Ryodan says to Dancer, “Work faster. Get back in your lab and find me an answer. Dublin’s turning into Siberia and the thing just deposited a pile of frozen shit on top of my club.”

“At least it didn’t ice the door,” I say. “ ’Cause then we couldn’t get back in.”

Ryodan gives me a look that says he knows I know the back way in.

“Try a flamethrower,” Christian says. “Does the trick. Till everything blows.”

“Speaking of which, any ideas what makes the scenes blow up?” I ask Dancer.

“I think it creates a kind of energy vacuum where things get unstable. Like I said, physics aren’t working right. It’s possible objects reduced to no energy are brittle, and when disturbed by vibrations of objects around them, they explode. The lack of energy may also be the lack of ‘glue’ necessary to hold matter together. Except in these cases, they’re shellacked in ice. Once that shell is compromised, everything comes apart. The larger the disturbance of molecules surrounding the scene, the more violent the explosion. You freeze-framing in to study the scene would generate a significant vibrational disturbance.”

Sometimes I miss the most obvious things. How many scenes exploded when Ryodan and me were fast-mo-ing through them and I never put two and two together? I ponder what Dancer just told me, crunch it with a few other facts, mix it all up good to see what I get.

The Hoar Frost King leaves no energy behind when he vanishes. It’s stripped from everything he ices.

R’jan said that when the HFK iced places in Seelie, the Fae weren’t just killed, they were erased like they’d never been.

Both times I saw the HFK appear, all sound vanished. None of us could hear a thing. Dancer confirmed a third case of similar silence and hollow-sounding aftereffects at the WeCare event he witnessed.

Why would sound vanish? Because everything stopped vibrating the instant the HFK appeared? Why would things stop vibrating? Because it was sucking energy? What exactly is the HFK doing? What attracts it to where it’s being attracted? What is the fecking commonality? Until we figure it out, we have no hope of stopping it. We’re sitting ducks.

I examine the icy tableau before me. I need answers and I need them now. Before I went into the White Mansion I might have had a little time to play with, but since I’ve been gone, things in my city have gotten critical. There’s too much snow and the cold’s getting too extreme, and if the HFK doesn’t kill folks, cold alone will.

How many hundreds, even thousands more people will die before we figure out how to stop it? What if it goes to the abbey next? What if it takes Jo from me? What if everybody’s generators run out of gas and they all die holed up, alone?

I sigh and close my eyes.

I shiver. What I need to see is right here in front of me. I can feel it. I’m just not looking with the right eyes, the clear eyes that suffer no conflicts. I need a brain like mine and eyes like Ryodan’s.

I focus on the backs of my lids, take the grayness of them and cocoon it around me. I make a bland womb where I can begin the process of erasing myself, detaching from the world; the one where I exist and I’m part of reality and everything I see is colored by my thoughts and feelings.

I strip away all that I know about myself, all that I am, and sink into a quiet cavern in my head where there is no corporeality, no pain.

In that shadowy cave, I don’t wear a long black leather coat, or skull-and-crossbones panties, or crack jokes. I don’t love being a superhero. I don’t think Dancer is hot and I’m not a virgin, because I don’t really even exist.

In that cave, I was never born. I won’t die.

All things are distilled to their essence.

I go inside my head and become that other me, the one I don’t tell anybody about.

The observer.

She can’t feel hunger in her belly or cramped muscles from being in a cage for days on end. She isn’t Dani. She can survive anything. Feel nothing. See what’s in front of her for exactly and only what it is. Her heart doesn’t break a little every time her mom leaves, and she holds no price too high for survival.

I don’t let go of myself and seek her often because once I got stuck there and she took over and the things she did …

I live in terror that one day I won’t get to be Dani again.

But, fecking-A, she’s one smart cookie! Tough, too. She sees everything. It’s hard to see like she does. Makes me feel like a freak. She thinks I’m a wuss. But she never refuses me when I come.

I open her eyes and study the scene. She’s a receiver. Things go in and come out. She processes. No ego or id. Nothing but a puzzle here, and all puzzles can be solved, all codes decoded, all prisons escaped. No price too high for success. There is an end and there are means, and all means are justified.

The facts, void of emotion, look completely different.

Folks bang cans. Fist-pump the air. Some clap. Others warm themselves. I pick and discard. I strip to bare essence.

Their bodies are bent and moving in ways that suggest intended, even relaxed motion, not the instinctual, tense muscular and skeletal flexion of panic. Everyone whose mouth is frozen open appears to be making an elongated E. Their eyes are nearly closed and the cords are tight in their necks.

I couldn’t see it, but she can.

It’s right there, in front of us. It was there the whole time. She thinks it’s obvious and I’m stupid. I think she’s a sociopathic nut job.

I have my answer but can’t rejoice in it because she doesn’t feel. I close my eyes to detach but she won’t let me. She wants to stay. She thinks she’s better equipped than me. I try to leave the cave but she hides all the doors. I visualize brilliant lights in it, like those on top of BB&B. She turns them off.

I open her eyes because I can’t stand the darkness.

Ryodan is staring at me, hard. “Dani,” he says. “Are you okay?”

He uses a whole, unadulterated question mark, a bona-fecking-fide interrogatory that rises just like a normal person, and that simple thing penetrates. It surprises me the things that rattle her. It loosens her hold on me and I slip free. I guess my sense of humor is more Dani, not her, than anything else about us because when he cracks me up, just like that, she’s gone. For a few fleeting seconds I know I’m going to forget her again. I think she makes me forget her and I won’t remember until I need her or I get pushed too far.

Then I don’t even know that anymore.

I replay all my filed scenes, looking for — and finding — that single commonality it took me so long to see. It was right in front of me all this time but I couldn’t drop my preconceptions. I saw what I expected to see and that wasn’t what it was at all. “Holy frozen frequencies, Dancer,” I say softly. “It’s drinking sound Slurpees!”

“What?” Dancer says.

None of them were screaming. All the folks I thought were yelling in fear and horror at the end were singing.

The music changes beneath my feet. A heavy metal song just came on in Chester’s and the vibrations increase in tempo and intensity. I feel the blood drain from my face.

If I’m right …

And I am right.

There are thousands of people below us, in Chester’s, and although I’m not real impressed with their choice of a lifestyle, the race we’re in now needs all the humans we’ve got left.

“We’ve got to turn it off!” I say. “We’ve got to turn everything off right now! Dude, we’ve got to shut Chester’s down!”

Beyond the frost-etched window of my bedroom, fat snow-flakes drift lazily to the ground. Unlike me, they know no urgency. At the abbey, snow obeys a simple prime directive: fall without cease. It began two days after Sean went to work at Chester’s, and has not stopped for twenty-three.