Chapter Text
Jennifer wasn’t asleep. She lay in her bed staring at the dark window, where snow drifted down in slow, lazy spirals.
The war. Here, in the middle of nowhere in North Dakota, it barely touched their lives — army trucks occasionally rolled through town, a couple of soldiers at the campus gate checked IDs with bored faces and assault rifles slung over their shoulders. Students kept going to lectures, taking quizzes, living as if nothing had changed.
But Jennifer felt it. She read the news, saw the footage of strikes on the East Coast, where her parents lived in a big, noisy city. The connection was unstable; their messages arrived with delays, full of that quiet parental worry that fed her own.
Across the room, Bev slept. Or pretended to.
Ever since she’d come back that night two months ago — soaked and filthy — she’d changed. Dramatically.
Before, Bev was understandable. Predictable. Classes, books, the occasional trip to town for a box of chocolates. Her ambitions were bright, but quiet. Now she was someone else entirely.
She was still the best in the program — but only out of habit. The coursework no longer held her attention. When she looked at holograms of neural pathways, her eyes stayed blank.
Bev disappeared at night. Slipping out alone, returning at dawn, silent, indifferent to everything. She’d found new friends — strange, bohemian arts and philosophy students who gathered in the abandoned chapel near the woods and talked about “expanding consciousness.” Bev had become more confident, more unrestrained. She no longer feared the war. Or the future.
The new Beverly unsettled Jennifer.
There was a power in her now, the kind that came from someone who looked at the world as if it were glass — and knew exactly where to strike to make it shatter.
But the most painful part was that Bev had stopped paying attention to Jennifer at all.
Before, they had shared everything — lectures, professors, dreams of the future over cheap campus coffee. Now Beverly was almost never with her. Jennifer tried to start conversations about classes, but Bev answered in short, detached phrases, staring through her as if solving some private equation in her head.
Their quiet evenings with books had been replaced by noisy gatherings of Bev’s new friends. Jennifer tried to join them a few times, but never managed to. They talked about things she couldn’t even begin to understand — “subtle matter,” “intersecting realities,” rituals that supposedly granted power. Beverly sat at the center of their circle, and Jennifer saw how she basked in their awe, how she played them like an audience. And her old friend, sitting quietly in the corner, didn’t exist for her at all.
One night, mustering all her courage, Jennifer asked, “Bev, what’s happening to you? We used to be—”
Beverly cut her off without even turning her head.
“We used to be children, Jen. It’s time to grow up.”
The cold indifference in her voice plunged Jennifer into a slow, suffocating depression. In Bev’s world, apparently, “grow up” meant learning how to burn out warmth and attachment. Jennifer realized she had lost her. Her best friend had walked somewhere far ahead, leaving her behind in a world cracking at the seams.
She fell asleep at some point — and woke up cold. Her first glance went to the other bed. Empty. The blanket was neatly smoothed, as if no one had slept there at all. Bev had slipped out again in the night.
Jennifer walked to class alone. The campus, usually drowsy and quiet in the mornings, buzzed with anxious whispers. An army patrol stood by the main entrance, checking IDs. The war was closing in.
The neuroanatomy auditorium greeted her with the familiar smell of formalin and steel instruments. Jennifer sat beside her friend’s empty seat. Bev never missed neuroanatomy. Never. It was her favorite subject.
The vague unease in Jennifer’s chest condensed into a heavy, suffocating knot. Everything felt wrong — the world with its war, Beverly, herself. She wished she could crawl back into the past and stay there forever.
When the lecture on the cerebral cortex finally ended and the professor dismissed them for a break, a wave of chatter immediately flooded the auditorium. As Jennifer collected her things, she caught bits of a conversation among the students by the window.
“…two more from the fourth dorm,” a tall guy in a sports jacket was saying. “Bud and his girlfriend disappeared last night.”
“Oh God,” the girl beside him whispered. “That’s the fifth case? Or sixth?”
“Sixth,” the guy confirmed. “The state police came this morning, all the way from Bismarck. They cordoned off the whole north woods, searching with dogs.”
“And? Did they find anything?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No clothes, no bodies. Shannon told me — her brother’s on the search team.”
Another student joined in, wearing a cynical smirk.
“They’re just dodging the draft. Slipping across the border to Canada before the army grabs them. I’d do the same if my parents weren’t breathing down my neck.”
It was the most logical explanation. The only one that made sense. And it was comforting. The border was only a few miles away. Jennifer wanted—desperately—to believe it.
In the main hall, where campus ads and class schedules usually looped on the big screen, bright red letters flashed across it: Breaking News.
A news anchor appeared, pale and tense.
“…the first strike hit Boston. According to preliminary reports, it appears to be a series of explosions in the port district. All communication with the city has been lost…”
The world narrowed to a single word: Boston. Her parents lived in Boston.
