The heat woke her up.

Taeyeon furiously kicked her fleece blanket aside. Soon after, even without the blanket and lying in bed with only her bra and , she was soaked in sweat. She was still exhausted and continued to drift off in a vexatious sleep before being definitively woken up with a terrible headache.

She glanced at the air-conditioner, only to find it turned off. It was no wonder why it felt like an oven. She played around with the remote and maxed out the air-conditioning. She looked at the clock and it was only five in the morning. It felt like right smack in the afternoon. Perhaps a good cold shower would do her good while she waited for the room to be cooled. She walked past the window to get to the closet when she noticed something was amiss. She went over to the wooden boards nailed to her window and saw a few strays of light rays shining through.

“Are those… bullet holes…?”

She traced the trajectory of the penetration to the roof and true enough, there were two bullets embedded in the ceiling, cracking the concrete. Flakes of the ceiling were on the ground.

“What the hell?”

She investigated the mirror and glanced at her wounds. The hematomas were still there, but they seemed less painful today. Her cuts had healed a little more compared to yesterday. Aggressive movements were still inducing wincing pain, so she decided to move gentler and gracefully.

“What happened to your family, Irene?”

“Hmm…” she smiled and continued sipping her wine, “So, we’re going there again.”

“I want to know you better. I can’t recall anything now. Please, you’ll be doing me a favour.”

“Hmm, are you sure?” Irene’s eyes were fixated on her glass, gently swirling the wine around in circles, “My past won’t make your day any brighter.”

“Absolutely.”

“I turned my back on my parents,” Irene looked into Taeyeon’s eyes emptily, “I refused to save them. I didn’t kill them, but I didn’t save them either.”

“What happened?”

“I let the dead take them. It wasn’t the best sight and decision, but it was what they deserved. In fact, they deserved so much worse.”

“What did they do?”

“No, Taeyeon, I can’t. This pulls a knife that’s far too deep.”

“I see. What about boyfriends?”

“Nope.”

Taeyeon just stared at Irene, speechless.

“Come on, Irene. Give me something to go on with. Tell me something about yourself. I can’t just sit here day and night staring at you but not knowing anything.”

“Then… don’t.”

“Huh?” Taeyeon raised her eyebrows, “What are you saying?”

Irene drank her glass dry and placed it on the table with a soft clink, smiling.

“Let’s go out tonight.”

***

Taeyeon’s breath turned to mist almost immediately.

Her hot bath had helped her peripheries to stay warm and not turn blue, but that didn’t last long when she stepped out of her steamy bathroom. The cold and dense air struck her warmed body like a blizzard and insulted her nostrils with a chill that went deep into her lungs. It had fallen to a deep negative degree. Everything froze on the outside, but at least the heater kept things slightly comfier. She tiptoed across the ice-cold flood with just her towel wrapping around her body and dashed towards the wardrobe. She wore as many wool clothing she could and topped that up with a fleece jacket. She put on mittens for her hands and heat tech socks for her legs.

“Should I wear a mask…?” she contemplated, “Should I wear a beanie?”

“Not that kind of mask,” Irene interrupted, standing at her bedroom door and startling the other woman, “You’ll need these.”

She held up a small oxygen tank, fully strapped up to be worn like a backpack. With it, a hospital-looking face mask was attached.

“You’re going to need this if we’re going outside, Taeyeon. Come on. I’ll help you put it on.”

Taeyeon nodded and walked towards Irene before turning around. Irene strapped the tank around her back and surprisingly, it wasn’t as heavy as Taeyeon had initially anticipated.

“I’d never seen an oxygen tank this small before…”

“It’s a portable one. There… all done.”

“What about you?”

“I’m used to this level of oxygen. You’re not.”

“How much oxygen should I set?”

“Around 3 litres should be enough. It’s just to bring the oxygen levels up to normal levels, but…”

“But what?”

“Try not to use your gun if you can, Taeyeon. It’s oxygen, after all. It will explode.”

“Oh wow. Fantastic,” she murmured.

Taeyeon kept fiddling with the safety pin on her submachine gun.

She really didn’t want to be blown to pieces.

The sand had been replaced by snow. Every step she took crunched the icicles beneath her thermal boots. The air was stale but punishingly cold. There was not a single breeze to be felt, so snow kept falling from the sky without much turbulence. Taeyeon opened her palm out and let some of the flakes land on her palm. She crushed them between her fingertips but something was amiss. There was something different about the texture of the snow. There was something mixed in it.

“Ashes,” Irene murmured, looking at Taeyeon analysing her palm, “Ashes mixed with snow.”

“Human ashes?”

“And more…” Irene glanced at the sky, “A lot more. They’re ashes of what earth used to be. Everything has been burnt, reduced to nothing but flakes for us to reflect upon our irredeemable mistakes.”

“Are you always this bleak?”

