Chapter 17
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mirel. You did well for a first day.”
Professor Kiba stacked her holo-pads with careful precision, the blue light catching on the silver rings at her fingers. She adjusted her glasses, their lenses flickering with the classroom’s projection feed.
“Imperial Kylix is a remarkable man,” she added with a small smile. “You should be proud.”
Mirel nodded, too tightly. His throat felt scraped raw, hoarse from effort. He had used his voice more in one day than he usually did in a week.
Professor Kiba paused, considering him. “Your speaking will come easier with time,” she said. “Speech is a matter of trust. The more you trust others, and yourself, the more it will return.”
He didn’t answer. He only nodded again, watching as she gathered her things and left. The door shut behind her with a soft hiss.
He sat very still. The room’s buzz sharpened until it felt like a blade, seventeen counts between the projector’s faint ticks, the same wrong rhythm Yure had shown on the kitchen screen.
Seventeen. Light. Seventeen. Dark. The number paced inside his head like a thing with teeth.
He swallowed and it scraped. His name lived in other mouths now.
Mate. Claimed. He felt it like a brand and could not tell if the heat belonged to pride or fear.
He rubbed his palms together until they burned.
The heat held for a breath. Then it fled.
The cold returned cleaner, smarter, as if the room had learned him.
The distance between desk and door looked long as a street.
He didn’t move. Stillness had been safety once.
Stillness made you invisible. That was not true here. Here even his silence drew light.
The room felt too large once she was gone.
The light hummed against empty seats. He sat still for a moment, aware of every sound, the pulse in his throat, the hum of the projector, the scrape of his breath.
So much had happened in such a short time.
Meeting his mother, his brother, being claimed by Kylix, being seen by everyone on Helion.
Mirel reached for his bag but his hand hesitated. A shiver ran through him, and for a second he thought the air itself had turned colder. He blinked it away, rubbing his palms together until they warmed. He needed air. Space. Somewhere quiet.
The air thinned. He couldn’t breathe past it.
Frost crept over the walls, slow at first, then fast, crawling toward the window.
It gathered like breath on glass, forming a shape he refused to wait for.
The frost had once given him answers when he first arrived on Helion, showing him how Cyprian was his brother and how his mother stayed in the Hospital for the Living Dead.
Mirel shivered at the name. Like so many things on Helion, the name carried dread.
The ice had shown him truths he never wanted. Now it came only as reflection, emotion spilling from him until the room turned cold, the shapes half-formed and ghostlike, the kind that vanished if you looked too long.
Frost thickened near the projector lens, catching light like a mirror desperate to show him something.
For an instant he saw the shapes of hands, or faces, pressed from the other side of the glass.
He reached out, fingertips grazing the cold.
The image shattered to mist, and the thrum of the room rushed back, loud and ordinary.
Mirel stood, slung the bag over his shoulder, and stepped into the corridor. Conversations stilled as he passed. A few students looked up from their holos.
“Congratulations. On the claiming.” One of them even smiled awkwardly.
Mirel’s stomach twisted. He nodded, unable to answer, and walked faster toward the exit.
Outside, the city wind bit sharper than the classroom air. Vandor waited at the curb beside the hover car, steam curling from his breath.
“Rough first day?” he asked.
Mirel gripped the strap of his bag tighter. The air felt too thin. His heart thudded once, then again, hard enough that he could feel it in his throat. The urge built before he could stop it, unsteady and raw, born of exhaustion more than courage. “I… I need to go to the g-graveyard.”
Vandor froze mid-motion. “The graveyard?”
Mirel nodded, eyes fixed on the pavement. Just saying the word made his chest tighten. He wanted to see Geron, to feel the quiet again, to hide where no one could reach him. The world outside felt too loud, too bright. “Just… for a moment,” he said, voice breaking on the last word.
Vandor exhaled through his nose. “You know Kylix will kill me if he finds out where I took you.”
“I w-won’t tell him.”
“Yeah, that’s what they all say.” Vandor slid into the driver’s seat and nodded toward the passenger side. “Get in. We’ll talk inside.”
The hover car sealed around them, shutting out the noise of the street. A faint hum filled the air as the engine idled. He glanced over. “Fine. Just shortly.”
