A Frost-Kissed Bargain

On a snow-dusted park bench, two teens navigate a clandestine conversation under the city's neon glow, the air thick with unspoken fears and a dangerous, newly acquired artefact.

Mason dug the toe of his worn synth-leather boot into the fresh snow, watching the fine powder puff up, then settle back into its disturbed pattern. The cold bit through his patched-up jacket, a chill that had nothing to do with the external temperature and everything to do with the glowing, irregular shape tucked deep in Harper's rucksack. He shivered, not just from the frost seeping into his bones.

"Right. So, what was that, then?" Mason muttered, his breath clouding in the icy air. He didn't look at Harper, instead fixating on a flickering neon sign across the plaza that advertised 'Nutri-Paste: Energy for the Modern Pioneer.' The sign kept shorting out, leaving half its promise in darkness, then flashing back to life with a jolt.

Harper shifted on the bench, the old plasti-wood groaning under her. The worn fabric of her own coat, once a dull charcoal, now showed the faint sheen of a thousand mends and washes. Her fingers, tucked into oversized gloves, fumbled with a loose thread on her sleeve. "You saw it. We saw it. It’s… exactly what the intel said it would be. Only… smaller."

"Smaller?" Mason snorted, a plume of vapor rising from his nose. "Harper, that thing pulsed like a dying star. And it hums. Can you feel it? Still humming. Right through the canvas."

He finally turned, meeting Harper’s gaze. Her eyes, usually sharp and quick, held a flicker of something he didn’t often see there: doubt. Or maybe just pure, unadulterated annoyance. She didn't like unknowns. She preferred maps, schematics, iron-clad plans. This… this was off-book. Wild.

"It's fine," she insisted, but her voice cracked on the 'fine.' She cleared her throat, adjusted her posture, pulling her shoulders back, a familiar gesture of defiance. "The hum’s probably residual energy. From being… wherever it was. The old dig site. They said it was active."

"Active and… glowing like a rogue bioluminescent fungus?" Mason pushed his hands deeper into his pockets, fingers already numb. He could feel the tiny pinpricks of static on his skin, a ghost of the thing's proximity. "And what about those… things? That were guarding it? They weren't in the intel, Harper. Not a word."

Harper bit the inside of her cheek. A faint, almost imperceptible twitch played at the corner of her eye. She was already mentally sifting through her internal data banks, checking and re-checking, running diagnostics on their 'source'. "They were… unexpected. Primitive, for the most part. Just automated drones, old security protocols kicking in."

"Primitive? One of them nearly took my head off with a laser-whip!" Mason exclaimed, his voice hushed but intense. He unconsciously touched a spot just behind his ear, where a rogue strand of hair had been singed clean. The smell of burning copper was still faint in his memory. "And it didn't even *look* like a drone. It was all… cobbled together. Like something from a salvage yard trying to impersonate a mechanical scorpion."

She finally pulled her gaze from the distant light of a data tower, its spire piercing the smog-hued sky. "Look, the important thing is we have it. And it's intact. Mostly."

"Mostly?" Mason echoed, a laugh bubbling up, sharp and humourless. "What do you mean, mostly? It was supposed to be a solid data core, Harper. Not… not a pulsating orb that looks like it's trying to hatch."

The humour of it felt like grit under his teeth. They had risked getting vaporised, or worse, picked up by the Enforcers, for something that felt less like a score and more like a ticking parcel bomb. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, watching another snowflake drift down, perfect and temporary, onto the sleeve of his jacket.

Harper sighed, a long, weary sound that dissipated quickly in the cold. "It's a power source, Mason. Or a data conduit. Or both. The specs were… vague. But valuable. Extremely valuable. Enough to get us out of this particular slice of hell, if we play it right."

"'If we play it right,'" Mason mimicked, his voice edged with a cynicism that felt too old for him. He was only fifteen, but the city had a way of carving adult lines into even the youngest faces. "We're currently sitting on a public bench in the middle of a plaza, with every optic-cam and sensor array in a two-klick radius probably pinging our every breath. And we've got a hot piece of tech in your bag that's practically screaming its existence to anyone with a quantum tuner."

He shifted, trying to get comfortable, but the cold plastic of the bench pressed against his back, a constant, unpleasant reminder. He wondered if the bench had seen happier days, maybe before the Big Glitch, when people actually sat in parks for leisure, not for clandestine meetings involving stolen, possibly alien, glowing artefacts. The idea was absurd, almost quaint.

