The thermometer on the Vance kitchen wall read minus thirty-one, and Rowan Ashby was the only person in the house still expected to go outside."The fuel line froze again," Harlan Vance said from his leather chair, not even looking up from the whiskey he rationed like gold. "Fix it, scholarship boy. Before my daughter wakes up cold."Rowan didn't argue. Nineteen days into the Long Freeze, he had stopped arguing about anything. He pulled on the thin jacket they let him keep, the one with the torn cuff, and stepped into the blue dusk that now passed for noon.The cold hit him like a slap. Within three breaths, his nostrils stuck together. Rowan was twenty-three, a thermal engineering graduate with a head full of heat transfer equations that had never once been useful to anyone. He knelt beside the generator shed, thawed the line with a blowtorch, and shielded the flame with his own body against the wind. Above him, the sun was a dim coin behind a sky of ash.The world was dying one degr

For one long second, nobody in the depot breathed.Then Mara Okafor moved. She tore the coats off the boy, laid him flat, and set the heel of her hand against his small breastbone. "Pip. Come on, baby. Come on."Compressions. One, two, three, four. Her braid swung with each push. Rowan slumped against the bench, his own heartbeat stuttering, and watched the System text bleed pale and thin at the edge of his sight.**[EMBER: 0. HEARTH ZONE OFFLINE.]****[TIME REMAINING: 31 MINUTES.]****[TRUST: 51%. BOND THRESHOLD: 60%.]**He had nine percent to go and nothing left to burn.*Think.* That was the one thing Rowan had always been good at. Not courage, not luck. Just cold, patient thinking when everything was on fire. He looked at the numbers again.**[BOND EFFECT: A BOUND SOUL SHARES THE HEARTH. EMBER FLOWS BOTH WAYS.]**Both ways. He read it twice."Mara," he said. His voice rasped. "Stop for a second.""I'm not stopping!""I know. Listen to me." He grabbed her wrist, and she snarled at

"Get him on the bench! Move!"Mara was already running. Rowan had never seen anyone cross a room that fast. She dropped to her knees beside Gus, tore open his coveralls, and pressed both hands over the wound. Blood welled up between her fingers, dark and slow."Through and through, upper left chest," she said, almost to herself. "Missed the heart. Hit the lung or close to it. Pip, stay with Darren's wife. Rowan!""Here.""I need your fire on this table. Right now."He didn't ask why. He knelt on the other side of Gus and let the Hearth spill outward, and the room warmed to something close to a spring morning. People gasped. The wounded mechanic's gray skin pinked a shade.**[EMBER: 74. UPKEEP: 9 PER HOUR.]****[WARNING: HEALING SURGE REQUIRES ADDITIONAL EMBER.]**"Cold kills the wounded faster than the wounds do," Mara said. Her hands never stopped moving. "I've been losing people to that for weeks. You're the first thing in this city that's ever been on my side.""Don't get sentiment

"Down!" Tess shouted.The first shots tore through the darkness. Muzzle flashes strobed along the rafters. Bullets chewed the shelving, and a pallet of canned beans burst open like a wounded animal.Rowan grabbed Ivy and dragged her behind a steel pillar. Tess landed beside them on one knee, rifle already up, firing at the red lights above. Two of them went out. A man screamed and dropped from the catwalk."Voss!" Rowan yelled. "Where are you?""Right here."The voice came from behind him.Rowan spun. The Hearth flared, and in its orange glow he saw a tall figure walking calmly down the central aisle between the shelves, hands in the pockets of a long black coat. Pale eyes. A neat, handsome face. A faint, tired smile.Frost bloomed beneath each step he took."Interesting," Voss said. "You really don't know what you've got, do you? You're burning bright and loud like a kid with a flare gun. Anyone within ten miles could find you.""Stay back.""Or what?"Rowan didn't have an answer. Hi

"Mara!"Rowan's voice cracked on her name. It bounced around the empty depot and came back to him unanswered.Tess moved through the wreckage like a hunting dog, rifle raised, checking every bench, every bus seat, every dark corner. Ivy hovered near the doorway with both hands pressed over her mouth. Rowan turned in a slow circle, staring at the stain on the floor, and tried not to think the thing his body was already thinking."It's not hers," Tess said.He swung toward her. "What?""The blood." She crouched and touched the frozen streak with two fingers. "It's a man's boot print, not a woman's. Look at the spacing. Someone was limping, and someone was dragged." She stood slowly. "Doc fired that rifle. You see the shell on the floor? She hit somebody."It was the single most hopeful thing anyone had said in an hour.Something thumped.All three of them froze. The sound came again, a dull knock, from the long yellow bus parked against the east wall.Tess crept toward it, rifle steady.