The first hour.
It was the hardest.
Day 9. 12:04 PM. —70°C exterior. 20°C inside Unit 1418.
Jae-min sat in the corner of the living room with his back against the wall and his eyes closed and his hands flat on his thighs.
The void behind his ribs was still there — he could feel it like a phantom limb, dense and cold and patient.
But the connection was severed.
He wasn't reaching into it. Wasn't letting it hum. Wasn't letting it breathe.
It was like holding your breath underwater.
You could do it for a while.
But sooner or later your body screamed for air.
His body was screaming now.
The headache started at his temples and spread to the base of his skull. Not the sharp electric pain of void contact — something duller. Aching. Like a muscle cramp that wouldn't release.
His fingers tingled.
His vision blurred at the edges.
The shimmer around his fingertips, the one he could never fully suppress, flickered once and died.
He was going dark.
Really dark.
For the first time since the regression.
And it felt like dying.
Not physically. Something deeper.
The void wasn't just a tool. It wasn't just a weapon. It was a part of him now — grafted onto his soul the way the gamma had grafted itself onto the world.
Shutting it down wasn't like putting down a gun.
It was like putting out your own eyes.
Alessia watched him from across the room.
She was sitting on the floor beside the charcoal sectional where Jennifer lay, one hand on the telepath's wrist, her thumb pressed to the radial pulse — gentle pressure, a reminder that she was still here, still monitoring, still present.
But her eyes kept drifting to Jae-min.
To the way his jaw was clenched.
To the way his shoulders were rigid.
To the way his fingers pressed into his thighs hard enough to whiten the knuckles.
She didn't say anything.
She knew better. When Jae-min made a decision, he made it completely. No half-measures. No negotiations. Asking him if he was okay was pointless. He wasn't okay. He wouldn't be okay until this was over.
And asking wouldn't change either of those facts.
So she just watched.
And waited.
And kept her hand on Jennifer's pulse.
— • • • —
12:31 PM. —70°C exterior.
Yue was at the glass slider.
She hadn't moved from that position since Jae-min had announced the blackout. She stood with her back to the room, marble eyes fixed on the southeast, watching the entity through the massive floor-to-ceiling pane.
Beyond the glass, the balcony was a frozen slab — the two wicker chairs and small table buried under a shelf of ice, the "sniper's nest" view now a portrait of the apocalypse.
Something had changed.
The distortion field was still contracting — still funneling energy into the wounded leg.
But the rhythm was different.
Before Jae-min went dark, the contraction had been smooth. Steady. Like breathing.
Now it was irregular. Stuttering.
The shimmer expanded and contracted in uneven pulses, like a heart skipping beats.
"It's distressed," Yue announced from the glass slider, a clinical alarm flattening her cold voice.
"Distressed how?" Ji-yoo asked, a skeptical curiosity pulling her attention from the whetstone.
She didn't look up.
She was sitting on the white porcelain tile near the kitchen doorway, sharpening her knife with slow, deliberate strokes that produced a sound like a cat purring.
The blade was already sharp enough to split a hair lengthwise.
She wasn't sharpening it for function.
She was sharpening it for something to do with her hands.
"The field. It's losing coherence," Yue tilted her head, a sharp analytical focus narrowing her marble eyes as she tracked the uneven pulses. "When I observed it this morning, the distortion was smooth. Uniform. The compression was consistent across the entire radius. Now..." She pressed her fingertips against the cold glass. "Now the edges are ragged. Like a signal losing strength. It's pulling inward in some places and expanding in others. Like it can't decide what to do."
Rico joined her at the glass slider.
His eyes were good — better than they should have been at his age, better than they'd been before the gamma. He could see the distortion clearly through the frozen pane. The way the skyline rippled and bent around the entity's silhouette. The way the blue-white glow from the wounded leg pulsed in uneven bursts.
"Could it be the wound? The healing process destabilizing?" Rico questioned, a cautious hypothesis weighing down his gruff voice as he studied the ragged field.
"No." Yue's voice was certain, an absolute conviction hardening her tone. "The wound is healing. I can see the crack closing. The blue-white glow is brighter now, almost sealed. This is something else. This is behavioral."
"Behavioral." Rico repeated it to himself, a thoughtful gravity turning the word over like a stone.
