UNRANKED BEFORE THE END: Everyone had a rank except me

The Cold Stopped Hurting

TRESTIN — DAY ONE (BEFORE)

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The cold stopped hurting an hour ago.

That's how I know it's bad. Pain is the body arguing. When the arguing stops, the body has already agreed.

I'm in the parking lot behind the east hostels, on my side against a curb, and I can't feel my hands. My cheek is stuck to the asphalt. The thin scar on my left cheek is the only part of my face still talking to me, and what it's saying is get up, and I can't.

Two streetlamps still on. One black car with its engine running, exhaust curling white into the dark.

Ashley Hayes's car.

I know it from the facilities window. I've watched it pull in a hundred nights at three in the morning while I mopped a hallway nobody would look at until morning. Leather seats. A mint tin in the console. A parking pass with his family's name in letters that cost more than my tuition.

The passenger door opens. Vanessa Sinclair climbs in, laughing.

Her laugh is the worst sound in the world right now. It's warm — warm, in a parking lot where the air is killing me — and she laughs like a girl getting into a car with a boy who chose her.

Because he did. He chose her.

The car starts to pull away. That's when Amelia Grace comes around the corner of the hostel at a run, coat half-open, hair whipping, breath white. She's calling after it. I can't hear the words over the engine. I don't need to. I know the shape of that word.

Wait.

The car doesn't peel away. That would be dramatic, and Ashley doesn't do dramatic things. It just leaves. Smooth and unhurried, tires crunching over frost, taillights shrinking, until the lot is one long dark mouth with the headlights gone out of it.

Amelia stands there with her hands half-raised, like she's still holding a rope that's already been dropped.

And I lie in the dark ten feet away and think: that's it, then.

Nobody is coming for her. Nobody is coming for me. The cold doesn't check your band before it takes you.

I'm unranked. Not even gray a band is for people the system expects to survive. I fix the heaters in buildings I'm not allowed to sleep in.

And in two years on this campus, I spoke to Amelia Grace exactly once.

Last September. She was coming out of the library with too many books stacked under her chin, and I was holding a door open with a paint bucket, and she said thank you, and I said yeah.

That's it. That's the whole conversation. A door and a yeah.

But she sees me now.

Boots on the ice, quick and uneven. Her shadow falls over my face and blocks out a streetlamp, and that's the closest thing to warmth I've felt in hours.

"Oh my God. Oh my God."

She drops down. Knees on the frozen ground, no hesitation, like the cold isn't already in her bones too. Her hands find my shoulder and turn me, and my cheek pulls off the asphalt with a sound I'd rather not remember.

Brown eyes, wide and wet. Hair falling forward. Skin so pale the cold has taken the color out of it, and a flush high on her cheeks that isn't health. It's damage.

"You're freezing. How long have you been out here? Can you hear me?"

"Yeah," I say. My voice comes out like paper tearing.

"Okay. Good. That's good." She says it like she's convincing herself.

Then she does the thing I will not understand for the rest of my life, however long that is.

She takes off her coat.

Not her scarf. Not her gloves. Her coat. The long dark one, and her fingers are shaking so badly she has to try twice, and she pulls it off her own shoulders and puts it over mine.

It smells like coffee and cold air and something I can't name.

"No," I say. "Put it back "

"Stop it."

"You'll freeze. You'll actually "

"I know," she says.

And she says it calmly. Like it's a fact she's already filed, already decided, already paid for.

Then she sits down.

Right there on the ice. Beside me. Back against the same curb, shoulder pressed to mine through the coat, close enough that her hair touches my jaw.

A stranger. A nobody. A boy she's spoken to once, at a door.

"Why," I say. It isn't really a question.

"Because it's cold," she says, like that explains anything. "And nobody should be alone for this."

Above us, one of the last two streetlamps dies with a click.

I feel her flinch. Then the other one goes.

The dark has weight now. It presses. The wind stops, which should be a mercy, and instead feels like a hand closing.

One coat. Two people. No lights. No car coming back.

"Hey," she says, softer. "What's your name?"

I've wanted to say it out loud to her for two years, and I can't make my mouth work.

"Trestin," I get out. "Trestin Cole."

"Trestin." She says it carefully, like she's putting it somewhere safe. "I'm Amelia."

"I know."

She laughs. Weak, cracked, the best thing I've ever heard.

"Yeah," she says. "I know you know."

Then, after a while, so quiet I almost miss it:

"I'm tired."

Those two words go through me like a nail.

I know what tired means out here. I've seen it on the news in other winters, in other cities. Tired is the body agreeing.

"Amelia." My hand finds hers. I don't remember deciding to do it. Her fingers are so cold they feel like wax. "Don't close your eyes."

"I'm just "

"Don't."

She tries. I'll give her that. She tries.

For a while I can hear her breathing, small and shallow, and I hold on to it like a rope.

Then the sound thins.

And the whiteness comes.

---

It doesn't come from the sky. It comes from inside the cold, rising up through the asphalt and the ice and my own body, until the lot is gone, the lamps are gone, her hand is gone, and there's nothing in the whole world but white.

White with no edges. White with no floor. White so total I can't tell if my eyes are open or shut.

I should be gone by now. I've known that for an hour.

But I'm still here. Still thinking.

Then the whiteness takes me.