Beat

Year 1 PK (Post-Kulda)

There’s warmth under your fingers. Beating, beating warmth.

The man in the alley burbles — another Thermie victim — and clutches at your hands. Red slides over his lips, soaking his shirt, leaving your palms wet.

“Please,” you hear him say. “Please.”

He clutches at you again. Heat splashes onto your fingertips. You unfreeze.

“It’s okay,” you say, lurching forward. His eyes latch onto your fingers as you reach for the locket around your neck. “Don’t worry. It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

You stay with him. Eventually, the man stops trembling. The muscles around his eyes go slack — his gaze grows dazed, then dull, then terribly empty. All his brilliant heat ebbs away, until finally he is as cold as you are.

*

Year 5 PK

You vault over the fence, ignoring the bite of frosted metal on your palm. Your allies follow suit. Barbed wire leaves deep scratches on their skin, and more than a few grimace darkly up at the building you’ve come here to infiltrate.

One hiss in particular catches your ear. A young man with ruffled blond hair glances up at the sounds of your footsteps. He huffs when you zero in on the bleeding gash the wire’s left on his arm.

“It’s fine,” he says, raising a palm. He pulls out a bandage and starts haphazardly wrapping the wound. “See? I’m good.”

You’re dissatisfied, but you let it pass. “Alright, everyone,” you call. “Shall we?”

*

Year 1 PK

This is the fifth victim you’ve found this week.

As you trek home, other scavengers stare wide-eyed, and you remind yourself to scrub the red from your clothing later.

A brick smashes the pavement by your foot. You jump, craning your neck to an apartment window two levels above.

“Sacha!” hisses Belvie. “Where the hell have you been? You went scavenging four hours ago!”

You glance down at the smashed brick, then back up at him. “You trying to brain me or something?”

“You’d actually need a brain for that,” Belvie mutters. His eyes catch on the dark blotching of your clothes, and his mouth thins. “Again with the bleeding heart routine? Really?”

You shrug, helpless, and Belvie rolls his eyes before helping you inside.

After you wash, Belvie crouches in front of the portable stove, where he's made dinner. Something about the way he’s staring at the flames gives you pause. You watch as he reaches out and slowly drags a finger through the fire.

The skin blisters. He doesn’t flinch.

*

Year 5 PK

The government soldiers have been lying in wait for your group, yelling slurs against the Resistance as they gun down your allies.

You scowl. The Kulda was a shock to everyone, when it came — a wave of cold rippling out from Iceland, wiping out the heat sensory abilities of most of the human population.

“Sacha!” someone calls. You look, but there’s only a flash of blond racing down the hall. A room about fifty feet away holds rows of boxed heat tech, awaiting distribution.

“Wait!” you yell, but a volley of bullets pins you in place.

There are mechanisms, now, of keeping people from dying at the hands of this cold — none so advanced as yours, but enough to save them from the fate of the Thermies.

Hypothermia is the deadliest disease in the new world — once body temperature drops past the point of sustainability, that’s it. To the Thermies, the only place warmth can still be found is inside the bodies of other people — in their cores, their chests, the cavities surrounding their beating hearts.

You can hardly blame them for wanting that warmth for themselves, you think, as you race down the hallway after your ally. How could you? Here you are, doing the exact same thing.

*

Year 1 PK

“Stop that,” you say, knocking Belvie’s hand from the flame. He frowns at you but complies.

“It’s not like it hurts,” he mutters, a little defensively. “I wish it did.”

He stares at his finger, the exposed skin a furious red. You blink, and for a moment, your own hand is superimposed over his, soaked in the blood of all the Thermie survivors you’ve accompanied through their last breaths.

You blink again, and the image is gone.

“I wanted it to hurt,” Belvie continues. “I was just checking to see, you know, if …”

“I know.”

“It’s been a year, Sacha. If this thing was gonna wear off, wouldn’t it have happened by now?”

There’s a desperate shine to his gaze you don’t often see. Maybe it has something to do with the scent of iron still hanging in the air, or the man you just watched die, or the low, moaning murmurs of the Thermies you can hear stumbling on the streets below.

Whatever it is, it compels you to shift a little closer to him and nudge his shoulder with your own. He jolts.

“Give me your hand,” you say.

*

Year 5 PK

Blood pools beneath you, streaking its way through dirty blond hair.

Your allies have overwhelmed the government forces, rounding up the boxes of tech you came for. You, however, are cradling a blood-smeared face in your hands, staring with muted horror at the red that seeps over lips, onto floor.

Please, you hear him say. Please.

You shake your head, gaze rough, memories sharp. He’s staring up at you, clutching your arms.

“No, no, no,” you murmur. Your hands flutter over the mess of his chest, so littered with bullets it might as well have been cracked open, like the clawed victims of the Thermies, like the two halves of a locket. “I’m here. It’s okay. You’ll be okay.”

He grasps harder at your arms, and you feel icy tears welling above your lashes.

“Please,” you hear him say. “Please, Sacha.”

You close your eyes. You can’t lose him. You can’t.

Freezing fingers grip your own, curling alongside the burbling of blood.

