HEARTHBOUND: THE LAST WARM MAN

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 degree at a time. The Vances had a generator, so as far as Harlan was concerned, the world could wait.

The generator coughed, caught, and roared. Then he heard the engines.

Not one. Many. Heavy diesel growls, and the crunch of chained tires on packed snow. Three black trucks came up the hillside road, headlights cutting through the blowing white, and stopped at the estate gate. Men in white winter gear stepped out with rifles. The gate guard, a fat man named Pruitt who had never once said good morning to Rowan, raised his hands before anyone told him to.

Rowan's stomach dropped. He ran for the house.

By the time he reached the living room, the visitors were already inside. Six armed men spread along the walls. And in the center, standing on the Vance family's cream carpet with his coat open to the cold like it was nothing, was a tall man with pale, patient eyes.

Frost was growing on the windows around him. Rowan watched the fire in the hearth shrink to a sulking orange thread.

"Garrick Voss," the man said pleasantly. "You've heard of me. Everybody has. Northgate Citadel? The place with the lights on?"

Harlan Vance had risen from his chair. His glass trembled. "Mr. Voss. We're happy to cooperate. We have fuel, a good generator..."

"I can see the generator from the road. Everyone with eyes can." Voss smiled. "That's the problem with warm things. They glow."

Delphine came down the staircase then, wrapped in a white fur coat, her blonde hair pinned perfectly even at the end of the world. Rowan's heart did what it always did when he saw her. Two years of dating. Eight months engaged. A ring he'd paid for with three summers of tutoring money.

"Del," he said. "Go back upstairs."

She didn't. She stopped on the last step and looked at Voss. Her fingers dug into her sleeve, white at the knuckles. She never once looked at Rowan.

"Mr. Voss," she said, and her voice was steady in a way that made Rowan's skin crawl. "What would it take for my family to be safe inside the Citadel?"

Harlan blinked. "Delphine..."

"The generator," Voss said. "The fuel. Whatever's in the cellar. And the people who run it." His eyes slid to Rowan. "That would be you?"

Rowan opened his mouth.

"No," Delphine said. "He's nobody."

The word landed like a stone through ice.

"He fixes things when I tell him to," she went on. "He's a student. He has no skills that matter and he eats more than he's worth. We have the generator manuals, my father knows the cellar, and I can give you everything else. But I won't carry dead weight into your walls."

"Del." Rowan heard how small his own voice sounded. "What are you doing?"

For the first time, she looked at him. Her eyes were wet. Her face was perfectly still.

"Survival isn't personal, Rowan," she said.

Voss laughed softly. "Well. I did not even have to ask." He lifted two fingers. "Take his coat."

Two men grabbed Rowan before he could move. A third tore the thin jacket from his shoulders and threw it on the carpet. Rowan fought, and a rifle butt cracked into his ribs, folding him in half. Harlan Vance turned his face away and stared at the wall. Nobody said a word.

"Don't make a mess in the house," Voss said. "Put him out."

They dragged him through the hall and the front door, down the steps, past Pruitt, who looked at his own boots. At the gate, they threw him face first into the snow. Behind him, the iron gate clanged. The black trucks idled, then rolled inside, one after another.

The warm yellow windows of the Vance Estate shone above him. Rowan lay in the snow and watched them for a long time.

Minus thirty-eight. He knew the number because he'd checked the thermometer an hour ago. In a cotton shirt, a man had twenty minutes before his hands quit.

He got to his knees. He got to his feet. He walked.

The road down the hillside was a white blur. The wind found every gap in his clothes. His fingers went from pain to burning to nothing. His thoughts went slow and soft. He remembered Delphine laughing in the campus library, flour on her nose from the bakery class. He remembered thinking all of it was worth it, because someday he would be enough.

His knees buckled at the bottom of the hill. He fell, and the snow came up and took him gently, almost kindly.

*So this is how it ends.*

A thin, pleasant warmth spread through his chest. He knew, from three semesters of cold physiology, what that warmth meant. It was the body giving up. It was a lie.

Then the lie spoke.

**[DING.]**

Rowan's eyes snapped open.

Blue text hung in the white air above him, crisp and impossible, glowing like a screen.

**[LOWEST POINT DETECTED. HOST CORE TEMPERATURE: 27.4°C. CRITICAL.]**

**[WORLD STATE: THE LONG FREEZE. CONDITIONS MATCH ACTIVATION REQUIREMENTS.]**

**[HEARTH SYSTEM AWAKENING...]**

**[HOST: ROWAN ASHBY. SYNC 100%.]**

His heart slammed once, hard.

Heat burst out of his chest like a struck match. It poured down his arms into his frozen fingers, and the pain was so sharp he screamed. Snow hissed around him. A ring of bare black asphalt melted open in the drift, three feet wide, steaming in the dark.

He sat up in the middle of it, shaking, gasping, alive.

**[WELCOME, HOST. IN A WORLD THAT HAS LOST ITS WARMTH, YOU WILL BECOME ITS SOURCE.]**

**[HEARTH ZONE: 1 METER. CURRENT BONDS: 0.]**

**[THE MORE PEOPLE WHO WILLINGLY STAND BESIDE YOU, THE WIDER YOUR FIRE BURNS.]**

Rowan stared. Then he started to laugh, a cracked, hysterical sound. Every semester of thermal engineering, every sneer from the Vances, every night he'd been told he was useless. And now the dead world had handed him the only thing it was starving for.

The text flickered.

**[FIRST MISSION ISSUED.]**

**[OBJECTIVE: BIND ONE LIVING SOUL TO YOUR HEARTH WITHIN 60 MINUTES.]**

**[REWARD: 1 EMBER CORE. 100 EMBER POINTS. ACCESS TO THE HEARTH EXCHANGE.]**

**[FAILURE: HEARTH COLLAPSES. HOST COOLS TO ZERO.]**

"Bind someone?" Rowan whispered. His breath steamed. "There's no one out here. The whole city is..."

**[NEAREST POTENTIAL BOND DETECTED: 340 METERS. STATUS: DYING.]**

A pale arrow of light unfolded across his vision and pointed down the dark road, toward the shuttered bus depot at the bottom of the hill.

Rowan staggered to his feet. His new warmth surged with him, melting a path through the snow. For the first time in nineteen days, he was not afraid of the cold.

He took three steps toward the depot.

In the blo

wing white ahead, a rifle bolt clicked.

"That's far enough," a woman's voice said. "Whatever you are, stop right there."