V.
Elsa closed her eyes and fell backward onto the blanket. If she had done that back in Aunah, her back would have broken from the impact against the wooden board that served as a bed. Here, her fall was cushioned by a springy mattress, and she imagined herself falling on a white summer cloud.
Opening her eyes, she sat up on the bed and gazed at her surroundings. She was in a small and cozy square room with a high ceiling and a floor-to-ceiling window on one wall. The bed faced the window and the bare desk and matching chair beside it. At the foot of the bed was a long empty drawer with a lid that opened upward. Across the room to the right of the closed door was a cream bookcase of two shelves stuffed with various books. On the wall opposite the window was a lone hanging mirror that was as tall as Elsa.
Earlier, Jack had led her up a long spiral of steps until they reached a long corridor of identical doors with different colored doorknobs. He had taken out a ring of multicolored keys from his pocket and given the white key to Elsa. "The door with the white doorknob leads to your room," he'd said. "Make yourself comfortable. I need to run some errands, so I will return in a little bit."
Elsa slid off of the bed and walked to the mirror. It took all she had not to cringe in disgust, for her reflection was appalling. Loose threads jutted out haphazardly from the black and turquoise wool of her dress. Several patches had gotten lost in the storm, exposing uneven holes in the fabric. Her blond braid fell limply over her shoulder, but it was so unkempt and dripping with melted snow that it hardly looked like a braid at all. She tried to tuck in the loose strands as well as she could, but her reflection improved little.
A low voice behind her chuckled, "You could use a bath."
At that moment, Elsa noticed Jack's reflection grinning on the windowsill behind her. She gasped and spun around so quickly that her foot caught in her long skirt. Jack leaped and grabbed her hand just in time to stop her from falling. When she regained her footing, she shook off his grip and aggressively straightened her skirt.
"I'm positive that I locked the door!" she said breathlessly. "How did you get in here?"
"Through the window."
"But this is the fourth floor."
"I ride the wind."
Elsa sighed and rubbed her temples. "Please don't do that anymore. You might catch me at a bad time."
"When would be a bad time?"
"What if I was in the middle of changing?"
"Do you have clothes to change into?"
She bit her lower lip and quickly glanced at the empty drawer. She hadn't thought about the prospect of not having any to wear other than the tattered rags on her back.
Jack grinned as if he'd read her mind. He reached under his cloak and pulled out a thick bundle of cloth. "I dropped by the clothing store and grabbed whatever I could off the racks. I didn't know what size you wear, but we can go later so you can choose to have whatever you want."
"Thank you," Elsa gushed, and she reached forward to take the bundle. As she took the gift, she felt Jack's gaze trained on her hand.
"Does it still hurt?" he asked.
"Not much." He was referring to the knife wound Elsa had self-inflicted, which was now bound by a red handkerchief. "It was rash of me to do what I did. I – I usually have more self control. I don't know what's wrong with me today."
"I told you, you've been through a lot in a short amount of time. Don't be so hard on yourself." He patted her shoulder and walked toward the locked door and unlocked it. "When you finish your bad time, come downstairs, and I'll show you around Bergis." He exited the room but left the door open. Elsa listened for the sound of footsteps as he descended the staircase, but it never came. She wondered if he was standing and waiting beside the door, so she quickly jogged over to check.
The corridor was empty.
Was Jack a ghost? Elsa shivered at the possibility. That would explain how he'd lived alone in Bergis for eighteen years and also how he seemed to approach out of nowhere from all directions. But at the moment, she didn't care so much about the existence of ghosts as her want of company, and she really didn't care whether Jack was dead or not.
Elsa laid the choices of clothing on the bed. She stifled a giggled as she scanned the dresses of a wide assortment of sizes that ranged from extra-large to children's. Still, Jack had brought enough that a blue woolen dress Elsa's size was among them. Closing and relocking the door, she threw off her old dress and slipped the new one over her head. Once it was on her body, she felt a strange sensation. It wasn't strange like she felt something strange. When her arms were through the sleeves and all the buttons were clasped, she realized that she was surprisingly warm – not uncomfortably warm but warmer than what she remembered the room to be.
Maybe Jack had bewitched the clothes somehow. The idea of Jack being able to use magic did not surprise her. As an experiment, Elsa went to the window and unclasped the lock. She intended to open them just a crack, but the howling gusts outside threw them inward so fast and so forcefully that one grazed her forehead and scratched her skin. In a panic, she tried to close them again, but the wind blew inside with flurries of snow that blinded her.
After a minute of trying, she decided to give up. If she left the window open the way it was, much snow would definitely get in the room, but Jack would probably fix things somehow. In the meantime, Elsa didn't see a reason not to test the limits of her seemingly cold-proof attire. Bracing herself against the wind, she pulled herself on the ledge and hopped down onto the snow-laden roof. Although standing in several inches of snow and ice, her feet did not feel cold at all. The wind did not penetrate the dress, either. Only her face felt somewhat nippy, and her braid blew around wildly behind her.
A laugh escaped her lips. Standing in the cold and yet being completely unaffected by it made her feel invincible.
She took one step, slipped, and went sliding off the roof.