"No one knows what it is," Harper retorted, her voice a low murmur, barely audible over the distant drone of an atmospheric cleaner. "And besides, this isn't exactly a high-traffic area. Especially not after the first snow."

Mason scoffed, gesturing vaguely at the empty space around them. "Yeah, because everyone else is smart enough to be indoors, huddled around a synth-fire, playing their VR rigs. We're out here freezing our nuts off because you picked a 'discreet' location."

A gust of wind, smelling faintly of exhaust and wet concrete, swirled around them, rustling the fabric of Harper's rucksack. The bag twitched. Or maybe it was just the wind. Mason wasn't sure. His stomach did a nervous flip. He found himself picking at a loose thread on his own sleeve, a habit he'd picked up when he was agitated.

"We need to get it to the contact," Harper said, her tone firm, trying to steer the conversation back to the mission. "They're expecting us. And they'll know what it is. Or at least, what to do with it."

"And what if they don't?" Mason shot back. "What if they take one look at this thing and decide it's too hot to handle? Or worse, what if it's a trap? That's not the first time we've been handed faulty intel."

He remembered the incident with the 'prototype bio-chip' that turned out to be a glorified toaster oven, nearly getting them fried by an irate tech-junkie. Harper had dismissed it as a minor miscalculation, but Mason still felt the phantom heat on his fingertips.

"It's not a trap," Harper stated with more conviction than she probably felt. "The data was solid. The payment will be substantial. Enough to clear our debts and then some. Enough to leave."

The word 'leave' hung in the air, tasting of desperation and a strange, fragile hope. Leaving the grime, the cold, the constant low-level fear. Leaving the grey, metallic sky and the pervasive scent of recycled air. It was the dream, the shimmering holographic promise that kept them going, kept them taking these insane 'jobs'.

"Leave where?" Mason asked, the question laced with a weariness that belied his age. "Another city just like this one, only with different neon signs? The 'outer rim' is just a nicer way of saying 'same garbage, different dumpster.'"

Harper leaned back, finally looking up at the sky, a canvas of bruised purples and greys, stitched with faint, almost imperceptible trails of high-altitude transport. "Doesn't matter. Just… away. Someplace where the air doesn't taste like burnt circuits and regret."

Her voice had softened, a rare crack in her usual pragmatic armour. Mason felt a pang of something he couldn't quite name – sympathy, a shared longing, or perhaps just the cold making his chest ache. He glanced at her, her profile etched against the faint glow of a distant cyber-cafe sign. She looked tired. They both did. Years of hustling, scavenging, and dodging the law had taken their toll, hardening them, but also leaving them brittle.

"Alright, fine," Mason conceded, a grudging acceptance in his tone. "But we move fast. And if this contact looks at us funny, if their optic implants even flicker with a hint of double-cross, I'm cutting loose. And so are you. No questions, no arguments."

He saw her nod, a slight, almost imperceptible movement. It was their unspoken agreement, the rule that had kept them alive so far: always have an exit strategy, and don't hesitate to use it. Especially when the stakes were this high.

---

Harper reached into her rucksack, pulling out a small, rugged data-slate. Its screen glowed faintly in the deepening gloom, displaying a segmented map of the lower city's transit lines. Her finger traced a path, a circuitous route designed to shake any digital tails. "The drop-off is at the old freight depot, Sector Gamma. Access through maintenance tunnel 7. We go by foot, then grab a rail-runner from the secondary hub. Stick to the alleys."

Mason studied the map, memorizing the convoluted pathways. "And what about the… glowing passenger? You think the rail-runner is going to appreciate the extra electromagnetic interference? What if it shorts out the whole system? We'd be sitting ducks."

"It's shielded," Harper said, tapping a section of the data-slate with her gloved finger. "Crude, but effective. The source indicated it was safe for short-range transit. Just don't hold it against your head."

He suppressed a shudder. "Comforting. So, we're trusting the same 'source' that didn't mention the laser-scorpion-drones? Excellent. Top-tier intel."

His sarcasm hung heavy in the air, a familiar rhythm between them, a way of coping with the absurdity of their lives. Harper ignored it, her focus entirely on the logistics. She was good at that, compartmentalizing the fear and the unknown, reducing everything to a series of solvable problems. Mason was more prone to letting the existential dread seep in, like the cold through his boots.

"We should move," she urged, standing up. Her movements were stiff, likely from the cold, but also from the tension humming beneath her calm façade. "The longer we're out here, the higher the risk."