"It's reacting to something. Something changed in the last hour, and it changed fast," Yue turned from the glass, a grim certainty tightening her jaw. Her marble eyes found Jae-min in the corner. Flat. Expressionless. "You went dark. The void went silent. And the entity lost the only frequency that was keeping it stable."
"I know," Jae-min answered, a hollow acceptance draining his flat voice. He didn't open his eyes.
"It's panicking. Not physically. Spatially," Yue's voice was tight, an urgent dread coiling beneath her clinical delivery. "The distortion field is an extension of its emotional state. When it was stable, when it could detect your frequency through the void, the field held together. Now that the signal is gone, the field is destabilizing. Like an infant losing its mother."
"I said I know," Jae-min snapped, a raw irritation cracking through his composure.
"Then you know what happens if it panics hard enough," Yue's eyes were chips of ice, a ruthless insistence freezing her gaze.
He opened his eyes.
Looked at her.
"What happens?" Jae-min asked, a cold dread anchoring his low voice.
Yue held his gaze.
"The distortion field isn't just a shield. It's a sensory organ. The entity uses it to perceive the world, spatially, not visually. When the field destabilizes, the entity's perception narrows. It loses resolution. It stops being able to distinguish between threats and non-threats," Yue paused, a grim precision slowing each word. "A frightened child in the dark doesn't just cry. It flails. And when a seventy-meter entity flails with a destabilized distortion field—"
"The compression wave," Rico breathed, a heavy horror dropping the words from his lips.
"Exactly," Yue nodded, a cold certainty cementing her posture. "If the field destabilizes enough, it could release a spatial compression event. Not targeted. Not intentional. Just a terrified child lashing out. The shockwave alone would shatter every window in a two-kilometer radius. The compression itself would flatten anything within five hundred meters."
She looked at Jae-min.
"Including this building," Yue stated, a flat fatalism stripping the warmth from her voice.
The room absorbed the words.
Ji-yoo stopped sharpening her knife.
"So let me get this straight. If Jae-min keeps the void closed, the entity panics and might accidentally kill us. If Jae-min opens the void, he starts broadcasting again and every spatial nightmare on the planet homes in on our location," Ji-yoo deadpanned, a bitter incredulity sharpening her dry tone.
"Yes," Yue said, a stoic resignation settling over her features.
"Great. So we're dead either way," Ji-yoo scoffed, a defeated humorlessness hollowing her voice as she laid the whetstone on the porcelain tile.
"Not necessarily," Jennifer said, a fragile determination steadying her hoarse voice.
Everyone turned.
Jennifer was sitting up on the charcoal sectional.
Alessia was behind her, one hand on her shoulder — gentle pressure, a reminder to stay still — the other pressing a water bottle to her lips.
Jennifer's face was pale. The glow beneath her sternum was barely visible — a faint pulse like a candle in a drafty room. Weak. Hoarse. But awake.
Her eyes were bloodshot, the whites webbed with burst capillaries.
A curtain of ice-blue hair fell across her face, and her fingers were curled into the slate-grey linens bunched around her waist, knuckles white.
But her mind was clear.
"There's a middle ground," Jennifer whispered, a fragile determination trembling beneath her exhaustion.
— • • • —
12:49 PM.
Jennifer was sitting cross-legged on the white porcelain tile in the center of the living room.
Alessia had wrapped a down comforter from the master bedroom around her shoulders and forced a protein bar into her hands.
She was eating slowly. Mechanically.
Her body needed fuel even if her mind was elsewhere.
The ice-blue hair hung loose around her face, and she kept her gaze fixed on the tile between her knees — anywhere but the corner where Jae-min sat.
"Talk," Rico crossed his arms, a patient command grounding his gruff voice. The voice of a man who had learned that wisdom wasn't about having all the answers, but about knowing when to listen.
Jennifer took a sip of water.
Gathered herself.
"The void isn't a light switch. It's a frequency," Jennifer explained, a clinical precision steadying her weak voice. She was still looking at the floor. Her fingers found the edge of the comforter, pressed into it, the nails dimpling the fabric. "Jae-min thinks he can turn it off completely, seal it, shut it down, go dark. But that's not how spatial resonance works."
She looked in his direction — not at him, never at him, but somewhere near his knee.
"Y-you can mute it. You can dampen it. You can reduce the output to almost nothing," Jennifer stammered, a nervous devotion making her words trip over themselves as she addressed him. "But you can't kill it. Not without k-killing yourself."