Screaming, Elsa clawed for whatever was available as she helplessly tumbled down the steep icy slope, but she only grabbed handfuls of snow. A fraction of a second before she went flying off the roof, her hand found the edge. She managed to grab it with both hands as she fell, and she hung there with her entire body being kept suspended by the strength of eight fingers. The ground seemed miles below her. The wind continued to blow.
"Jack!" she screamed in panic, but her voice was lost in the wind. "Jack! JACK!"
"Elsa!" The familiar voice called out faintly from the ground. "Let go!"
"Let go of the ledge? You must be insane!"
"Elsa, I can't help you if you're hanging there. I'll catch you when you fall, so trust me. You have to let it go!"
The grip in Elsa's fingers was weakening, and she didn't know if she would be able to hold out for another minute. Jack hasn't failed me yet, she thought. Closing her eyes, she counted down from three and let go of the edge.
She screamed all the way down. Her limbs flailed in all directions as she tried to regain balance in midair. After a few seconds, she clenched her teeth, shut her eyes again, and braced herself for death. Instead of a hard impact against the stone library steps, she was caught in a firm support. She slowly opened one eye and saw Jack grinning down at her. He'd caught her in his arms.
"I said to you to come downstairs when you were done," he joked, "But I didn't think you'd come through the window."
"That wasn't my intention."
"No need to be ashamed. It's much faster than the stairs, I admit."
"Just please, put me down."
Jack lowered his arms, and Elsa hopped down onto the ground so that her feet were surrounded by snow once again (and, once again, unaffected by the cold). She brushed the white flakes from her shoulders and head and cleared her throat. "So, here I am," she said. "I remember that you promised me a tour of the district."
It was a rather bleak but strange tour. As Elsa allowed Jack to lead her down the streets of Bergis, she noticed that most of them looked very similar. They were either lined with closed shops and service centers or housing buildings. Elsa squinted to see past the ice-covered windows of businesses and caught glimpses of clothes still hanging from racks and loaves of bread still sitting on shelves. In terms of build and content, Bergis was little different from Aunah, except for the former's lack of factories and slums. Bergis looked like a regular district aside from the fact that it was trapped in an eternal deadly snowstorm and was inhabited by virtually no one.
"That's the post office," Jack said as he passed the small cement block squeezed between two other businesses. "Obviously, it's not in use, but it's fun to play in the boxes of packing peanuts once in a while. Over there is a private book store. You can think of it as a second smaller library. There are some interesting finds in there. You can take whatever you want from these stores as long as you have a key. Oh, and at the end of this block, you can see a grocery store. It's one of many here in Bergis."
Elsa remembered the potatoes and biscuits that Jack had provided in the library. "You promised me that if I told you about my past, you'd tell me about how the food doesn't rot."
"Oh, yeah." He glanced over his shoulder and grinned emotionlessly. "When the snow started falling, time here just sort of… stopped. My mom told me about it afterwards. It's strange, but it can be convenient. Milk doesn't spoil. Food doesn't rot. Electricity doesn't fail. Dust doesn't build." Jack kicked a bundle of snow on the side of the road and revealed a green flowered shrub. "Plants don't wilt. Basically, anything that can and should decay doesn't. It's as if the snow froze time for everything that is a part of Bergis."
"Except for people," Elsa said, thinking about her mother.
Jack chuckled half-heartedly. "Except for people," he repeated in agreement, and he nodded. "I'll have to rephrase my observation: the snow stops the decay of everything in Bergis except for its people."
"What about you?" Elsa asked after a moment. "The Frost doesn't kill you. Did it freeze time for you?"
"Probably not. Living here sort of makes you lose your awareness of time, but I'm pretty sure that I'm not inhibiting the body of a newborn infant."
It was Elsa's turn to giggle. No, Jack definitely looked at least as old as her – eighteen.
It wasn't until they had walked down two more streets that Elsa's mind suddenly pieced together the information. She stopped walking and clenched her stomach. Her heart felt like it almost stopped.
"Jack," she called.
He paused without turning around. "Yeah?"
"How old are you?"
He didn't answer.
"You said that time froze in Bergis when the Frost started, but it didn't freeze for you," Elsa continued. "You continued aging."
No response.
"But you just said that if your time had stopped, you'd have the body of a newborn infant. Back in the library, you told me that you've been in Bergis since you were born. Did the Frost begin when you were born?"
Still, there was not a word of reply. Elsa stood with her bare feet in the snow, hugging her own shaking body which was not shaking in cold but in fear; why she was fearful, however, she didn't quite now. Jack was a nice boy. He was nothing to be afraid of.
But Elsa suspected that Jack was hiding something big from her, and the thought made her feel uneasy. She wanted him to say something – anything, whether it be "yes" or "no" or even "maybe" because she could use whatever clue he provided here to try to piece together his story that he refused to tell her.
"Jack," she begged. "Say something."
Finally, Jack looked over his shoulder and gazed squarely into Elsa's eyes. A mysterious smile crept onto his face, and he raised his finger to his lips.
He turned back around so that she was looking at his back, which receded slowly as he continued walking forward. "Bergis is a rather interesting district," he piped. "Too bad it's so whitewashed. A little color here and there couldn't hurt. Anyway, I'd like to get to the clothing store as quickly as possible so that you can choose what clothes you want to keep. Let us hurry with this tour, shall we?"