Lieutenant Kim was waiting anxiously for them when they emerged.  Seoyeon hadn’t noticed the door on the way in to the Wintry Cells because she hadn’t been paying attention to what was in front of her, and so she was surprised not just by how thick and heavy it was, but also by its existence.  Thankfully, Lieutenant Kim helped her as soon as he realised that she was trying to pull it open, though it swung back so fast she barely had time to jump out of the way to stop herself from being hit in the face.  Sehun stumbled out behind her, gasping in the fresh air.

“Oh, thank god,” he blurted out as his flames shot away from Seoyeon and back to him.  They flared up briefly, and the nearest three ghost fires responded by burning brighter until he extinguished the flames.  “That was horrible.”

Lieutenant Kim glanced distractedly at Minseok and Jongdae as they came out and shut the door behind them, Jongdae murmuring something about it being lucky that it wasn’t locked and Minseok responding that the locks looked so complicated most people with a key probably would have given up and hoped that the number of locks would intimidate people into thinking it was locked shut anyway.

“We should get going,” he said.  “A number of patrols have come past and I can’t keep pretending to check on them.  It’ll start to look weird.”

“Where’s Baekhyun?” asked Minseok.

“With the horses.  How is he?”  Lieutenant Kim nodded to Chanyeol, whom Sehun was readjusting so that he could piggyback him.  Now that he was out of the Wintry Cells, Sehun looked absolutely fine.  Chanyeol was still limp and unconscious and looked absolutely frozen.

“Not great,” admitted Jongdae.

Lieutenant Kim grimaced.  “We probably ought to decide what we’re going to do with him now so we don’t waste time,” he said.

“Well, it’s pretty clear we can’t send him into the Neuma like Kyungsoo suggested,” Minseok pointed out, “and at least until he’s up and moving by himself we need to hide him somewhere it’s easy to care for him.”

There was silence for several long moments.  Seeing that Sehun had Chanyeol safely on his back, Seoyeon stepped over and reached out with her hand to touch Chanyeol’s purpley-blue cheek.

To everybody’s surprise, Chanyeol nuzzled into her touch.  It startled Seoyeon enough for her to yank her hand back – his skin was still clammy with cold sweat – and he whined, trying to follow.

“Chanyeol?” she whispered, but there was no response.  He was still unconscious.  But across his cheek, where Seoyeon had touched him, the skin had warmed to a healthier colour.

As they watched, it faded back to the frozen pale purpley-blue from before, and an abrupt shiver ran through Chanyeol.  Seoyeon reached out again and placed her hand on his head this time.  His silver-blue hair was almost as cold to the touch as his skin.  Contact with her hand seemed to calm him, though, and the shivering stopped at once.

“He needs to stay with me,” she said.  She could feel his hair and his scalp beginning to warm under her hand.  “He’s never going to warm otherwise.”

Lieutenant Kim shot the idea down at once.  “That’s too risky.  It’s best if we find somewhere to hide him and Sehun stays with him whenever he’s not on duty.”

“Sir, whatever Captain Park has, it’s not ordinary Burn Out.  My fire’s doing nothing for him.”

Lieutenant Kim closed his eyes with a grimace.  “Regardless, he can’t stay with Miss Han.  It’ll be bad enough if anybody discovers him once they realise he’s not in the cells, but if they find him anywhere near you, ma’am, your father might fly off the handle and kill him.  It’s not wise.”

“Chanyeol needs me,” Seoyeon fired back.

“It’s still—”

“You’re both right,” Minseok interrupted.  “Why don’t we just say that whatever Seoyeon has is incredibly contagious so nobody disturbs her for a day or two?  If Chanyeol’s no better in forty-eight hours we’ll have to think of something else, but if Seoyeon’s presence is making a difference, I think we ought to give it a day to see how much difference, if not longer.”

Sehun cleared his throat.  “The Dark Solstice is in two days.”

“Then we need Chanyeol awake before then,” pointed out Jongdae.  “Either he needs to stay with Seoyeon, or Seoyeon needs to stay with him, or we need to find something to fix him as soon as humanly possible.”

“We won’t find anything,” said Minseok.  “It’s a Borderlander thing, not a usual illness.”

“Then Jongdae and Sehun are going to have to spend a lot of time in the library,” sad Lieutenant Kim tiredly.

“But it’s not safe!” Jongdae hissed.  “There’s a reason we stayed out of there even when Chanyeol was fit and well!”

“There has to be some solution!” Lieutenant Kim hissed back.  “He can’t just stay like—”

He froze very suddenly, then reached out and pushed them all back into the shadows near the door to the Wintry Cells.  Seoyeon collided with Sehun, staggering to maintain her balance, and ended up pressed against Chanyeol as she hid behind the Borderlander-in-training, wondering what was going on.

After a moment or two, she heard what Lieutenant Kim must have heard: footsteps, and the sound of several horses nearby.

Then Baekhyun’s voice whispered through the darkness.

“Sir?” he called quietly.  “Sir?  One of the city patrols is coming and I think we ought to go.”

Sehun lit a flame for a few seconds so that Baekhyun could find them, and everybody relaxed.

It was a silent, very tense ride back to the fortress.  Since Seoyeon was a competent rider, Lieutenant Kim allowed the others to drape Chanyeol over her back as she sat in the saddle so that he could use her warmth, although Jongdae did insist on tying him there with his belt in case the unconscious man fell off.  Seoyeon would have been more comfortable with Chanyeol sitting in front of her, except he was so tall that she probably wouldn’t have been able to see where she was going.

Sehun led them a different route through the ghost fires to the one they’d come so that they could avoid the patrols and also hopefully avoid being seen from the outpost.  A bitter wind had picked up, though once they were in the stables and Jongin was helping them to return the horses to their stalls, the only person to mention the cold was Jongdae, who joked that it was still much better than the cold in the Wintry Cells had been.

“Is that Captain Park?” Jongin asked in surprise as Sehun arranged the still unconscious man back into piggyback position.  “He looks really unwell.”

Sehun grunted in reply.

“Remem