Skadi woke to the cold. A quiet chill nested beneath her ribs, calm and vast and patient.

Her eyes cracked open. The metal grating of Tala's workshop floor pressed hard against her cheek. Tiny rivulets of frost spiderwebbed out from her body, drawn in delicate branches across the panels. Somewhere beneath her, bundled cables gave a low metallic groan as they adjusted to the temperature drop.

She hadn't moved all night. The borrowed blankets tangled around her hips were stiff with cold where her aura had bled through, the fabric crusted with rime.

Above her, the server towers glowed in pale cycles of blue and amber, lights blinking in smooth, contented patterns. They seemed to like the cold. Skadi couldn't quite decide if that was comforting or not.

A faint clink drew her attention. She turned her head just enough to see Tala reclining in a battered swivel chair a few feet away, mug cupped in both hands, steam curling lazily toward the ceiling. Bare feet propped on a crate, eyes bright and watchful over the rim of the cup.

"Good morning," Tala said. Her tone was airy, unconcerned. But the way her gaze lingered on the frost still creeping away from Skadi's skin told a different story.

Skadi pushed herself upright, joints stiff. Her breath fogged the air in front of her. "Morning."

Tala didn't continue right away. She took a slow sip, then tilted her head, expression sharpening into something sly. She set the mug aside, pushing up fluidly. Stepped close enough that Skadi could feel the faint warmth radiating off her skin, a tiny jarring contrast to the hush of cold still settled deep inside.

"My servers are enjoying your little sleepover more than I am. They haven't run this quiet since I jury-rigged the primary intake last year."

Skadi let out a slow exhale. "Glad someone's comfortable."

"For now." Tala's eyes narrowed faintly, speculative. She set her mug aside and leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "But how about we see if you can do more than leak frost everywhere?"

Skadi stilled, muscles tight. "Meaning?"

"Meaning control." Tala spread her hands lightly. "Precision. Intent. I've got more delicate equipment in this room than the rest of the Hold combined, and you've already proven your aura likes to reach out and touch things without asking. So. We teach it manners."

A faint tension eased from Skadi's shoulders, though she didn't let it show past a tiny breath. Training. She could understand that. Could focus on it. Better than drowning under the dark churn of memory.

Tala rose, graceful and fluid, stepping past her to a side worktable cluttered with slim tools and tangled sensor rigs. Panels flickered to life in the air around her, ghostly orange diagrams rotating slow. Her focus was absolute, almost predatory in how it locked on each shifting line of code.

"Alright, Snowdrift," she said without turning. "Let's start simple. Stand there. Don't do anything fancy."

Skadi held back a retort. She didn't trust her voice not to betray the tangle of restless cold still wound through her chest. So she crossed her arms instead, weight settling carefully on her heels.

A low hum built in the floor. Something in the server towers changed pitch. A subtle whine, the edge of vibration brushing her feet.

Then a shiver of power rolled out from Tala's rig. Skadi felt it catch against her skin, tug at the frost still trailing from her fingers. Like iron filings stirring toward a magnet.

Her gut tightened. Instinct wanted her to shove back. To pull the cold deeper, anchor it where no one could touch it.

Tala caught the twitch in her posture and made a small, dismissive flick of her hand. "Easy. That's just the compensator. Pulled it out of a Haven wreck two weeks back. They've been trying to balance excess heat loads with… whatever this is. Magic, I guess."

Her mouth hooked in a crooked grin. "Their grunts don't understand it any better than I do. Gods know where they got it, or maybe they've got a R&D black-ops site devoted to it. But it works. Shunts thermal energy in ways that make the math go sideways. Useful for keeping these overclocked cores from slagging themselves."

The rig pulsed again, stronger. Skadi felt the cold wick outward, drawn into invisible channels that braided through Tala's servers. Her aura reluctantly stretched thin.

Tala's head angled, reading data from one of the floating screens. "Resist if you have to. But don't snap it off completely. I want to see the thresholds."

"You're using me as a load test."

"Damn right." Tala glanced at her, grin quick and wolfish. "Your problem is you think of your magic like a bomb. On or off. Detonate or suffocate. That's sloppy. Inefficient. If you can't feed a steady draw, you're just waiting to tear yourself apart."

Skadi's jaw worked. She forced herself to uncurl her hands, let the frost bleed slow and steady from her skin. It was harder than simply letting go. Her aura wanted to flood outward in a sweeping tide. Holding it to a trickle felt like trying to throttle an avalanche.

The hum underfoot climbed, the fields around Tala's equipment catching delicate filaments of Skadi's power, channeling it. Somewhere, heat exchangers snapped open to vent the load.

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"Good," Tala murmured. "Don't clamp down on it. Just ease it. Like lowering your voice instead of swallowing your tongue."

Skadi focused on the breath in her lungs. On the way the cold pooled, then lapped outward in a slow tide. Her pulse stuttered when she felt it catch in Tala's systems, an intimate, unwanted familiarity, like breath against the nape of her neck.

Tala's expression sharpened, eyes glinting. "Look at that. My processors are running thirty percent more efficiently than baseline. Your ice is pulling heat out faster than any of our built-in reclamators."

Skadi didn't reply. Her throat felt raw, though she wasn't sure why. She just focused on keeping the flow steady.

"You keep this up," Tala said, voice pitched casual but eyes bright, hungry, "and we might actually figure out how far this little trick of yours can scale."

Skadi narrowed her eyes. "Scale to what?"

Tala's shoulders lifted in a careless shrug, but the tension in her grip on the console belied it. Her thumb tapped out a sharp, staccato rhythm on the metal. "Bigger heat sinks. Bigger systems. Hell, maybe even ship cores. You've seen the frigate still squatting overhead, haven't you?"