“Hah! Good one!” Irene stopped and knelt, pushing the snow on the ground aside.

“What are you doing?”

She kept pushing until something emerged from within the depths of snow and sand; something that looks like the tip of a single plane roof. Curious, Taeyeon stepped closer and knelt with Irene, helping her push more and more of the particles away until the roof became clearer to sight under the pale moon.

“This was my home.”

“Oh…” Taeyeon was at a loss of words; she didn’t know what to say.

Irene smiled and looked at Taeyeon sheepishly.

“Don’t worry; you don’t have to sound so shocked. You don’t have to console me. I’m just narrating. This is where I was born to a broken family,” Irene ran her fingers along the bricks of the roof, “This is where I spent my childhood and adolescences in pain and terror, all alone.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“No,” she shook her head, “I didn’t have the luxury. I had to deal with own parental issues by myself. I had to deal with my mother bringing home random men and my dad physically assaulting her while he’s drunk.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, Taeyeon,” she shook her head, “They got what they deserved. Besides… we talked a lot about this before. I still remember.”

Irene stood up and dusted the sand and snow off her pants. Taeyeon followed.

“Do you wanna see something cool?” Irene looked at Taeyeon and grinned, “Sure you do. Come.”

Irene held Taeyeon’s hand and ushered her forwards towards the mountains. The eerie moon made the mountains sparkle in white. Irene wouldn’t tell where she was taking her. A secret was what it was.

The sound of their feet crunching was the only sound amongst the dead silence. There was not a single bird chirping in the sky. There wasn’t a single cricket stridulating. There wasn’t a howl by the night wolves. There were no hoots of owls. There was just emptiness. There was a couple of Night Walkers standing in the middle of the snow-riddled desert, completely lost and distraught. They weren’t very far away; just a hundred meters apart from where Taeyeon stood. They looked at each other before turning their gaze towards the two women. Panic triggered within and Taeyeon was ready to arm herself but soon realised that the Night Walkers clearly had no harmful intent, which was odd.

“Calm down, Taeyeon. They won’t harm us. They’re suffering in their own right.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re burnt to a crisp at day and regenerate at night. The cycle repeats day to day. That puts a strain to their regenerative capabilities. Everything has a limit; if not in quality, it would be in quantity. Since they can regenerate in top-notch quality, I’m guessing the limit lies within the number of times they can do so. They’re dying. Looks like nothing is invincible.”

Taeyeon sighed, stepping under the shadow casted at the base, blotting out the light thanks to the huge mountains. They were reaching their destination soon.

“Even the dead is left suffering,” Irene mumbled, “Where’s does that leave the living?”

“I don’t know, Irene. I don’t know.”

“Will we even find solace in our deaths?”

“I don’t know that either,” Taeyeon stated coldly, still staring at the two Night Walkers that were minding their own business, just standing and staring like they were perpetually trapped in a spiralling madness of hell and shock, “I don’t know a lot of things right now.”

“People always feared World War III,” Irene doled, “We signed all kinds of peace treaties with the UN; peace between countries, peace between es, peace between races. We just didn’t prepare for a war between mankind and nature. We never signed any peace treaty with the Earth.”

Taeyeon had hoped that walking out at night would give her a sense of serenity and peace; an ambience for her to ruminate upon her shattered memories, hoping that the moonlight would help her glue back the fragments. She had hoped the night would help her re-establish her own identity. Unfortunately, it didn’t. She felt peril imbued in every frame of existence that her eyes could visualise.

Then, the glow was caught Taeyeon’s eyes.

The Northern Lights sparkled with life in the heavens above, far, far beyond reach. It swayed gracefully without the presence of any wind. Its colours seamlessly transitioned from primaries to secondaries; effortlessly and graciously. Taeyeon wasn’t aware but she was quite certain that her jaw hung open. The humongous mountain had blocked it off from sight but now, it fleshed out in all its glory; the peacock of the skies. Towards the edges, rainbows sprung into life, shooting themselves far away from the source and deep into the unseen horizons; they formed the bridge of heaven.

Something sparkled from within the lights themselves.

“Suspended raindrops,” Irene pointed out, “These Northern Lights emit some sort of mild gravitational pull, suspending the snow and water in its field. Strange, but amusing.”

“How is that even possible?”

Irene opened her backpack and pulled out a flare gun. She took aim at the aurora lights and fired it off with a blinding red glare. The flare flew all the way up while illuminating the surroundings and killing off the shadows that lurked beneath the moonlight. It propelled forward and upwards through the night air through its predetermined trajectory and then stopped.

Taeyeon stared quietly at the flare being suspended in mid-air, right at the heart of the aurora, turning almost the entirety of the natural lighting into angry red. The flare pulsated, with the smoke it emitted being trapped within the gravitational pull as well, forming a cloud of its own.