chapter 5
697 Words
Chapter 5
DREAM
Ice was standing inside a massive underground tunnel.
A ship loomed nearby — enormous, metallic, crowded with people packed shoulder to shoulder. The air felt thin, heavy with fear and desperation.
Then he saw her.
Nina.
She looked exactly like Nella — the same eyes, the same face — but her expression was frantic as she forced her way through the crowd toward him.
“Ice!” she shouted, her voice breaking. “My love!”
Relief flooded him. He pushed forward, trying to reach her.
Then a man stepped out from the crowd.
A flash of metal.
A blade sank into Nina’s stomach.
Ice screamed and shoved through the people, catching her as she collapsed. He dropped to his knees, pulling her into his arms as blood soaked into her clothes.
“Nina, why?” he cried, tears blurring his vision.
She winced, her fingers gripping his tightly.
“There isn’t enough space down here,” she whispered weakly. “No one from up there can come down… or we will starve.”
Her eyes searched his, filled with sorrow — and apology.
Then the light left them.
Ice held her, frozen in disbelief, as the crowd continued moving around them. People stepped over his legs, brushed past his shoulders, uncaring, desperate to reach the ship.
“Stop!” he shouted, trying to push them away, but there were too many.
Too many.
He clutched Nina’s lifeless body as the world closed in.
And then—
He woke.
Ice woke with a sharp gasp.
For a moment, he didn’t know where he was.
His hands were clenched so tightly they ached, fingers curled as if still gripping fabric — as if still holding her. His chest heaved, breath dragging in and out like he had been running for miles.
The room was dark. Still. Safe.
But his heart didn’t believe it.
He looked down at his hands.
No blood.
They were clean. Empty.
Ice swallowed hard and pushed himself upright on the bed, the sheets twisted around his legs. The silence of the palace pressed in on him, thick and unnatural after the chaos of the dream. He could still hear it — the crowd, the shouting, Nina’s voice breaking as she called his name.
My love…
His throat tightened.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat there, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. The cool air touched his skin, but he still felt overheated, like the underground tunnel hadn’t fully released him.
Nina.
No — Nella.
The resemblance in the dream had been too exact. The same eyes. The same stubborn softness in her expression. His mind had replaced one with the other, and that terrified him more than the knife, more than the crowd trampling past him like he and Nina were nothing.
“There isn’t enough space down here…”
Her voice echoed again, thin and fading.
Ice dragged a hand over his face. Those words didn’t feel like nonsense a dreaming mind would invent. They felt like a warning. A memory from a future that hadn’t happened yet.
Or one that was already beginning.
He stood and walked to the window, looking out over the sleeping city. Lights flickered in the distance. From up here, everything looked calm. Peaceful. Controlled.
An illusion.
Resources were tighter than people knew. Tensions between humans and Marsians were growing in quiet, dangerous ways. Protests. Shortages. Whispers of places already struggling to feed their populations.
And in his dream, the solution had been simple and cruel:
Not everyone can be saved.
Ice’s jaw tightened.
“No,” he murmured to the empty room.
He didn’t know who he was arguing with — the dream, fate, himself — but the word left his mouth with quiet force.
He wouldn’t accept that. He couldn’t.
But as he stood there, watching the city lights flicker like fragile stars, the unease refused to leave him. It coiled in his chest, heavy and cold, telling him that something was shifting beneath the surface of his world.
And that when it finally broke through—
It would be too late to stop it.
- Writer
