“I…” And then Cam fell silent, and Lee had a weirdly triumphant moment: I’ve thought of something that nobody else has considered.

I

Once, there was a species of fish-like creatures that had been the masters of their world. But that Earth had died, in part because of their overreaching technology. And yet the fish-creatures themselves persisted, even though they no longer lived, because their last act had been to make their world their greatest work, their archive, their mausoleum.

Sometimes Alison felt she had cast her lot in with a genie or demon, all that power reduced down to something she could petition. It was impossible to shake the impression she was dealing with a personality rather than a system, too, no matter how hard she tried to be distant and professional about things. Right now she was monitoring local traffic: the trilobites, Murther, Ertil, Khan and Rove. She had missed Rove’s input for too long though, not because his signal was hidden in the noise but because another user was deliberately obscuring his activity. When she’d tried to investigate, she’d met access issues for the first time: someone had more privileges than her. Only one person that could be, if they were pushing Rove’s agenda.

Hello, Charen, Alison thought. She’d intended the words to remain prisoners inside her head, but a spike of pain stabbed deep into her mind, even cutting through the usual dreamy numbness that accompanied communion with the Ice Mind.

“Hello, Alison Matchell. I remember you.”

Alison cut the connection immediately, rubbing at her face, where ice crystals were gritty as sand. Gone too far, gone too far, really—

“I need to talk to you, Alison.” She realized now that the voice was in her ears, not her head…There was something there, flickering, just where she could catch it in the corner of her eye.

Do I really want to see what this is? Because if her life had become a horror movie, this would be when the monster struck.

But she wasn’t eight, and she was insatiably curious, so she turned.

She remembered Charen Volkovska from all those years ago, a reserved Slavic woman with a flat voice. This current representation of her wasn’t very accurate, but maybe this was how Charen saw herself now, rather than how the world had seen her. She was an image composed entirely of glittering ice crystals, which formed and reformed as Alison watched. The figure broke up like static only to coalesce a moment later: a tall, pale woman in a spike-edged gown, diamonds glinting on her brow. The Snow Queen—of course she was the Snow Queen.

“Has Rove sent you to…” It occurred to Alison, somewhat belatedly, that if Charen could do this, she could probably kill someone easily by freezing select parts of their brain or cardiovascular system, blood clots that would melt before the autopsy discovered them.