Jae-min's jaw tightened.
He hadn't thought about that. Hadn't wanted to think about it.
"The void is part of your biology now," Jennifer's voice was matter-of-fact, a professional detachment reasserting itself as she forced her gaze away from him. "It's wired into your nervous system. Your brainstem. Your spinal cord. Every time you suppress it, your body fights back. The headaches. The tingling. The blurred vision. That's your nervous system demanding access to something it needs to function."
"So what do you suggest?" Jae-min asked, his voice rough with a reluctant curiosity grinding through his exhaustion.
"A whisper. Not silence. A whisper," Jennifer set the protein bar down, a quiet conviction lifting her chin. Drew a breath. The glow beneath her sternum pulsed faintly. "Right now, you were broadcasting at full volume. Not intentionally, just by existing. The void hums, the frequency leaks, and anything with spatial sensitivity can detect it for hundreds of kilometers. That's how the entity tracked you. That's how others could track you."
Jennifer's voice was stronger now. Clinical. The telepath had found her footing.
"So I turn the volume down," Jae-min observed, a cautious understanding narrowing his unreadable eyes.
"To almost zero. Not zero, your body won't let you. But close," Jennifer paused, a careful hope warming her clinical tone. Her fingers twisted the comforter. "Close enough that the signal doesn't carry beyond this room. And close enough that the entity can still hear it. Faintly. Like a radio station fading in and out."
"The entity's field is destabilizing because it lost the signal entirely," Jennifer continued, an analytical focus sharpening each word. "If you give it something, even the faintest whisper, the field might stabilize. The panic might stop."
"And if it doesn't?" Jae-min pressed, a cold skepticism flattening his mechanical tone.
"Then we're no worse off than we are right now," Jennifer replied, a steady pragmatism grounding her exhausted gaze as it dropped to the floor.
"And if giving it a whisper is enough for something else to find us?" Jae-min challenged, a grim logic cutting through the room.
Jennifer met his eyes.
Bloodshot. Exhausted. Sharp.
It lasted half a second — the longest she could hold his gaze before the weight of it became unbearable — and then she looked away.
Her fingers dug deeper into the comforter.
"Then we deal with that when it happens," Jennifer answered, a quiet resolve firming her voice despite the bloodshot eyes. "Right now, the immediate threat is eight hundred meters away and losing its mind. Everything else is theoretical."
Rico leaned against the kitchen counter.
Arms crossed.
The dark granite was cold under his elbows.
"She's right," Rico nodded slowly, a seasoned agreement weighing down his words. "You don't plan for the second bullet while the first one's still in the chamber. Stabilize the known threat. Then worry about the unknown ones."
Ji-yoo set the whetstone down.
Laid the knife flat across her thighs on the porcelain tile.
"He goes dark, the entity panics. He whispers, he might attract more. There's no safe option," Ji-yoo observed, a frustrated helplessness thinning her razor-thin voice.
"No. There's no safe option. But there's a smart option," Alessia's voice was small, a quiet courage trembling beneath her words.
Everyone looked at her.
She was standing in the kitchen doorway, arms folded, blue eyes steady.
The under-cabinet lighting cast a soft glow against the granite countertops behind her.
She crossed the living room.
Knelt in front of Jae-min.
Took his hands in hers.
His fingers were ice-cold.
The shimmer was gone entirely.
He looked like a man who had been holding his breath for an hour.
"The entity is wounded. It's scared. It's been following your frequency for nine days across a frozen continent because you're the only thing in the world that broadcasts on its channel. And you just shut the door in its face," Alessia implored, a desperate love shining in her wet blue eyes.
Jae-min said nothing.
"I'm not telling you to open the door. I'm telling you to crack it. Just enough for your frequency to leak through," Alessia squeezed his hands, a fierce tenderness pressing into her grip. Gentle pressure. A reminder that he wasn't alone. "You don't have to broadcast. You don't have to send messages. You don't have to sing. Just let the void hum. The lowest setting. The quietest frequency. Enough for the entity to detect you're still there."
"And the risk?" Jae-min asked, a wary suspicion tightening his jaw.
