushion that had been resting on the kitchen island fell off the counter for the second time in ten minutes.
"I was out for a while!" Ji-yoo gasped, a seismic shock detonating behind her black eyes. "That's all I was out! I knew you two were together, but I didn't know you were SPEED-RUNNING it!"
She jabbed a finger at Jae-min.
"I can't leave you alone for a WEEK without you making BABIES?!" Ji-yoo roared, a fierce sisterly righteousness blazing.
"I didn't say." Alessia started, a defensive composure cracking.
"I INTEND to threaten you." Ji-yoo declared, pointing at Jae-min with the gravity of a judge passing sentence. "If you hurt her, I will find a way to fold you into a spatial origami crane and leave you on the balcony as a warning to others."
"Noted." Jae-min accepted, a quiet acceptance squeezing Alessia's knee.
Rico sat down on the kitchen chair slowly like the chair was the only thing keeping him vertical.
"I need a drink." Rico rasped, a hollow surrender draining his baritone.
"It's 9:50 in the morning, Uncle." Ji-yoo corrected, an automatic response.
"It's 9:50 in the morning in the apocalypse." Rico countered, a weary logic. "The rules are different."
Ji-yoo turned back to Alessia with her eyes huge and the silver traceries pulsing.
"How pregnant might you be?" Ji-yoo pressed, a breathless urgency.
"That's not." Alessia started, a clinical deflection.
"I'm asking follow-up questions! This is standard procedure!" Ji-yoo interjected, an investigative fervor propelling her forward. "When someone drops a bomb like that, you ask follow-up questions! It's journalism!"
"It's not journalism." Alessia refused, a flat medical authority crossing her arms. "That's all I'm going to say about it in front of your brother."
Jae-min's ears went red.
Ji-yoo's mouth opened and closed and opened again, then she smiled, not a smirk but a real smile wide and unguarded and so bright that for a moment she didn't look like a girl who had died and come back with gravity in her bones.
"I'm going to be an AUNT." Ji-yoo breathed, a radiant joy flooding her voice.
The gravitational field pulsed soft and warm, spreading outward from her sternum like a heartbeat made of honey, and on the coffee table the scattered pills rolled back into the living room and climbed the leg of the table and crossed the polished surface and arranged themselves in a heart shape in the exact center.
Everyone stared at the heart.
"My gravity is emotionally compromised." Ji-yoo admitted, a mortified wonder.
"That's adorable." Alessia murmured, a reluctant warmth cracking her doctor mask.
"It's not adorable. It's a malfunction." Ji-yoo countered, a defensive embarrassment. "A highly lethal gravitational anomaly that happens to be expressing itself through heart-shaped pharmaceutical arrangements."
She looked at the heart then at Alessia.
"A scythe is a perfectly reasonable baby shower gift." Ji-yoo declared, a stubborn sincerity.
"No weapons at the baby shower." Alessia refused, an exhausted finality.
"A decorative scythe." Ji-yoo bargained, a hopeful persistence.
"No." Alessia repeated.
— • • • —
Jennifer was in the corner of the sectional and had been quiet through all of it, her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around them and the glow beneath her sternum faint.
'He could have a child. With her. The way it's supposed to happen.' Jennifer ached, a hollow grief opening a pit in her chest. 'I want that. I want to carry something of his. But I stand in doorways. I always stand in doorways.'
She pulled the comforter tighter and made herself smaller.
Rico's eyes found her from across the room, and he didn't say anything but watched her for a long moment with an expression that wasn't pity but something older and sadder, the look of a man who recognized hiding because he'd done plenty of it himself.
He looked away first.
— • • • —
Jae-min crossed the room and sat on the tile next to Ji-yoo.
"Hey." Jae-min murmured, a quiet gentleness dropping his voice to just above a whisper.
"Hey." Ji-yoo replied, a sullen grief pulling her mouth flat.
"We'll get you a weapon. Something better." Jae-min promised, a steady conviction.
"Not Soulcleaver." Ji-yoo answered, a hollow acceptance.
"Not Soulcleaver. Something new. Something yours." Jae-min declared, a fierce conviction burning behind his stoic eyes. "Something that doesn't exist yet. You manifested it once. You'll manifest it again. Better. Stronger. The new one will be more yours than the last."
'It wasn't about the scythe. It was about the person who carried it.' Ji-yoo realized, a fragile grief cracking through her sullen mask. 'The version of myself who stood on battlefields and killed things that shouldn't exist.'
"Promise?" Ji-yoo questioned, a fragile hope.
"Promise." Jae-min vowed, a warm certainty.
He reached over and ruffled her hair, the gesture automatic and brotherly and the kind of thing he'd done a thousand times since childhood.
"Don't." Ji-yoo protested, her hands coming up to protect her hair.
But she leaned into it just enough for him to feel the weight of her head against his palm for half a second before she pushed his hand away.
He felt it, and he always felt it and didn't say anything about it because saying something would make it a thing and it was better as a not-thing.
— • • • —
Jennifer watched him ruffle Ji-yoo's hair from across the room.
'He'll never touch me like that. Not because he's cruel. Because he doesn't know.' Jennifer grieved, a hollow longing settling behind her sternum. 'Because every time I open my mouth, the silence swallows the words.'
She looked at Alessia's hand on Jae-min's knee and at the crimson ears and at the quiet established intimacy that didn't need to announce itself.
'Always Alessia. It was always going to be Alessia.' Jennifer accepted, a quiet resignation folding over her. 'I stand in the doorway. I always stand in the doorway.'
She pulled her knees tighter, and the glow beneath her sternum flickered faint and fading but still there.