Mason pushed himself up, his muscles protesting. He stamped his feet, trying to get some circulation back into his toes. The thin layer of snow crunched under his boots, a sound that felt amplified in the quiet of the near-empty plaza. The city, despite its constant drone, often had these pockets of strange, unnerving stillness.

As they started to walk, Mason glanced back at the bench, then at the spot where they had been sitting. He swore, for a moment, he could see a faint, almost invisible shimmer in the air, a distortion of the light above the plasti-wood where the rucksack had rested. He blinked, and it was gone, replaced by the usual blurry reflections of the neon signs.

"You see something?" Harper asked, her voice low, noticing his pause.

"Nah," Mason lied, shaking his head. "Just… checking for loose ends. You know."

She gave a noncommittal grunt. Her eyes scanned the surrounding buildings, her gaze lingering on the dark windows of a abandoned office block, then sweeping across the street to a row of boarded-up data-kiosks. The wind picked up again, swirling the snow around their ankles.

The first few steps were slow, deliberate. They kept to the edges of the plaza, trying to look like any other two teenagers braving the winter chill for a late-night wander. Except their gait was too purposeful, their eyes too watchful, constantly sweeping for any anomalous movement, any glint of chrome from an Enforcer's uniform. Every shadow held a potential threat, every distant siren a possible warning.

They passed beneath a bridge where a massive, ancient-looking holographic billboard, half-broken, displayed a distorted image of a smiling synth-cowboy, his face glitching erratically. The advertising copy, meant to evoke images of frontier freedom, now just read: '…L…T…Y… R…L…' before dissolving into a burst of static. The irony wasn't lost on Mason.

"Think anyone saw us?" Mason murmured, his voice barely a whisper, as they turned into a narrow alleyway, the air immediately growing heavier with the scent of refuse and damp concrete.

"Doubtful. This sector's surveillance is mostly automated, running on old protocols. Not enough budget to upgrade it all after the 'Reclamation.'" Harper navigated the uneven ground with practiced ease, her footfalls barely making a sound. "Still, better safe."

They moved through a labyrinth of service corridors and forgotten pedestrian tunnels, the sounds of the city's upper levels fading into a distant roar. Here, the snow had barely reached, settling only in dusty patches where the wind could sweep it in. The walls were scarred with forgotten graffiti and ancient warning signs, half-obscured by decades of grime. The occasional drip of water from leaky pipes was the only consistent sound.

Mason felt the cold in his fingers, despite the gloves. It was the kind of cold that seemed to seep into the very marrow of his bones. His vision, naturally sharp, worked overtime, picking out details in the oppressive gloom – a discarded data-chip, a rat scurrying into a pile of torn bio-fabric, the faint, shimmering trail of a snail on a damp wall. Every sense was heightened, every nerve-ending alert.

They came to a sudden halt, Harper raising a gloved hand. Mason froze, his heart thumping a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He heard it then, too. A faint, metallic scraping sound, coming from further down the alley. It wasn't loud, but in the oppressive stillness, it sounded like stone grinding on metal. Too deliberate for a rat, too heavy for a falling piece of debris.

Harper lowered her hand, pulling out a small, battered vibro-knife from a sheath on her belt. The blade hummed with a low, barely audible frequency, a faint blue glow at its tip. Mason reached for the compact sonic disruptor tucked into his own waistband, its cold grip reassuring against his clammy palm. The air grew perceptibly colder, the metallic tang stronger.

The scraping sound stopped. A moment of silence, so profound it felt like the world had held its breath. Then, a low, guttural thrum, deep and resonant, vibrated through the ground, up through their boots, and into their teeth. It felt like a low-frequency hum, the kind that preceded an earthquake, or perhaps, something far more unnatural. It was not the city's usual mechanical pulse; this was something else, something heavier, older, and deeply unsettling. Mason looked at Harper, her face illuminated by the faint glow of her vibro-knife, and in her wide, frightened eyes, he saw the confirmation of his own growing dread: they were not alone. And whatever was coming for them, it had just found their trail.

A new, metallic scent, like burning chemicals and wet earth, wafted down the alley, cold and sharp, an unwelcome prelude to whatever horror now stalked them in the city's frozen underbelly. The hum grew, a slow, unstoppable crescendo, promising that the night's earlier skirmish was merely an overture, and the real act was about to begin.

They gripped their meager weapons, eyes darting into the impenetrable darkness, knowing that the thing in Harper's rucksack had just become a beacon in the storm, guiding something relentlessly, terribly, towards them.

The cold no longer registered. Only the vibration in the pavement, the burning scent, and the chilling certainty that whatever they had disturbed was now very, very awake, and very, very close.