The hall is a tomb of brass and velvet. You sit in the front row. Your spine is a rod of steel. The air smells of ozone and old money. You are here to listen. You are here to break.
The clock on the wall ticks. It is a heavy, wooden beast. It eats the seconds. You count them. One. Two. Three. The podium is mahogany. It gleams under the gaslight. The speaker stands there. He is tall. He is thin....
The wind did not howl; it screamed, a raw, tearing sound that scraped against the ridge like sandpaper on rusted iron, and I stood there with my boots sinking into the permafrost, the cold biting through my trousers and settling deep in my bones, feeling the weight of the rifle in my hands not as a weapon but as a limb that had grown wrong, thick and heavy and pulsing with a heat that had...
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