“Shit, this place is basically an icicle with Wi-Fi,” Minjae muttered, his words creating hazy clouds in front of his face. Ugh, he waved them away with a frustrated mumble.
To say the outpost was frozen from the inside out was a gross understatement. The concrete walls wept condensation that crusted into frost before it could reach the floor, and above them, vents that should’ve blasted out hot air spat nothing but cold. It was like the whole place was locked in a slow, glacial extinction-level event, and unfortunately, Minjae was here for it.
“For the record, I refuse to die like this,” he added, and shoved his hands in his pockets before they could turn blue.
In the middle of the floor, Kairo knelt over a loose constellation of glowing wires, humming to himself like the cold was just an abstract concept. Minjae frowned in his direction.
“It won’t be like this for long,” Kairo said with a grin. Minjae knew that grin. It usually meant either something terrible or brilliant was about to happen. “I’m making us a heat signature.”
“That sounds like something that gets us murdered,” Onyx said from the edge of the room, eyeing the wiring like a man who'd seen things and didn't want to see them again.
“No, no, no.” Kairo lifted a knotted coil of salvaged cable as if he were handling some ancient relic. “It’s gonna be subtle. Like a personal campfire that doesn’t scream ‘come kill us.' Promise.”
Minjae peered over his shoulder, squinting down at the chaos. “Why is that power cell bubbling?”
“Because it’s working,” Kairo replied brightly. “Now get out of my light.”
With a huff, Minjae stepped back and went to where Soahn was curled up in a chair, wrapped in two blankets and a synth scarf, his eyes half-lidded, hair filaments dampened to a pale, frosty blue. If he were a painting, it’d be called something dramatic like ‘Mild Regret in Minor Frostbite.’
Only Rayne was completely unaffected by the cold — lucky bastard. He leaned against the far wall, still and silent like some brooding Renaissance statue. Even so, Minjae could hear the delicate whir of his hardware, which was pretty much the only way you ever knew that Rayne was present.
“Still no word from The Hollow?” Minjae asked him.
Rayne shook his head. “Not yet. They’re still rerouting the upflow path. They’re probably waiting on a scan lull.”
“Which gives us plenty of time to get toasty,” Kairo said, and the cable he was holding let off a sudden warning sizzle.
Dropping to a crouch beside him, Onyx reached to take the cable. “If that arc jumps to the relay junction, it’ll fry every personal system in this room.”
Kairo snapped his hand away. “Details.”
“I will throw you through the wall.”
“You’re too cold,” Kairo said, raising his head long enough to smirk. “You won’t make it that far.”
Onyx made a sound like reluctant resignation. They all knew it was impossible to stop Kairo when he was on a mission. Minjae just wished it didn’t involve so much live wiring.
By some small miracle — and Onyx’s deeply troubled supervision — the contraption stabilised, and a soft, golden light bloomed at the centre of the room. Warmth unfurled outward, brushing against Minjae’s cheeks. It was, in that moment, the greatest thing he’d ever felt.
“It worked?” Soahn stirred in the chair, a couple of blankets tumbling to the floor.
“We survive another day,” Minjae said, going to the cables and dropping down beside them. He held out his trembling hands to warm them. Before long, Soahn joined him.
Onyx remained close by, one hand braced against his knee, the other loose, probably ready to shut everything down if it so much as twitched the wrong way. You could take the soldier out of the program, but some habits were coded too deep.
From near the door, Rayne watched them with his usual stoic silence, like some piece of very expensive infrastructure. He had this tendency to hover, like he was worried he’d take up too much room, which was weird because he was probably the least imposing person out of them all. But after a few minutes, he pushed away from the wall and came to the middle, sitting down cross-legged within the circle of heat.
“Whoa,” Minjae stage-whispered. “Rayne has entered the social circle. Alert the press.”
Kairo grinned. “He likes it. That means I win.”
“You don’t win,” Onyx snapped. “You jury-rigged a radioactive hug machine.”
“Radioactive hug machine. Title of our next album?” Minjae said, and that earned him a small laugh from Soahn.
“Hey, it’s warm, isn’t it?” Kairo nudged the power cell with his boot, and then settled back on his heels.
Letting his head tip against Soahn’s shoulder, Minjae muttered, “Still better than up there.”
“Yeah,” Soahn said with a sigh.
They sat quietly for a long time, listening to the clicks and clunks of The Ghost Lines in the wider tunnels around them. Sometimes it felt to Minjae like they’d been digested into the belly of some old, exhausted beast, and he supposed, in many ways, they had. But times like these, in the warmth and quiet and shared anticipation, it just felt weirdly comforting.
After a while, Rayne pulled up his console and rechecked it. “The Hollow says they’re close,” he said. “Once the grid resets, they’ll boost the signal.”
“Ooh, then the next track goes up tonight!” Kairo beamed, pulling a crumpled energy bar out of his pocket.
“Signal locked,” Onyx said. “They won’t even know we were there.”
Minjae snorted. “So, just another night of being illegal legends. Cool.”
The heater crackled, but it held. Minjae listened to the wind outside, howling through dead tunnels and frostbitten rails. He stared at the heat signature and had to admit — while Kairo was many things, most of them chaotic in nature, he had a hell of a way with hastily cobbled-together tech when it mattered.
Far above The Ghost Lines, where the old, crumbling train stations sat like broken molars on the landscape, a rooftop antenna flashed once — then caught.
Inside a shattered comms outpost-turned-safehouse, a janky terminal blinked awake, screen lighting up with a judder. The woman seated at the terminal straightened, shrugging off the foil blanket keeping her from freezing to death. She’d been waiting for this.
Brushing her fingertips across the waveform, she played the audio.
Immediately, she knew it wasn’t NuYu, because it was far too imperfect. Far too alive.
The file name scrolled on screen:
UcantDELETEm3.wav
Origin: deep ghostline relay B-9
Flagged: unregistered
Flagged: destabilising content
Of course it was. She leaned back in her chair, relit her half-smoked cigarette, and whispered into the recorder:
“Echo confirmed. The boys are still transmitting.”