He pulled a bottle of water from the console and passed it over. “Drink. You sound like sandpaper.”
Mirel unscrewed the cap, took a few sips, and felt his throat loosen. The coolness smoothed the burn enough to let air move again. “Thanks,” he murmured.
Vandor thumbed a quick message on his multislate, then started the engine. The hover car rose from the curb and slid through the night. City light washed across the glass, gold, then dimmer, then gone as they left the center behind. The buildings thinned, streets turning to shadow.
The window caught the city in slices of gold.
Kylix’s voice still lived somewhere under his ribs, the low command that made his pulse obey.
He pressed his thumb to his throat as if he could quiet it.
Helion blurred past, light falling away to black glass and fog.
He wondered if anyone else ever looked at the city and felt caged by its shine.
After a few minutes Vandor spoke again. “You don’t have to go back there. You’ve got people now. A home.”
Mirel kept his gaze on the window. “I… I don’t know what that means.”
Vandor didn’t answer right away. His eyes flicked from the road to Mirel’s reflection in the glass, a quiet understanding settling between them.
Tires hummed over the guide rails. “Wh-what do you study?” Mirel found himself asking.
Vandor glanced over, surprised. “Tactical psychology. How people break, how they hold together. Kylix thinks it makes me useful.” He hesitated, eyes flicking back to the road. “Guess it’s why he picked me up in the first place.”
“It d-does.” The words came easier than he expected.
“Didn’t think you’d talk to me.”
“Ne-neither did I.” Mirel’s mouth twitched into almost a smile.
For a moment the quiet between them felt lighter. Mirel watched the lines of Vandor’s calm face in the dashlight. He realized, almost with surprise, that he trusted him, and wondered briefly if the same blood that made Kylix what he was might run quietly in this man too.
As they headed out, the city fell away behind them. Ahead, the road bled into fog, and the first edge of frost began to show on the glass.
The fence rose from the mist, the sound of the wind muffled to a low hum as if the world held its breath.
The air carried the taste of metal, sharp on the tongue, and faint movements flickered at the edge of sight like ghost shadows slipping between stones.
Frost clung to each spike, glowing dull gold as they passed.
The light had changed. Though still afternoon, it had already begun to darken, the sky bruised with snow.
Vandor guided the car down behind a ruined workshop and cut the engine.
Silence followed, wind over stone, water shifting beneath ice.
Vandor let out a low whistle, eyes narrowing toward the horizon. “Holy shit,” he muttered, voice almost a whisper in the cold. “This place is creepy.”
The gate sagged open as if tired of guarding the dead. Frost-slick grass bowed under their steps. The stones leaned, names erased by seasons. Somewhere a bottle rolled until it found its hollow.
Mirel stared at the endless graves ahead of them. “Not creepy. Home.”
He could still map it in the dark. The split column that hid a tin of matches, the drain grate that never froze, the angel missing a hand that pointed, always, to a dry ledge under the eaves.
He had taught his feet where not to step, which stones rang, which cracked.
He had learned the crows’ hours. Dawn meant bread crates left out too long behind the parish door.
Night meant rats. He had never feared rats.
He feared men whose steps made others smaller.
They moved deeper between stones. Sound thinned to breath and frost-crack.
Mirel’s steps found the old path by instinct, boots sinking into thawed mud.
The air trembled, a faint static crawling across his skin as if the dead still whispered beneath the frost. Vandor’s lamp painted half his face in bronze, the other half in shadow.
Vandor walked beside him. “You really lived here?”
Mirel nodded. “Here it was quiet.”
Vandor’s breath came out white. “Quiet’s worth more than comfort sometimes.”
They reached the place where the wall had collapsed, where once a tarp made a roof. The tarp was gone, the wall flattened by boots. Still, his body remembered the corner that had sheltered him. His spine curved into it without thought.
Vandor stopped close, watching him. “It’s worse than I pictured.”
Mirel’s fingers trembled as he crouched. “It was mine.”
He pressed his palm to the ground. The chill moved up his arm, cold and sure. He was twenty-two, but the years felt heavier, carried in the quiet of places like this. Frost gathered around his hand, rising as if answering an old call. He lifted it and watched the thin white lines hold, trembling.