She stumbled out of the building and into the street, frantically pulling out her old comm. Her fingers kept slipping on the screen. “Mom.” “Dad.” She called again and again. Each time—silence, followed by the mechanical reply: “Unable to connect to the subscriber. Network overloaded.”
Not noticing anything around her, she returned to the dorm. The room greeted her with emptiness, Bev’s bed still neatly made. Jennifer dialed her parents’ number over and over until her own heartbeat drowned out the beeps.
To calm the rising panic, she started cleaning. First her side of the room, then—driven by some desperate urge to impose order on a collapsing universe—she crossed into Bev’s half. She dusted her books, straightened piles of papers on the desk. Under the bed, her hand caught on the corner of a small box shoved carelessly out of sight.
Driven by an impulse she couldn’t explain, she pulled it out. Inside, neatly stacked, were plastic ID cards. Jennifer picked up the top one. The smiling face of Dave from the fourth dorm. She picked up the next—his girlfriend. And beneath them—more. And more. Those who had “gone missing,” the ones who supposedly “dodged the draft.” And a brownish stain on the plastic. And in a filthy rag at the bottom of the box—a small knife with a narrow, rusted blade.
Still not understanding what she was seeing, she turned the knife in her hands when the comm let out a sharp, piercing alert. An official notification from the State Emergency Service.
A short, soulless message.
“We regret to inform you of the death of your parents, David and Sarah Welsh, as a result of an enemy attack on the city of Boston. Please note that due to the imposition of martial law, all personal assets of the deceased are frozen until further notice.”
The comm hit the floor with a short, dry crack. She sank down onto the floor, surrounded by photographs of dead students. Her parents were gone. The money for her education was gone. Her future was gone.
The room turned into a soundless, viscous fog. The message on the comm’s screen. The smiling faces on the student ID cards. The two facts refused to form a single reality; they existed in different universes that had just collided and annihilated each other inside her head.
Her parents. They were gone. The thought was too enormous to feel all at once. She didn’t cry. Everything inside her solidified, turning to solid ice. The silence pressed down on her like an unbearable weight.
And the box with the IDs. Dave had always copied off Bev in biochemistry. His girlfriend, the one who drew so beautifully. They were here, under her best friend’s bed, reduced to plastic.
Everything blurred together. The horror of her parents’ death mixed with the sick, repulsive fear of Beverly herself. The person she would have called right now, to break down in tears, was a monster. The person who had always helped her turned out to be a killer.
She didn’t know how long she sat like that. She came to when the comm on the floor emitted a sharp, insistent alarm. A general alert for all senior medical students.
Attention. A large group of wounded has been delivered to the medical wing. All students with clearance must report immediately.
Time to go to clinicals.
Her body moved on its own, following not her will but a long-learned algorithm. There was no meaning left. Only action, the simple, familiar habit.
The medical wing roared with voices, groans, and the clang of instruments. Dozens of wounded had been brought in, and students who had been sitting in lectures only yesterday now darted between the gurneys. The injured were being delivered by cargo helicopters to every clinic available, even here. Hard to imagine how many there were across the country. The air smelled of blood, antiseptics, and fear. The groans of the wounded mixed with the crisp, businesslike commands of the doctors.
Jennifer pulled on her gloves, her hands moving automatically. She stepped up to the table to assist with primary wound treatment. Beverly was waiting for her.
They began to work together in silence, surrounded by chaos and pain.
Jennifer passed instruments, swapped out blood-soaked dressings, while Bev worked with cold, soulless detachment. Her movements were quick and precise: the scalpel opened skin in a confident stroke, the needle slipped into flesh, clamps snapped shut on vessels, and dark drops stained her gown. She pulled the jagged edges of the wound on a man’s leg together with even, mechanical stitches, as if she were sewing coarse fabric. Her face showed no horror, no compassion — only the concentration of a surgeon working on a slab of meat.
For a moment their eyes met, and Jennifer saw nothing but emptiness. Beverly silently nodded toward the instruments.
When Jennifer handed her a clamp, it slipped from her fingers. Metal clattered against the tiles, leaving a thin red arc — it had brushed the blood-slick floor. Burning with shame and exhaustion, she bent down to pick it up. Her hands trembled, her gloves slid in blood, and a lump rose in her throat — her breath caught as tears surged up.
“What’s wrong with you?” She sensed that Beverly had crouched beside her.
The question carried genuine concern. Not the cold, detached tone she had used with Jennifer for the last two months. Bev took the clamp from her trembling fingers and, for a moment, covered Jennifer’s hand with her own. The touch was warm.