"The risk is the same risk you took when you pulled a rifle out of thin air on Day One. The risk is the same risk you took when you opened the storage dimension in front of all of us. The risk is the same risk you take every time you get out of bed in a world that's been frozen for nine days," Alessia paused, a steady conviction anchoring her voice as her thumbs traced circles on his palms. "You calculate. You minimize. You don't eliminate. Because elimination isn't possible."
He stared at her.
At the calm in her eyes.
At the steadiness in her hands.
At the woman who had watched him tear holes in reality and hadn't run.
"She was always right." Jae-min realized, a warm surrender melting through his resistance.
He leaned forward.
Pressed his forehead against hers.
Closed his eyes.
His hands found her waist — pulled her closer until her knees pressed against his thighs.
She came willingly, her hands sliding up his arms to rest on his shoulders.
The cold of his skin against the warmth of hers.
Her breath ghosted across his jaw.
His fingers pressed into the curve of her hips, anchoring himself to her the way a drowning man anchors to driftwood.
For a long moment, they just breathed together.
Forehead to forehead.
The void and the woman who made it bearable.
"Tell me if I start bleeding," Jae-min whispered, a quiet trust softening his low voice.
"I will," Alessia murmured, a tender promise barely escaping her crimson ears.
He pulled back.
Sat up straight.
Pressed his palms flat against his thighs.
And opened the void.
Not all the way.
Not even close.
He cracked it open the way you crack a door — just a sliver. Just enough to let a sliver of cold air through.
The void responded immediately.
The hum returned — faint, barely audible, more vibration than sound.
It spread through his chest like warm water, filling the spaces that had been empty for the last hour.
The headache eased.
The tingling faded.
His vision cleared.
He was breathing again.
And eight hundred meters to the southeast, the distortion field stuttered.
Stopped.
And then, slowly, steadily, began to stabilize.
The ragged edges smoothed.
The uneven pulses evened.
The contraction returned to its natural rhythm — slow, steady, deliberate.
The energy flowing inward toward the wounded leg resumed its consistent pattern.
The entity's field was responding to his frequency.
Not communication.
Not understanding.
Just physics — two identical spatial frequencies falling back into phase.
And somewhere in the resonance, faint as a whisper, a word drifted through the connection like smoke through a keyhole.
"You." the entity crackled, a faint recognition threading through the spatial frequency.
Jae-min didn't respond.
He just held the door cracked.
Let the void hum at its lowest frequency.
Let the faintest whisper of his spatial signature bleed into the frozen air.
Not silence.
Not shouting.
A whisper.
— • • • —
1:15 PM.
The living room was quieter now.
Not the screaming quiet of before — something more sustainable. Something almost peaceful.
Rico was at the Samsung TV, where he'd rigged the 75-inch screen to pull building communications. Frozen Collective was active — residents reporting the violet pulse, sharing theories, arguing about whether to evacuate.
He scrolled through the messages with practiced disinterest.
Most of it was noise. Fear dressed up as analysis.
He'd seen it before — in three wars, in a dozen different emergencies. Civilians always had opinions. Few of them were useful.
"A hundred and forty-seven people in this building, and every single one of them thinks they're an expert on spatial entities now," Rico muttered to himself, a dry amusement softening his weathered face. A thin smile. "Reminds me of the junior officers at Villamor. All theory, no mud."
Yue had moved from the glass slider to the floor.
She sat with her back against the wall beneath the screen, jian laid across her knees, eyes half-closed.
Not sleeping.
Listening.
She could feel the entity's field through the building's structure — a faint vibration in the concrete that most people would miss.
But that wasn't the problem.
The problem was what she'd felt when Jae-min opened the void.
Yue had Spatial Awareness. She could feel space fold before she Blinked. Could feel the geometry of a room change when a portal tore through it. It was practical. Tactical. A tool she used to kill.
But when Jae-min cracked the void open — when that sliver of spatial frequency bled into the room — her Spatial Awareness didn't register it as a threat.
"It registered it like a hand on bare skin." Yue realized, a hot shame burning across her collarbone.
The space around him had rippled. And every cell in her body had leaned toward it the way a flower leans toward the sun. The warmth had started in her sternum and dropped through her core and pooled somewhere low and aching, and for one terrible second she'd wanted nothing more than to cross the room and press herself against him and let that frequency wash through her until she forgot what cold felt like.
"Like hunger. Like thirst. Like a wife reaching for her husband in the dark." Yue catalogued the sensation with clinical precision, a furious denial clamping down on each observation.
