Why would sound vanish? Because everything stopped vibrating the instant the HFK appeared? Why would things stop vibrating? Because it was sucking energy? What exactly is the HFK doing? What attracts it to where it’s being attracted? What is the fecking commonality? Until we figure it out, we have no hope of stopping it. We’re sitting ducks.

I examine the icy tableau before me. I need answers and I need them now. Before I went into the White Mansion I might have had a little time to play with, but since I’ve been gone, things in my city have gotten critical. There’s too much snow and the cold’s getting too extreme, and if the HFK doesn’t kill folks, cold alone will.

How many hundreds, even thousands more people will die before we figure out how to stop it? What if it goes to the abbey next? What if it takes Jo from me? What if everybody’s generators run out of gas and they all die holed up, alone?

I sigh and close my eyes.

I shiver. What I need to see is right here in front of me. I can feel it. I’m just not looking with the right eyes, the clear eyes that suffer no conflicts. I need a brain like mine and eyes like Ryodan’s.

I focus on the backs of my lids, take the grayness of them and cocoon it around me. I make a bland womb where I can begin the process of erasing myself, detaching from the world; the one where I exist and I’m part of reality and everything I see is colored by my thoughts and feelings.

I strip away all that I know about myself, all that I am, and sink into a quiet cavern in my head where there is no corporeality, no pain.

In that shadowy cave, I don’t wear a long black leather coat, or skull-and-crossbones panties, or crack jokes. I don’t love being a superhero. I don’t think Dancer is hot and I’m not a virgin, because I don’t really even exist.

In that cave, I was never born. I won’t die.

All things are distilled to their essence.

I go inside my head and become that other me, the one I don’t tell anybody about.

The observer.

She can’t feel hunger in her belly or cramped muscles from being in a cage for days on end. She isn’t Dani. She can survive anything. Feel nothing. See what’s in front of her for exactly and only what it is. Her heart doesn’t break a little every time her mom leaves, and she holds no price too high for survival.

I don’t let go of myself and seek her often because once I got stuck there and she took over and the things she did …

I live in terror that one day I won’t get to be Dani again.

But, fecking-A, she’s one smart cookie! Tough, too. She sees everything. It’s hard to see like she does. Makes me feel like a freak. She thinks I’m a wuss. But she never refuses me when I come.

I open her eyes and study the scene. She’s a receiver. Things go in and come out. She processes. No ego or id. Nothing but a puzzle here, and all puzzles can be solved, all codes decoded, all prisons escaped. No price too high for success. There is an end and there are means, and all means are justified.

The facts, void of emotion, look completely different.

Folks bang cans. Fist-pump the air. Some clap. Others warm themselves. I pick and discard. I strip to bare essence.

Their bodies are bent and moving in ways that suggest intended, even relaxed motion, not the instinctual, tense muscular and skeletal flexion of panic. Everyone whose mouth is frozen open appears to be making an elongated E. Their eyes are nearly closed and the cords are tight in their necks.

I couldn’t see it, but she can.

It’s right there, in front of us. It was there the whole time. She thinks it’s obvious and I’m stupid. I think she’s a sociopathic nut job.

I have my answer but can’t rejoice in it because she doesn’t feel. I close my eyes to detach but she won’t let me. She wants to stay. She thinks she’s better equipped than me. I try to leave the cave but she hides all the doors. I visualize brilliant lights in it, like those on top of BB&B. She turns them off.

I open her eyes because I can’t stand the darkness.

Ryodan is staring at me, hard. “Dani,” he says. “Are you okay?”

He uses a whole, unadulterated question mark, a bona-fecking-fide interrogatory that rises just like a normal person, and that simple thing penetrates. It surprises me the things that rattle her. It loosens her hold on me and I slip free. I guess my sense of humor is more Dani, not her, than anything else about us because when he cracks me up, just like that, she’s gone. For a few fleeting seconds I know I’m going to forget her again. I think she makes me forget her and I won’t remember until I need her or I get pushed too far.

Then I don’t even know that anymore.

I replay all my filed scenes, looking for—and finding—that single commonality it took me so long to see. It was right in front of me all this time but I couldn’t drop my preconceptions. I saw what I expected to see and that wasn’t what it was at all. “Holy frozen frequencies, Dancer,” I say softly. “It’s drinking sound Slurpees!”

“What?” Dancer says.

None of them were screaming. All the folks I thought were yelling in fear and horror at the end were singing.

The music changes beneath my feet. A heavy metal song just came on in Chester’s and the vibrations increase in tempo and intensity. I feel the blood drain from my face.

If I’m right …

And I am right.

There are thousands of people below us, in Chester’s, and although I’m not real impressed with their choice of a lifestyle, the race we’re in now needs all the humans we’ve got left.