CHAPTER THREE- UNSEEN THINGS.
1204 Words
No one sleeps.
We pretend to.
We lie still inside our thermal wraps, eyes closed, breaths slow, but the night presses in too tightly for rest.
The white silence from earlier is gone. In its place is something worse.
Sound.
Not footsteps. Not voices.
Breathing.
It comes and goes with the wind, rising and falling like the world itself is inhaling. I keep my hand wrapped around the blade Uncle Rafe gave me, knuckles numb, heart racing every time the sound grows closer.
George shifts beside me.
“You awake?” he whispers.
I don’t open my eyes. “I can’t sleep, I am not sure anyone can, those things are monstrous.
They could come while we sleep, I am sure no one is actually sleeping tonight”
A faint spark pops between his fingers. He kills it instantly.
“If they come, i will make mince meat out of them."
"They’re not attacking,” he murmurs. “That’s what scares me.”
I swallow. “They’re listening.”
He goes still. “You think they heard what happened earlier?”
“I think,” I say slowly, “they felt it. I feel they are a connected bunch. I could be pretty wrong though.”
"No wonder majority of them don't make it back, these Nemans, these skin walkers are a terrible foe. They changed our climate to suit their needs, and now they want to steal our skins."
A soft crunch sounds beyond the constructed thermal shield came.
Then another.
Scarface hisses, “Don’t move.”
The crunching circles us, slow and deliberate. Shadows stretch across the ice as figures move just outside the light’s reach.
A voice drifts through the dark.
“Ava.” It calls.
My blood turns to ice.
George’s hand clamps around my wrist. “Don’t answer.”
The voice tries again. Softer this time. Familiar.
“Ava, it’s cold out here.”
I squeeze my eyes shut.
That’s my mother’s voice.
She’s been dead since I was a child, and during the early days of the invasion, torn apart when the Wall was still being built.
Uncle Rafe tells me of her screams, how she was torn about, skin ripped open.
I remember the way her hand slipped from mine.
“You have to come help me,” the voice pleads. “I can’t feel my hands, its cold out here.”
My chest tightens so hard it hurts.
"George can you hear it?" I ask as I turn to face him. "That's my mother, she is calling for me," I say as I tried to stand up and head outside.
“That’s not her,” George whispers urgently as his hands held mine, tightly. “Ava, look at me.”
I force my eyes open and stare at him instead. His face is pale, jaw clenched, electricity trembling beneath his skin, eyes pale with fright.
“I know,” I whisper back. “I know it’s not her.”
The voice shifts.
Angrier now.
“You always were selfish,” it snarls. “You let me die.”
Something inside me snaps.
“Stop,” I say, my voice shaking.
The shadows recoil.
Scarface, and the others stares at me. “It’s reacting to you. In all my five years of hunting, I have never seen them react to humans, not once. They deceive, manipulate, control, but do not yield ever!" Scarface pointed out in awe, and fear.
The breathing, the crunching sound grows louder. Faster.
Then they step into the light.
Three of them.
They wear the skins of hunters. Faces frozen in expressions of terror, mouths stitched poorly back together. Antennae twitch beneath torn hoods, black and glistening.
One tilts its head.
“She hears us, can command us,” it says.
Another clicks its teeth. “But she is wrong.”
I stand slowly, ignoring George’s grip.
“Ava, don’t,” he whispers.
“I need to see them,” I say.
The cold thickens around me, frost crawling across the ground in slow, spiraling patterns.
“You shouldn’t be able to speak,” I say to the creatures. “You’re not yet… finished.” looking at the hanging skin yet to blend, and join.
They laugh.
The sound scrapes against my bones.
“We learn,” one says. “We adapt.”
The nearest one steps forward swiftly, and touch me, faster than i could blink—and stops short, as if hitting an invisible wall.
Its skin sizzles.
It shrieks, stumbling back, clutching its face as smoke curls from its fingers.
The others retreat instantly.
Fear flashes across their stolen faces.
“She is wrong,” one repeats, louder now. “She is not like the others.”
My breath comes out in short bursts. “What am I?”
They don’t answer.
They flee, writhing and mangling in worm like motions, pulsing as they go sliding into the white ice, unjoined skin falling off, quite disgusting to watch.
Silence crashes down again.
No one speaks.
Scarface finally breaks it. “We leave. Now.”
We move at dawn, faster than before. No arguments. No formations. Fear has rewritten the rules.
As we walk, I feel it.
Eyes.
Not on my back.
On my skin.
George leans close. “They didn’t try to copy you.”
I frown. “What?”
“They mimic everything,” he says. “Voices. Movements. Skin.” His jaw tightens. “They didn’t try with you. One of them touched you, and was burnt.
I stare ahead, my reflection faint in the ice beneath my boots.
“Maybe,” I say quietly, “they can’t.”
We reach the remains of an old outpost by midday—half-buried in snow, metal twisted and frozen mid-collapse. Scarface signals a halt.
“Short rest,” he says. “We regroup.”
I sit apart from the others, rubbing my arms. I don’t feel cold anymore.
That scares me more than the night did.
George crouches in front of me. “You’re shaking.”
“I don’t know why,” I admit. “Since we came out here, I feel… full. Like something’s pressing against my skin from the inside.”
His eyes search my face. “You’re still you, Ava.”
I nod, though I’m not sure I believe it.
A scream erupts from the far side of the outpost.
We run.
A hunter is pinned to the wall by ice-black tendrils, his skin peeling away like wet paper. A skin walker looms over him, antennae flaring.
I don’t think.
I move.
The air around me drops sharply. Blue Frost explodes outward, coating the creature mid-motion. Its scream cuts off as ice races across its body, sealing it in a frozen snarl.
The hunter collapses, sobbing.
I stare at my hands.
I didn’t touch it.
I didn’t command it.
It obeyed me anyway.
George reaches for me, voice trembling. “Ava…”
The white ice around us began cracking.
Cracking the ground.
Reflecting something deep inside of me that was being released.
Something really deep inside me.
And far beneath the white snow, something ancient shifts—alert, afraid, and now, very much aware that I exist.
- Writer
