shiver (FEATURED) | ✓

oo2

vance

EVEN THE COUNCIL room is cold, though the heating is supposed to be up at maximum.

The frost creeps inside, slipping through the large windows, hitting every single person in the room, engulfing the circular chamber in low temperatures. I feel it sink into my clothing, seeping through the fabric of my suit and my dress shirt, leaving me with cold skin and purplish fingernails. My eyes feel raw and uncomfortably dry; my age-old, bad sleeping habits have left the skin around them stinging: a dark pink, bleeding colour.

I listen with rapt attention to the conversation of the Inner Circle, my fingers poised on the plasma screen projected from my data chip, ready to move, to type, to note down what is important, what could be important, whatever becomes relevant.

As per usual, I speak little, preferring to use my other senses to formulate possibilities, to slowly get to conclusions. Most of the time, when I come to a suitable answer to an issue, the conversation has already moved on, and so I keep it to myself. I shouldn't keep things to myself, not if they'll benefit the State, but I don't want to interrupt.

Gradually, the conversation draws out onto a tangent of matters of little importance and my focus begins to slip in and out, my gaze often straying to the large glass window that makes up more than half of the council room in favour of a concrete wall. This is the only building, along with sections of the medical bureau, where concrete infrastructure has been used for some form of privacy, for keeping things hidden.

A dull white light from the sun traces our physical contours, lining us in a soft glow. Somehow it makes everything feel so much colder.

I can't recall the last time I've ever felt so miserable, so guilty. The greater part of me wishes I'd never accepted the post in here. The government trusts me. They trust me.

I follow a code, I follow the rules:

I am their soldier.

Expectations are theirs to set, and mine to live up to.

This is all I have left. This is what I am, this is who I am.

I have become a part of them.

Nevertheless, the ice haunts me.

The ghosts haunt me, too, and spit wisps of frosty air at me in a reawakening of their ever fading last breaths, as an endless, recurring reminder. And they wail, oh, they wail. You could have saved us, they cry. Their voices fade in and out of my mind. You could have...

Now, they interrupt my careful, calculating thought pattern with white hands that stretch out from the flesh of my brain, batting away at my silver stream of consciousness, causing it to break. I shake my head. The probing fingers, though reluctant, disintegrate into mist, occasionally reforming, and I gradually regain my focus. I keep my mouth shut, unwilling to say anything until my opinion is required and so I listen, still, waiting.