76°00'08.2"S 53°43'31.2"E - Nuevo Trujillo, Spanish Antarctic Colonies

  18.05.2024 23:45, UTC+03:00

  Lucia stood in front of me, her eyes glinting with precursors of tears. I had to be careful now. Maybe my anxiety was triggering some kind of episode, but that poor girl had no reason to feel bad for it.

  “I was just thinking I want to see different places, you know. High school was a bit much.”

  That was it, just how I had rehearsed it. I saw her eyes squint again.

  “What the fuck, ángel?” She said in a low voice, her eyebrows raised. She pulled me closer, her hands now grabbing me by the shoulders.

  Had I messed this up so much? Or was she really so shocked? This was just a high-school fling, but I could see her face turning pale with every word I uttered. I had to rip off the band-aid. Blurt it all out, get it done with. Make sure she no longer thinks she was the problem. I was.

  “Look, Lucia. It is not exactly easy or fair. But in the end, we are only seventeen, and maybe I need to first explore the world a bit. It was fun. And it has been great!” I said to her as fast as I could. Or at least I thought I did.

  Halfway through my script, the sun was so bright I had to close my eyes, strain, and focus to get the words out. Cold sweat trailed down my back.

  “ángel, you are not making any sense. Do you need to sit down?” she said. She grabbed me and led me to a bench. My hands were shaking badly.

  “Lucia, I am sorry. I am not sure how else to say this. I really liked the time we had together,” I kept talking, but as she sat me on a bench, legs shaking, I started listening to myself speak, and nothing made sense. I was not speaking Spanish, nor any other language I recognized, for that matter.

  The family that I had noticed earlier looked worried at us, and the mother of the group approached Lucia and said something. I tried to tune into their conversation, but the noise was very muffled. I could see that Lucia was very scared, alternating her attention between me and the woman, until the woman pulled a phone out of her pocket.

  “Lucia. I do not understand,” I tried to say, but again I spoke in tongues. I could not even understand myself. Was that how a panic attack was? Or was I having a stroke? I looked at my hands. They looked normal, so did my breathing. I felt nothing out of the ordinary.

  No, that was wrong. I felt something. The stone-cold finger from before, I could feel it hovering behind my neck. I had to push it away: I raised both my hands behind my head, trying to push an invisible finger away. I couldn’t find it.

  I turned to Lucia, now talking with the woman. Her two children stood next to her, listening to the discussion. A man, probably her husband, held a small kid in his embrace, still sitting on their bench. The children were at most twelve years old. Maybe ten. An immense sense of impending doom overcame me. I turned behind me, but I just knew the finger was always floating behind my neck, somewhere out of reach. Its nail almost touched my hair.

  “Help me! Get it away!” I shouted at Lucia, but yelling gibberish once more. She left her discussion with the woman and kneeled in front of me. She grabbed my hands and lowered them on my thighs.

  She was talking, but I could not hear a thing. I could see in her eyes that she was very scared, and she was trying to calm me down.

  “Please, Lucia, something is behind me. Please help me push it away,” I begged her. Again, utter nonsense. She nodded in a way to show me she was listening, but I knew she could not understand me.

  Then I felt it. I breathed in.

  An eerie calm overcame me. I turned my gaze to the north, where the Conservatorio stood as the last bastion of the Spanish Colonies, the crowning jewel of the Paseo.

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  I breathed out.

  The finger at the back of my head pulled away, and the Conservatorio vanished. Swallowed by white mist.

  As if something cracked beneath the palm of my left hand, a ripple of electricity passed through me.

  I stood up quickly and grabbed Lucia.

  “We have to run,” I said and started running in panic. I could not hear what she said but she started following me.

  “— hear me – where are….” she yelled at the top of her lungs.

  It did not matter. Even if I did not know what I was running from, I knew we had to reach the stairs. Leave Paseo.

  Why—

  The walls shook as if the earth and wind decided to revolt against gravity. We both fell on the floor. Suddenly, my hearing came back: I could hear children screaming and crying. They weren’t being playful or complaining. I had never heard children cry like that – it was something deeper, a cry that evoked a true primal appetite to run and save them.

  As I pushed to rise up, I noticed people were looking in shock and wonder. They were looking at something past me, and by the way they tilted their head, it was something high up. A shadow was cast above them, above all of us.

  I turned and looked back.

  White mist had breached the Paseo, starting from the northernmost part. The Conservatorio. The mist was quickly expanding upwards and sideways, diffusing in the air. From afar, it looked like milk poured into water and dissipated slowly in all directions. We were far enough, but it was impossible to estimate how quickly it would expand. Or what it was.

  “Lucia, we need to run,” I said, and I was not the first. The realization rippled through everyone standing on the Paseo, and started running. Lucia and I started sprinting, heading towards the closest stairs.

  I wished really really hard that we would be faster than the wave of white. It was ice. It must have been.

  My mind was having difficulty processing what it was sensing: an unnatural scenery, breaking the rules of physics, in a way only something Cursed could. The impossible was happening. The domain was collapsing before our very eyes. Right next to us. I did not dare look back, who knows how far until that cloud had to reach us?

  What if I delayed too much if I looked?

  “ángel!” Lucia screamed. She was a good runner, but her panic did not help. I dared to look behind us and saw the white clouds of ice menacingly enlarging and closing the distance on us. I noticed some people, running like us, being engulfed by it, rendering their screams audible only until the cloud reached them, and then, nothing.

  These clouds of air were so much lower in temperature than our surroundings, I did not dare fathom what would happen if we were to be engulfed alongside the others.

  “Run!” I yelled. We were almost there, at the stairs. Children screaming and a man yelling some names behind us suggested to me that the cloud probably claimed the family that was just beside us, moments before chaos was let loose.

  We grabbed each other’s hands and jumped towards the stone stairs. We glided on the floor and quickly tumbled down the stairs. I hugged her to protect her as she cried, and I bruised myself all over during the fall. The light of the Antarctic sun dimmed as the white cloud expanded above our heads, turning everything gray.

  I closed my eyes, wondering if the icy embrace of the Antarctic would reach us now that we had fallen so far down. Maybe the damage would be limited only on the Paseo, and the cloud would not crawl further into the city. Maybe we were still safe. And as I kept thinking that, and moments passed without feeling anything, I thought we had survived whatever was coming. I mustered the courage and opened my eyes, holding my breath.

  Silence, white ice. The cloud was over us. But no cold.

  “Lucia, I think we are fine,” I said, untucking her from my hug.

  Her frozen body tumbled over next to me, and then I heard a haunting sound as if the finest crystal was breaking. Her left side shattered in bloody red pieces under the fragility of her frozen weight.

  I jumped back crying her name, not daring to even breathe inside what I assumed was that white mist that had chased us before.

  She was dead. A piece of ice shattered in pieces. Then the realization hit: I was not. I was not even cold.

  I let myself breathe. You could see particles of water freezing in the air as I breathed out, but it did not hurt when I inhaled.

  CITIZENS – THIS IS A PSYCHIC PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT. EVACUATE NORTH CHINESE DISTRICT. THE DOMAIN HAS BEEN BREACHED, WITH NO SURVIVORS. RETREAT TO THE SOUTH CHINESE DISTRICT

  My head hurt from the psychic intrusion.

  “No survivors?” I said out loud, engulfed by white, anywhere my eyes could see. “Then what am I?”