She'd crushed it. Instantly. The way she crushed everything that wasn't discipline.
But her thighs were still pressed together beneath the jian, and the heat hadn't fully receded, and she could still feel the ghost of that spatial ripple against her skin like the memory of a touch she'd never received.
The stabilization was holding.
For now.
"Stable. For now," Yue noted, a cautious relief tempering her perpetual vigilance.
"But the way the field responded to his frequency..." Yue pondered, a troubled curiosity stirring beneath her discipline.
"The way it smoothed the instant he opened the void. Like a hand calming a frightened animal." Yue observed, an unfamiliar warmth flickering in her chest before she crushed it.
She glanced across the room.
Jae-min was sitting with his eyes closed, his breathing slow and measured, the faintest shimmer around his fingertips pulsing in rhythm with the entity's distant glow.
"Stop." Yue commanded herself, a fierce discipline clamping down on the heat crawling up her neck.
She closed her eyes.
Forced her attention back to the vibration in the concrete.
The warmth didn't leave.
Ji-yoo was in the corner opposite Jae-min, on the porcelain tile near the hallway to the guest wing.
She had stopped sharpening the knife.
It lay flat on the tile beside her, the whetstone within arm's reach.
She was watching her brother.
Studying the way his face had relaxed since he cracked the void open. The way his shoulders had dropped. The way his breathing had evened out.
She didn't like it.
Not because she wanted him to suffer.
Because she recognized the look on his face.
She'd been seeing it for nine days — since the night he pulled a rifle out of thin air and told them the world was going to freeze.
That look.
The one where his eyes went distant and his jaw went slack and he stopped being her brother for a few seconds and became something else.
Something that saw things she couldn't see.
The void was his weapon. His gift. His curse.
And every time he touched it, it pulled him deeper.
She could see it in the faint black lines beneath his skin — darker now than they'd been an hour ago. Spreading. Like roots. Like veins.
"Jae-min," Ji-yoo called, a fierce concern hardening her narrowed eyes.
He opened his eyes.
Looked at her.
"How do you feel?" Ji-yoo demanded, a raw fear cracking through her warrior mask.
He considered the question.
Actually considered it.
"Like I've been holding my breath for an hour and finally got to exhale," Jae-min replied, a faint relief touching the corner of his mouth. Not happiness. Relief.
"And the void?" Ji-yoo pressed, a sisterly dread tightening her raw voice.
"Quiet. Low. Like a radio turned down to one," Jae-min answered, a methodical calm reasserting itself over his features.
"And the connection?" Ji-yoo bit her lip, a terrified suspicion gnawing at her chest.
He paused.
Felt the thread between himself and the entity — thin as spider silk, faint as a whisper.
But there.
"Still there. The entity's field is reacting to my frequency. But I'm not giving it anything else. No images. No messages. Just presence," Jae-min explained, a measured certainty grounding his calm voice.
Ji-yoo nodded slowly.
"That's good. Keep it that way," Ji-yoo commanded, a protective authority steeling her spine as she picked up the knife and slid it into the sheath at her hip. "The longer you stay at this level, the less you broadcast. The less you broadcast, the safer we are. But the second you feel the urge to push harder, to send something, to hear something, to open that door wider, you come find me."
"Why you?" Jae-min asked, a quiet curiosity lifting his brow.
"Because Alessia will tell you it's okay. Uncle will tell you to be tactical. Yue will tell you the odds. Jennifer will tell you what the entity might be feeling," Ji-yoo met his eyes, a fierce love burning in her gaze. Fierce. Unflinching. The same look she'd given him when they were seven and she'd punched a bully twice her size for pushing him. "I'll tell you the truth. And the truth is that every time you open that door wider, you look less like my brother and more like that thing outside."
Jae-min held her gaze.
She wasn't wrong.
"I'll come find you," Jae-min promised, a warm gratitude flickering behind his stoic mask.
"You better," Ji-yoo warned, a tender ferocity lifting her chin.
The fierceness softened for just a moment — just long enough for her to reach out and squeeze his hand once, hard, before standing.
She walked to the kitchen.
Pulled a can of corned beef from the custom cabinetry beside the stainless steel refrigerator.
Popped the lid.
Started eating cold from the can, the knife still at her hip, the blade within reach.
Normal. Mundane. Human.