Skadi stiffened. Of course she had. Everyone on Zephara had. That silent shape in orbit was a wound no one knew how to close. "You think you could do something with that?"

Tala's mouth curved into a thin smile, more knife than warmth. "If I had the right leverage? The right edge? Maybe. Haven's so busy pretending it's still in charge down here, they've barely bothered to crack that prize open. A little focus, a little directed entropy, and who knows what might spill out."

For a moment, Skadi's pulse stumbled. The thought of it. Of breaching the thing that had hovered over them like a blade since the day everything fell apart. It sent a chill deeper than her magic.

Tala's gaze tracked hers, sharp and unblinking. "What, you'd rather keep living under its shadow forever? Let Haven or Ashara carve it up when they get around to it? I want to know who's still listening inside that hull, and how to make them stop."

Skadi didn't answer. The rig hummed, mana filaments spiderwebbing across the floor, greedily sucking at her cold. The servers around them pulsed, lights flickering in delicate sequence.

Tala didn't linger long on raw stress tests. Once the readings stabilized, she was already keying through new commands, hands moving over her boards with frantic precision.

"Alright, enough small fry," she muttered. "Time to see if this was actually worth nearly freezing my lungs solid."

She didn't bother explaining. Just punched in a string of inputs and leaned closer to one of her cracked displays, breath fogging against the cooler air spilling off the compensator. Skadi felt it. A subtle change in the pull on her magic, no longer a simple drain of heat. It was directional now. Taut. As if something on the other end was finally pulling back.

"What are you doing?" Skadi asked, voice rough. Her throat felt tight, her magic curling uncomfortably under her skin.

Tala didn't look at her. "Old satellite relay. Been floating dead between orbits for years. I cracked its routing algorithms forever ago, figured it might still be good for something. Frigate's been ignoring local transmissions, but maybe we get lucky."

Lines of data poured across the screen. At first it was nonsense, the same cryptic noise Skadi could tell Tala had seen before, judging by the taut set of her shoulders. Tala's mouth pressed into a thin line. Her fingers hovered over the keys, as if debating aborting the attempt.

Then Skadi's breath caught. A ripple went through the rig. Not just the compensator. Through her. Like someone had plucked a string inside her chest.

The lights across Tala's boards flared, cascading in a pattern Skadi couldn't parse, but she felt it. Something vast. Remote. And impossibly cold. Her own magic lurched, forced outward, the conduit yawning wide.

The distant star of her mana core, her strange, new sun, strained. As if some gravity well far beyond her sight had hooked into it.

She sucked in a sharp breath, teeth clicking together. "Stop," she rasped.

Tala didn't hear. Or didn't want to. Her eyes were wide, hungry. "It's working. I think it's… gods, I think it's actually talking back."

Skadi wasn't so sure. It didn't feel like talking. It felt like drowning in black water under a dead sky. Like something impossibly far away had turned a single eye in her direction, and found her interesting.

The workshop suddenly felt too close. Too warm, somehow, despite the chill still crawling under Skadi's skin.

She needed something real. Something warm. Something that remembered her before all of this.

Tala barely looked up as Skadi left, half-buried in readouts she was already scrubbing for anomalies. Skadi pushed into the corridor, footsteps quiet on the grated flooring, frost whispering along after her in faint threads that dissipated against the recycled air.

The Hold stretched around her, hollow and uneasy. Every pipe shudder felt like it echoed in her chest. She caught wary glances from passing crew. Quick, sharp, then just as quickly averted. As if afraid her gaze alone might freeze them where they stood.

Skadi turned down a narrower passage, where the lights flickered overhead and the smell of old oil clung to everything. A low murmur carried from just ahead.

She found Fenrik in a breakroom that looked half cannibalized for scrap, benches stripped of panels, tables braced with mismatched supports. He was seated on the edge of an old crate in one of the side tunnels, a datapad balanced on his knee, half-distracted by supply rosters and the constant trickle of desperate messages from the outer sectors. The way his shoulders stiffened when he saw her said enough.

"You alright?" he asked, voice pitched low as he closed the distance. His hand hovered near her arm, like he wasn't sure she'd accept the touch.

Skadi hesitated. Then sat beside him, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm. His body heat felt fragile. Like it might gutter out if she pressed too hard.

"I'm fine. I just… just needed someone who knows me. Knew me. Remembers me."

Skadi stood there, unsure how to fill the silence. Her breath still felt too shallow. Like there wasn't enough air in the Hold for what pressed against her ribs.

How could she explain what she felt? That feeling like she was a pebble under the weight of an ocean, vast and inevitable. Like she was a snowflake cast out into summer's heat. That against something of that scale, she could vanish entirely and never even notice.

For a long minute, neither of them spoke. The only sound was the faint whirr of vent fans overhead and the distant grind of machinery deeper in the Hold.

Then Fenrik let out a breath, low and rough.

"You're letting them carve pieces out of you, Skad."

Her jaw tightened. "It's not like that."

"Feels exactly like that." His hand hovered, then settled on hers. Careful, as if he expected frostbite. "I've been where you are. Hungry to matter so badly you let the cause fill in all your empty places. Until you wake up one day and there's nothing left that's yours."

She almost laughed. Almost. It scraped out of her more like breath on cold metal.

"You think you're the expert on this because you ran yourself hollow first?"

"Yeah," he said, his voice quiet. "Exactly that."

She didn't pull away, though some part of her wanted to. Wanted to snap at him, wanted to retreat into the cold and say he didn't understand. But she was so tired of the cold. Tired of being only that.

"Just… promise me you'll hold something back. A piece of yourself that's still yours. Or you'll end up a tool. For Tala. For Nika. For whoever can point you at the next enemy."

She didn't promise. Couldn't.

Because somewhere deep inside, under all the frost, part of her wondered if it was already too late.

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