And in that moment, Jennifer felt something. A warm current flowed from Beverly into her, and the hopeless grief in her chest softened, then quieted. The pain didn’t disappear, but it stopped tearing her apart from the inside. Jennifer lifted her gaze to Beverly, surprised and frightened — and there was something in Bev’s eyes — deeper, older than simple empathy. She was feeling everything Jennifer felt, suffering with her through the pain that was tearing her apart.
“It’s all right, Jen,” she whispered. “I’m here.”
And Jennifer believed her. Not because she was her friend, but because she could physically feel Beverly taking part of her pain into herself.
They finished their shift long past midnight. The head surgeon, a weary old man with bloodshot eyes, approached them as they pulled off their gloves.
“You two…” He shook his head. “Great work. You’re an excellent team, girls. I think I’ll exempt you from the exam this semester.”
Bev nodded indifferently, while Jennifer felt a sting — a strange mix of relief and bitterness. An exam? What did it matter, when her parents were dead and her friend was a killer. But the surgeon’s words lingered in her mind like a promise of normalcy in all this madness.
They stepped out of the medical wing into the cold, quiet night. The snow had stopped, and a clear, black sky hung over the campus, studded with sharp, unblinking stars.
“Come on,” Bev pointed toward the forest that started just beyond the institute grounds. “It’s faster this way. There’s a path.”
Jennifer hesitated. The forest at night had always frightened her. But Beverly’s calm seemed to spill into her, and she couldn’t bring herself to refuse. For the first time in two months, she felt it — Bev’s indifference was gone. The old warmth wasn’t back, but something else appeared. A calm, deeply understanding strength.
They stepped into the darkness of the forest, and the sounds of the campus immediately faded, replaced by the crunch of snow under their feet. The old pines greeted them with a mute, watchful wall, their branches heavy under thick caps of snow.
In that silence, far from the chaos of the hospital, the wall of self-control she’d been holding up for months finally collapsed.
“Bev,” she began, her voice cracking. “My parents… They’re dead. In Boston. The notification came today.”
And she told her everything. About the frozen accounts, about being expelled from university. And then, choking on tears, she told her about the box under Beverly’s bed. About the missing students.
“I don’t understand, Bev,” she whispered. “What’s happening?”
Beverly stopped and turned to her. Moonlight filtered through the branches and fell across her face, making it pale and still, like a funerary mask. She did not look surprised or guilty. She looked at Jennifer with that same deep, inhuman empathy she showed in the hospital.
“I know you’re hurting,” she said softly. “I feel your pain. And I can take it away. Forever.”
“Take it away?” Jennifer echoed. “You mean… kill me?”
“No,” Beverly said, shaking her head, a sad smile touching her lips. “Not kill. Free you. From the pain, the fear, this dying world. Trust me, Jen. Like you used to.”
She took her hand, and Jennifer let herself be led deeper into the dark, snow-covered forest.
They stepped into a small, round clearing. In the center stood an ancient oak, its enormous black branches outspread like wings. It was the only tree untouched by snow. A strange, barely perceptible warmth radiated from it. On the massive oak trunk, running down its dark bark, she saw fresh streaks — not yet frozen. Black in the moonlight. Blood.
Jennifer’s insides twisted in a cold, crushing spasm. She knew what it was — and whose it was. Slowly, she turned toward Beverly. Her friend stood beside her, waiting patiently for an answer.
“Do you agree?” Beverly asked quietly. There was no force in her tone. No threat. Only inevitability.
Did she agree? Her old life — parents, school, future — erased, burned to ash. Ahead lay the war, orphanhood, poverty. Or… this other path. Strange. Terrifying. And yet, when she looked at Beverly, she did not see a monster. She saw the only person left standing with her at the edge of a collapsing universe.
“Yes,” Jennifer whispered. “I agree.”
Beverly nodded, as if she’d received the most predictable answer in the world.
A knife slid down from her coat sleeve — heavy, its moonlit blade clean and cold. Not the one from the box. Beverly pulled Jennifer into an embrace — warm, intimate — and struck.
The blade didn’t go straight into the heart. It went slightly lower, slipping between the ribs — a crooked but perfectly calibrated thrust, angled upward. It pierced lung tissue, tearing a bronchus and an artery.
Jennifer choked. A sharp, icy pain exploded inside her. She tried to inhale, but her lungs filled with her own blood; a frothing crimson spray burst from her mouth. Beverly held her while life drained out. And then, when Jennifer barely understood anything at all, she let go — letting the warm, ancient trunk catch her body.
Beverly shed her coat. Then the rest. Her pale, perfect body glowed under the moon like carved marble.
The last thing Jennifer remembered, before darkness closed over her completely, was Beverly — naked, a Moon goddess, beautiful and terrible — leaning over her, embracing her cooling body and pressing a soft, tender kiss to her frozen, bloodied lips.