— • • • —
Yue sat against the wall with the jian across her knees and her marble eyes half-closed, watching the data.
'The field responds to emotional stimuli. Distress spikes it. Contentment stabilizes it. This is not a weapon. This is a mirror.' Yue catalogued, a cold fascination sharpening each observation. 'And it harmonizes with Jae-min's void signature. Two frequencies falling into phase. I should not have vocabulary for what that produces. I should not feel it.'
She pressed her spine harder against the wall and welcomed the cold of the concrete biting through her shirt.
'Discard the warmth. File the gravitational readings. Delete the rest.' Yue commanded herself, a fierce discipline crushing the heat before it could spread.
The warmth didn't leave.
She closed her eyes and forced her attention back to the vibration in the concrete and pretended very hard that she was made entirely of discipline and nothing else.
— • • • —
The rice was sad.
"This rice has no soul." Ji-yoo announced, a culinary grief poking at the mound of white rice.
"It's rice." Alessia countered, a practical patience.
"It's rice cooked by a camping stove by a doctor who can barely boil water." Ji-yoo pressed, a mournful accuracy.
"I can boil water." Alessia protested, a defensive pride.
"You boiled water once, and the smoke alarm went off." Jae-min murmured, a quiet amusement.
"That was the oil." Alessia deflected, a flushed embarrassment coloring her crimson ears.
"The meat is crying." Ji-yoo continued, a theatrical despair prodding the canned meat. "I can hear it weeping quietly in my mouth."
"It's not crying." Alessia corrected, a weary fondness.
"It's weeping, Ate. There's a difference." Ji-yoo declared, a philosophical grief. "This meat is weeping with dignity about the life it once had before it was canned and cooked over a camping stove by a doctor who sets off smoke alarms."
"Ji-yoo." Alessia warned, a fondness threading through.
"I need to eat for two now." Ji-yoo declared, a grave responsibility taking another bite.
"You're not pregnant." Alessia pointed out, an amused exasperation.
"Spiritually, Ate. I'm eating for the spiritual baby." Ji-yoo corrected, a mystical certainty. "The baby that exists in the spiritual realm where your future child currently resides. I'm building a spiritual welcome mat."
"That's not how any of this works." Alessia sighed, a defeated affection.
Ji-yoo took another bite and her gravity pulsed, the food bowl launching off the coffee table and executing a perfect half-rotation before depositing rice and canned meat across the porcelain tile in a modern art arrangement.
"The rice is even sadder now." Ji-yoo observed, a devastated sincerity. "It's on the floor, Ate. Floor rice. The saddest rice."
Alessia stood and made a new bowl and came back and put it in Ji-yoo's lap, her hand lingering on Ji-yoo's shoulder with a squeeze that was warm and present and said I'm here without needing the words.
"Eat." Alessia instructed, a tender authority.
Ji-yoo ate and the second bowl was also sad but less sad because it had been made by someone who cared enough to make it twice.
— • • • —
Jae-min tried to stand up and Ji-yoo grabbed both his arms in a full koala grip with her fingers digging into his sleeves.
"Don't move." Ji-yoo commanded, a fierce desperation.
"I was going to get water." Jae-min replied, a gentle amusement.
"Five more minutes." Ji-yoo bargained, a stubborn possessiveness.
"Five more minutes of what?" Jae-min questioned.
"Of you not moving." Ji-yoo answered, a raw fear cracking beneath the stubbornness. "Of you being right here. Where I can feel you. Where I know you're alive."
'I was dead for one hundred and nineteen seconds. I felt my heart stop.' Ji-yoo admitted, a desperate vulnerability stripping away the comedy. 'He refused to let me go. And now I can't let him go.'
"Five minutes." Jae-min agreed, a quiet warmth.
"Seven point five." Ji-yoo bargained.
"Five." Jae-min countered.
"I'll die emotionally, Kuya." Ji-yoo pleaded, a theatrical devastation. "Also the baby needs its aunt."
"The spiritual baby." Jae-min corrected, a faint smile cracking his stoic mask.
"That baby has very high standards for aunt proximity." Ji-yoo declared, a grave authority. "Five more minutes. Minimum."
"You already said five." Jae-min pointed out.
"Then we have an agreement." Ji-yoo concluded, a triumphant satisfaction tightening her grip.
She didn't let go, not after five minutes and not after ten, sitting on the porcelain tile with her hands around her brother's arms and her gravitational field humming low and warm around both of them.
"Kuya." Ji-yoo murmured, a sleepy contentment softening her voice.
"Yeah?" Jae-min replied, a quiet attention.
"When the new Soulcleaver manifests, I'm naming it Soulcleaver Del Rosario." Ji-yoo declared, a drowsy pride.
"That's our last name." Jae-min observed, a fond confusion.
"I know. It's a family weapon. It should have a family name." Ji-yoo reasoned, a stubborn logic. "Soulcleaver Del Rosario. For when I cleave the souls of anything that tries to take you away from me again."
'She would kill for me. Again. In every timeline.' Jae-min realized, a fierce burning warmth pressing against the back of his eyes. 'She would burn the world.'
His jaw tightened and his eyes went bright for a fraction of a second, not with the void but with something human.
"Cleaver for short." Ji-yoo added, a sleepy humor.
"Cleaver for short." Jae-min murmured, a warm surrender letting his sister hold on.
Because she wouldn't let go, not of him and not of this and not of the warmth of her brother's arms under her hands and the hum of his void in her gravitational field and the bone-deep silver-tracery knowledge that he was alive and here and would never leave.
The gravity hummed low and warm around her brother.
The pills held their heart shape on the coffee table.
Outside the frozen world turned.
Inside Ji-yoo held on.