“Dude’s as bad as you say, Mega,” Dancer says.

I stop about fifty feet from the frozen folks and look around. Jo and Dancer stopped about ten feet back and are shivering miserably. Ryodan and Christian flank me. I’m pretty sure Ryodan could go farther than any of us but he doesn’t. When I exhale, my breath frosts in a suspended plume. My bones hurt with cold and my lungs burn. I can’t make it another step without freeze-framing. I shiver, taking it all in. What element is present at this scene that was also present at every other scene that got iced? The answer is right here, staring me in the face, if I can peel my preconception-blinders back and see it.

There’s wood, plastic, metal, and dirt everywhere. But I know it’s not that simple.

There are no mirrors. No tapestries. No walls. No carpet. No real furnishings of any kind. No Unseelie. Pretty simple scene, really. Folks huddled around fire cans to keep warm. Was there fire at the other scenes? Like the ugly Gray Woman that’s drawn by the one thing she was created without—beauty—is the Ice Monster drawn to the warmth it can never have? “So you finally went and checked the college out?” I say.

“Yep. I went to their optical analysis lab. Place is a dream. I wanted to know what was happening to the stuff that got iced on a molecular level. Why it was still cold. Why it felt wrong.”

I consider and discard the fire theory swiftly. Off the top of my head I can think of five scenes with no fire present. I dredge my memories, find the file where I put the reconstructed images of the scenes and slap them up on an imaginary screen inside my head. I flash through them as I listen, back and forth, breaking them down, analyzing. “What did you find?”

“Trinity was pretty much untouched. Seems people don’t pilfer things that don’t address immediate needs. I padlocked everything I wanted for myself before I left. They have ultrafast Femtosecond laser systems! The setup is sweet. Pretty much everything I ever wanted to play with is there. Dude, they’ve got an FT-IR connected to a Nicolet Continuum Infrared Microscope!”

“Dude,” I say appreciatively, though I have no idea what he just said. I look beyond my mental screen at the scene in front of me again, wondering if these folks saw it coming, too, like a lot of the others did. They must have. Beneath the ice their mouths are open, faces contorted. They were screaming at the end. Soundlessly but screaming all the same.

“With enough generators running, there’s no kind of spectroscopy I couldn’t perform,” Dancer says happily.

“What the hell is spectroscopy?” Christian says.

“The study of the interaction of matter and radiated energy,” Dancer says. “I wanted to excite molecules so I could study them.”

“How … exciting,” Ryodan says.

“I prefer to excite women,” Christian says.

“It excites the feck out of me,” I say. “Don’t make fun of Dancer. He can think circles around you. He could probably figure how to excite your molecules and short them out.”

“Excitation,” Dancer says, “can be accomplished by a number of means. I was specifically interested in temperature and velocity, curious about the kinetic energy of our ziplock detritus. I thought the base state of the atoms might tell me something.”

Got to love a dude that says things like “kinetic” and “detritus.”

“What’s kinetic energy?” Jo says.

“Everything vibrates, all the time. Nothing is motionless. Atoms and ions are constantly deviating from their equilibrium position,” Dancer explains. “Kinetic energy is the energy an object possesses due to its motion.”

“Sound is a type of kinetic energy,” I say. I’ve often wondered about the properties of my ability to freeze-frame, why I can use energy the way I can, where I get it from, how my body manufactures it but another person’s doesn’t. I’m fascinated by the different types of energy, what they can do, how everything around us is constantly in motion on some minuscule level. “When a guitar is strummed, molecules are disturbed and vibrate at whatever frequency they’ll vibrate at under those circumstances. Their kinetic energy creates sound.”

“Exactly,” Dancer says. “Another example of kinetic energy is when you crack a whip in one of several specific modes of motion, the sound it makes is because a portion of the whip is moving faster than the speed of sound, and it creates a small sonic boom.”

“I didn’t know that.” Now I’m jealous of a whip. The speed of sound is over seven hundred miles per hour! I don’t make sonic booms. I want a whip. I like the idea of walking around making sonic booms everywhere. I can’t believe he never told me this before.

“This better be going somewhere,” Ryodan says.

“It is,” I say. “Dancer doesn’t waste time.”

“He’s wasting mine.”

Something’s gnawing at the edge of my brain. I’m relieved to realize these folks died quickly and without suffering, because I just calculated the most likely trajectory of the Hoar Frost King’s path, from where I saw it disappear, and I was wrong about my first assumption. There’s no way these folks saw it coming. None of them were facing the direction it came from. They died instantly, with no awareness of what killed them. I’m relieved. Unlike me, most folks don’t seem to want to live their death in slow-mo. Mom always used to say she hoped she’d die in her sleep, easy and without pain. She didn’t.