My Safe House Moves Every Seven Days

Chapter 5: Tundra Arrival

The nebula beyond the glass swirled with hypnotic grace, a bruised purple tapestry woven with threads of distant starlight. Eduardo leaned his forehead against the pane, the glass now vibrating with a subtle, rhythmic hum—a stark contrast to the aggressive, grinding tectonic shifts of the Scorch.

"It’s beautiful," Eduardo whispered, his breath fogging the surface. "Terrifying, but beautiful."

Carolina stood a few paces behind him, her arms tightly crossed. She hadn't taken her eyes off the floorboards, which had stopped their frantic pulsing and now emitted a dull, ghostly grey light. "Don’t get attached, Ed. The aesthetic is just a byproduct of the transit. It doesn't mean we’re safe. It just means the house is between biomes."

"You really don't know how to enjoy the view, do you?"

"I don't know how to die, which is why I’m still here," she shot back, though her voice lacked its usual sharp edge. "Wait. Do you feel that?"

Eduardo shifted, his boots sliding slightly on the hardwood. A sudden, biting chill prickled at the back of his neck. It was a sharp, aggressive drop in temperature that made the air feel thin and brittle. "It’s getting cold. Really cold."

"The house is losing its internal climate control," Carolina said, her movements turning frantic as she scanned the room. "The transition ended, but the insulation hasn't adjusted to the new environment. We’re being exposed to whatever is on the other side of this transition."

"What is on the other side?"

"Check the monitor," she urged, pointing to the phone on the table.

Eduardo grabbed the device. The screen, once dead, was flickering with a pale, arctic blue light. A new interface had loaded, minimalist and jagged.

[BIOME DETECTED: THE ETERNAL FROST]

[EXTERNAL TEMPERATURE: -48°C]

[STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: DEGRADING]

"Forty-eight degrees below zero?" Eduardo’s voice hit a high, incredulous pitch. "Are you kidding me? We were just in a desert, and now we’re in a deep freeze? This house has the worst travel agent in the universe."

"Forget the humor, Ed! We need heat, now!" Carolina grabbed her heavy pack, dumping the contents onto the rug. "If that temperature reaches the interior, the plumbing will burst, the walls will crack, and we’ll freeze before the next shift happens."

"Okay, okay! What do we do?"

"We need a fireplace. A real, heavy-duty furnace," she said, her eyes darting around the room as if searching for a hidden lever. "The system… it’s feeding us data."

She tapped her own device, projecting a complex, holographic wireframe into the center of the living room. It was a schematic for a thermal generator, a clunky, industrial-looking hearth that required a massive amount of physical assembly.

"Are you seeing this? It’s a blueprint," she said, her hands moving through the light as if she were sculpting it. "It’s a direct injection from the house’s core. It knows we need to survive, so it’s giving us the instructions."

"It’s a furnace," Eduardo said, staring at the glowing, three-dimensional model. "But it looks like it needs... scrap metal? Tons of it?"

"Exactly," Carolina replied, already pulling a crowbar from her gear. "We have to strip the inner lining of these walls. The house is telling us that the decorative wood is just a shell—there’s high-density conductive plating underneath. We need to tear it out and use it to build the firebox."

"Wait, you want me to destroy the house? From the inside?"

"Do you want to turn into a popsicle, Ed?"

Eduardo looked at the walls, then at the frost beginning to crawl up the edges of the window frame like jagged, icy lace. "No. No, I guess I don't. Give me that bar."

He plunged the end of the tool into the seam of the drywall. With a sickening crunch, the surface gave way, revealing a dark, metallic interior that hummed with latent, static energy.

"Careful!" Carolina warned, adjusting the projection. "That energy is what keeps the house floating in the void. If you nick the conduit, you’ll blow the power grid, and we’ll be sitting in the dark in absolute zero. Use the insulated side of the bar."

"Right. Insulated side. Got it," Eduardo muttered, his breath hitching as a cloud of white vapor escaped his lips. "It’s really dropping fast. My fingers are already starting to go numb."

"Focus on the work," she said, her own teeth beginning to chatter. "We need four plates, eight connection rods, and the central thermal regulator. If we can get this built before the internal temp hits zero, we’ll be fine."

For the next hour, the living room turned into a construction site from hell. They worked in a rhythm born of desperate necessity. Eduardo tore at the walls, ripping out the thick, cold metallic slabs, while Carolina—her fingers bleeding from the frigid metal—welded the plates together using a handheld torch she’d pulled from her gear.

"Almost there," she grunted, her face pale, her eyelashes tipped with tiny, frozen droplets of moisture. "Hold this edge. The seal has to be perfect, or the thermal radiation will leak out."

Eduardo grabbed the heavy metal edge, his muscles screaming under the strain. "This is crazy. We’re building a furnace in a living room that’s basically a spaceship."

"It’s not a spaceship, Ed," she whispered, her eyes fixed on the blue, flickering glow of the blueprints. "It’s a cage. We’re just decorating the interior so we don’t die while we wait for the next jump."

"You’re a real ray of sunshine, you know that?"

"I’m a realist," she said, snapping the final regulator into place. "And I’d rather be a cold realist than a frozen corpse. Hand me the igniter."

Eduardo passed her the small device. She pressed it against the base of the newly constructed furnace. There was a low, guttural roar—a sound like a jet engine muffled by heavy steel. A wave of intense, dry heat erupted from the unit, washing over them.

Eduardo collapsed backward, his back hitting the wall, his lungs greedily drinking in the warming air. "God. That’s… that’s better. I actually feel my toes again."

Carolina slumped beside him, the light from the furnace casting long, dancing shadows across her features. She looked exhausted, the skin around her eyes bruised with fatigue. "We did it. For now. The house will hold."

"How long?"

"Until the next shift," she said, closing her eyes. "Maybe a day? Maybe less. We need to conserve fuel—the furnace burns a mix of energy and solid matter. Keep an eye on the feed."

Eduardo stood up, shaking the stiffness from his limbs, and walked toward the window. The frost was retreating, melting away as the house’s localized field stabilized. He peered out into the darkness of the Tundra.

"Hey, Carolina?"

"Yeah?"

"You said we were alone out here, right? Just us and the house?"

"In this biome? Usually, yeah. Why?"

Eduardo froze, his hand pressed against the cool glass. In the distance, just beyond the glow of the house’s exterior lights, he saw two pinpricks of pale, hungry yellow. Then, two more. And another dozen.

"Because I think we’ve got company," he whispered, his voice steadying into a grim, cold realization.

Carolina scrambled to her feet, joining him at the window. As she stared out into the swirling white snow, her breath hitched.

A pack of creatures—sleek, grey, and unnervingly large—was pacing the perimeter of the house. They didn't bark, and they didn't run. They moved with a predatory, coordinated silence, their eyes fixed firmly on the structure.

"Wolves?" Eduardo asked, his voice barely a tremor.

"Not wolves," Carolina said, her hand dropping to the holster at her belt. "Those things have been tracking the house’s heat signature since we landed. And they look like they’re waiting for us to make a mistake."

"Can they get in?"

Carolina looked at the wall where they had torn away the insulation—the wall that was now the primary source of their heat, but also, perhaps, the most vulnerable point in their defenses.

"They don't need to get in," she said, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous whisper. "They just need to wait for us to run out of fuel."

Outside, the lead creature stood on its hind legs, its paws scraping against the invisible barrier of the house's field. It let out a sound that wasn't a howl, but a rhythmic, metallic clicking—a sound that, to Eduardo's horror, matched the exact frequency of the house’s own heartbeat

.

"They aren't just hunting us, Ed," she added, her face turning ashen. "They’re talking to the house."