“You’re never going to believe what I discovered,” Dancer says. “I was staring straight at the results and still refused to accept it. I kept checking, running different tests, testing different objects. I went back and grabbed more ziplocks and tested that stuff, too. The results were the same over and over. You know what absolute zero is, right, Mega?”
“Like, where the feck I’m standing?” I say, but I don’t mean it, because if it was, I wouldn’t standing here. I’d be dead. I frown, studying the scene, trying to make sense of something. If they didn’t see it coming, why were they screaming? Did they feel the same suffocating panic I felt at Dublin Castle before it arrived?
“Isn’t absolute zero theoretical?” Christian says.
“Technically, yes, because all energy can never be removed. Ground state energy still exists, although laser cooling has managed to produce temperatures less than a billionth of a Kelvin.”
“Again, what the hell is your point?” Ryodan says. “Are you saying these scenes are being cooled to absolute zero?”
“No. The only reason I brought that up was to illustrate the connection between extreme cold and molecular activity, and the fact that even at the most extreme cold possible, all objects still have energy of some type.”
“And?” Jo says.
“On a molecular level, the debris left by the Hoar Frost King has absolutely no energy. None.”
“That’s impossible!” I say.
“I know. I ran the tests over and over. I tested multiple samples from every scene. I went to Dublin Castle, dug pieces of Unseelie from the snow and tested them, too,” he says. “They’re inert, Mega. No energy. No vibrations. Nothing. They’re motionless. Deader than dead. The things I was testing can’t exist, yet there I was holding them in my hands! Physics as I know it is being reinvented. We’re standing in the doorway of a new world.”
“So, you think it’s drawn by energy, and eats it? Like fuel, maybe it uses it so it can move through dimensions?” Jo says.
Dancer shakes his head. “I don’t think it’s that simple. Most of the scenes it iced didn’t have an impressive stockpile of energy. If it was after energy, there are an infinite number of richer places to fuel up. I speculate the absence of energy when it vanishes is a secondary and perhaps a completely unintended effect of whatever it’s doing, tangential to its primary purpose.”
I got the same impression with my sidhe-seer senses at Dublin Castle, that it wasn’t malevolent or intentionally destructive. I sensed it was enormously intelligent and hunting for something.
“What is its primary purpose?” Ryodan says.
Dancer shrugs. “Wish I knew. I haven’t been able to figure that out. Yet. I’m working on it.”
“Well, what are we supposed to do?” Jo says, looking around. “There has to be something!”
“Stand around, hoping the bloody thing decides to appear while we’re looking, then hit it with whatever we’ve got handy in the two seconds it’s actually here in our world?” Christian says disgustedly. “At least I know what the Crimson Hag wants. Guts, preferably immortal ones.” He gives Ryodan a look. “And I know what to use for bait.”
“So do I,” Ryodan says.
“What are you talking about?” Jo says, looking between Christian and Ryodan. “What’s the Crimson Hag?”
I realize she hasn’t seen my Dani Daily. Nor does she know Ryodan was ever dead. She has no clue her “boyfriend” is immortal. I decide to save that bombshell for the perfect moment. I also decide I’m going to be spending a lot of time with Christian and Ryodan, hoping the Hag comes after them. I let her loose. I’m the one that has to send her back to hell.
Ryodan says to Dancer, “Work faster. Get back in your lab and find me an answer. Dublin’s turning into Siberia and the thing just deposited a pile of frozen shit on top of my club.”
“At least it didn’t ice the door,” I say. “ ’Cause then we couldn’t get back in.”
Ryodan gives me a look that says he knows I know the back way in.
“Try a flamethrower,” Christian says. “Does the trick. Till everything blows.”
“Speaking of which, any ideas what makes the scenes blow up?” I ask Dancer.
“I think it creates a kind of energy vacuum where things get unstable. Like I said, physics aren’t working right. It’s possible objects reduced to no energy are brittle, and when disturbed by vibrations of objects around them, they explode. The lack of energy may also be the lack of ‘glue’ necessary to hold matter together. Except in these cases, they’re shellacked in ice. Once that shell is compromised, everything comes apart. The larger the disturbance of molecules surrounding the scene, the more violent the explosion. You freeze-framing in to study the scene would generate a significant vibrational disturbance.”
Sometimes I miss the most obvious things. How many scenes exploded when Ryodan and me were fast-mo-ing through them and I never put two and two together? I ponder what Dancer just told me, crunch it with a few other facts, mix it all up good to see what I get.
The Hoar Frost King leaves no energy behind when he vanishes. It’s stripped from everything he ices.
R’jan said that when the HFK iced places in Seelie, the Fae weren’t just killed, they were erased like they’d never been.
Both times I saw the HFK appear, all sound vanished. None of us could hear a thing. Dancer confirmed a third case of similar silence and hollow-sounding aftereffects at the WeCare event he witnessed.
Why would sound vanish? Because everything stopped vibrating the instant the HFK appeared? Why would things stop vibrating? Because it was sucking energy? What exactly is the HFK doing? What attracts it to where it’s being attracted? What is the fecking commonality? Until we figure it out, we have no hope of stopping it. We’re sitting ducks.
I examine the icy tableau before me. I need answers and I need them now. Before I went into the White Mansion I might have had a little time to play with, but since I’ve been gone, things in my city have gotten critical. There’s too much snow and the cold’s getting too extreme, and if the HFK doesn’t kill folks, cold alone will.
How many hundreds, even thousands more people will die before we figure out how to stop it? What if it goes to the abbey next? What if it takes Jo from me? What if everybody’s generators run out of gas and they all die holed up, alone?