The kind of thing that kept people grounded when the world was falling apart.
— • • • —
1:47 PM. —70°C exterior. 19°C inside Unit 1418.
Alessia sat on the edge of the charcoal sectional beside Jennifer.
The telepath was fading — not dying, but retreating.
The glow beneath her sternum was barely a flicker now.
Her eyes were heavy.
The conversation had cost her.
"Rest," Alessia urged, a gentle concern pressing through her doctor's voice as she placed her palm on Jennifer's shoulder.
Jennifer shook her head.
"Not yet. I need to tell you something. About the entity," Jennifer insisted, a desperate urgency trembling in her raw voice.
"Can it wait?" Alessia pleaded, a fearful worry cracking her tone.
"No," Jennifer rasped, a grim certainty anchoring her exhaustion.
She pulled the down comforter tighter around her shoulders.
Drew a breath that rattled in her chest.
The ice-blue hair fell forward, curtaining her face from the room.
Her fingers were still curled in the slate-grey linens beneath the comforter, the fabric wound between her knuckles like a lifeline.
"When I was sensing the leakage this morning, when I picked up the entity's emotional tone, I felt more than just grief and confusion. I felt... context. Background noise. Like hearing a conversation and also hearing the room the conversation was happening in," Jennifer's voice was thin, a fragile clarity holding the words together. Fading. But the words were precise.
Alessia listened.
"The entity isn't just wounded. It's starving. Not for food, for something else. Something spatial," Jennifer revealed, a dreadful awe widening her bloodshot eyes. "The void inside it is running on empty. The jump that broke its leg, the planetary-scale blink that brought it here, it burned through almost all of its reserves. That's why the healing is so slow. That's why the distortion field is contracting. It's not conserving energy. It's rationing it."
Jennifer's voice was hollow.
"What happens when it runs out?" Alessia asked, her hands trembling with a sickening dread.
Jennifer closed her eyes.
"I don't know. But I know what it feels like when my telepathy runs dry. The headache. The bleeding. The disorientation," Jennifer swallowed hard, a cosmic horror weighting her quiet words. "Imagine that. But instead of a headache, reality stops working. The distortion field collapses. The spatial compression fails. And seventy meters of entity loses the only thing keeping it anchored to this plane of existence."
Jennifer's jaw was tight with something that sounded like self-loathing.
Alessia was quiet for a long time.
"It could die," Alessia whispered, a suffocating grief tightening her throat.
"It could disappear. Die. Fade. I don't know which is worse," Jennifer opened her eyes, a helpless terror clouding her pale gaze. "But I know this: if it runs out before the leg heals, it won't matter that Jae-min went quiet. It won't matter that we're hiding. A dying spatial entity in the middle of a collapsed distortion field is not a controlled event. It's a catastrophe."
"What do we do?" Alessia asked, her surgeon's assessment kicking in with a frantic urgency.
Jennifer looked at her.
Pale. Tired. Afraid.
"That is Jae-min's question to answer," Jennifer scraped the words out, a bitter resignation settling over her features.
She closed her eyes.
Let her head fall back against the sectional cushions.
Her fingers were still wound in the linens, the fabric clutched to her chest.
Within seconds, she was asleep.
Alessia sat beside her.
Listening to her breathe.
Watching the faint glow pulse beneath her sternum — weaker now than it had ever been.
She looked across the room at Jae-min.
His eyes were closed.
The void hummed faintly behind his ribs.
The black lines beneath his skin seemed darker than before.
She wanted to go to him.
Wanted to curl up against him and feel his arms around her and pretend, just for a moment, that the world wasn't ending.
But Jennifer needed her.
And Jae-min needed silence.
So she stayed.
And watched.
And waited.
Outside the glass slider, the entity knelt in the frozen dark.
Its leg was almost healed.
Its field was almost stable.
Its connection to Jae-min's frequency was thin as a thread.
Beyond the distortion field's shimmer, Manila was a white tomb — ten meters of snow covering everything, hard-packed frozen snow dense as concrete, only rooftops breaking the white plain. Deep canyons between buildings showed where the packed ice walls rose sheer on either side.
But somewhere beneath the surface, the reserves were draining.
And nobody knew how much time was left.
The void behind Jae-min's ribs flickered.
Went dark.
For a single heartbeat, the whisper died.
Then it snapped back on.