You open your eyes, slowly. You have no choice. You have to save him. You have to.

“It’s okay,” you repeat, reaching for your locket. Something eases in his eyes. He’s awaiting a send-off; a final moment of rest, cocooned in comforting heat.

“It’s okay,” you say, over and over. “I’m here. You’re not alone, Belv. It’ll be okay.”

*

Year 1 PK

“I’m not one of your bleeding heart Thermie vics, you know,” Belvie says, but his eyes remain fixed on your hand, grasping his.

“Shut up, Belvedere,” you say, and reach for the locket.

“Don’t call me that, you know I hate when you — the hell are you doing?”

You pry the locket open. It’s a cheap, tarnished thing, heart-shaped and tacky. Your brother bought it for a dollar when you were only children. Now, it’s the most valuable thing you own. Probably the most valuable thing in the world.

Inside, a small hypodermic needle protrudes, surrounded by a forest of technological machinery you could never hope to understand.

Belvie eyes it warily. You’ve used it sometimes in his sleep, on those frightening nights when his shivering stops and his skin grows clammy, but you’ve never flaunted it like this.

“Seriously, Sacha, what's going on?”

“Shut up a minute,” you say, and push your thumb onto the needle.

Belvie’s face makes a complicated sort of wince, and you know he’s about to start talking again. Blood wells where your skin is impaled by the needlepoint. You grip Belvie’s hand tighter.

He goes rigid.

“Wh —”

The look on his face makes you smile. You’re happier than you thought you’d be, sharing your greatest secret.

The true reason you feel so responsible for the Thermie victims is because of your brother. He was brilliant, a skilled scientist, and a global visionary. A year ago, he was working in Iceland.

He did this. He brought about the Kulda.

You still don’t know if he was aware his technology would be used for this desolation, but he clearly knew enough. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have left this gift for you — the last item in the world that can convey heat into the human body.

Warmth flows between you, and Belvie’s cheeks flush for the first time in over a year.

“What … is happening?” Belvie says. He repeats the words, over and over, as he shudders with the warmth you radiate. He slides his arm up your own until you are entwined in an awkward embrace. Eventually, you let the locket go and hug him in earnest.

“I know this isn’t a situation either of us envisioned for ourselves,” you murmur, “and right now we have nothing. But I want to change that.”

Belvie furrows his brow and leans back. His blond hair falls into his eyes, and you are taken with the sudden impulse to brush it away.

“I mean, I’m with you,” Belvie says, at length. “Always am, but the government hasn’t exactly been on a giving spree lately. How the hell are we gonna change things?”

You gaze at the flaming stovetop. “I might have a few ideas.”

*

Year 5 PK

Belvie grows cold beneath you, eyes wide.

“Sacha,” he gasps. “Sacha, what —”

“I’ll save you,” you promise him. The needle jabs deep into your skin. “I’ll save you. You’re with me, remember? Always. Always.”

Belvie’s chest heaves. Great plumes of frosted air escape his mouth with each exhale, alongside a fine pink spray of blood.

“Don’t understand,” he slurs, voice growing weaker, weaker. “Thought the locket was for — for warmth.”

The drip of your tears clears tracks through the red on his face. With one shaky hand, you brush the hair from his forehead.

“I can’t create something from nothing, Belvie,” you whisper, voice tremulous. “All that warmth. Where do you think I was getting it from?”

In your mind’s eye, a thousand still images flash and dissolve — you, sitting by the victims of the Thermies, your hand on their chests. Coming home to Belvie to watch him wrinkle his nose at you in distaste, smiling privately as he threw your bloodied clothes in the corner.

You sucked the warmth from each victim. Each one. You saved them, in your own way — now their spirits live on in you, an eternal repentance for the chaos your family has wrought.

Belvie’s gaze is impossibly wide. His hand brushes your cheekbone for only a moment, and it feels like forgiveness.

Then his eyes go dazed, like they did when you first showed him your gift. They’re dazed, and dull, and finally they are empty.

Belvie is empty.

Your tears are cold, as cold as the body beneath you.

The officer who killed him is long dead, eviscerated by your followers before you could even get close. Still, you make a point of stepping on his corpse, grief and hatred bleeding from your eyes with every vicious beat of your heart.

“Sacha,” your followers whisper, as you exit the building. “Sacha, Sacha, Sacha.”

The government likes to call you a dangerous influence, a cult leader, a terrorist — someone hoarding technology you should not possess and regularly abuse. But you know the truth: you are the leader of a noble Resistance, restoring order to a world gone mad.

You gaze down at the coppery smudges on your locket — a heart of gold, covered in crimson. Its shape has never seemed more fitting.

A follower offers you a sealed container of water. “Do you want to wash up, Sacha?” he asks, eyes eager and adoring. “You’ve got blood everywhere.”

You glance again at the red on your hands — beat beat beat, goes your aching heart — and the overstained locket. Belvie is with you, now. Always.

“No need,” you tell him, staring ahead once more, to the future you’d once envisioned together, and that you now must execute alone. “There are worse things, after all, than a little blood.”