12:50 PM. Day 16.
The generator had twenty liters of diesel left.
Jae-min stood in the storage room doorway and stared at the gauge. Twenty liters. At current consumption — two heaters in the bunker, three junction boxes, the water pump, and the heaters in the three neighboring units on the fourteenth floor — that was roughly thirty-six hours. Maybe less. Forty-three people across four units needed heat. The generator was feeding all of them.
Thirty-six hours wasn't a plan. It was a countdown.
He checked the fuel cans stacked against the wall. Four empty. One half-full. He'd started the freeze with two hundred liters. Three weeks of −70 had burned through it all.
Uncle appeared behind him.
"Spitting distance."
"Then we refill."
The informant was waiting by the front door. Coat buttoned. Hands in pockets.
Jae-min pulled on his coat. Everything else was in the void.
"Five stops. Gas station. Police station. Army base. IKEA. Mall of Asia."
"Order?"
"Fuel first. Everything else second."
The informant opened the door.
The cold hit like a wall.
−70. Same as yesterday. Same as last week. Same as it would be tomorrow. The temperature had locked itself at minus seventy three days into the freeze like a law of physics someone had rewritten. It fluctuated — a degree warmer at noon, a degree colder at midnight — but it always reset. Always came back to −70. The world had found its new equilibrium.
They took the stairs. Fourteen floors down, each step a negotiation between balance and ice.
...
The gas station was buried under two feet of snow.
Jae-min knelt on the frozen forecourt and pressed his palm flat against the ground. Reached downward — tearing a narrow void channel into the earth beneath the station. The resistance was heavy, dense. He pushed harder. His fingers broke through into the underground tank cavity.
Three large steel cylinders, buried horizontally beneath the forecourt. The diesel tanks. Fuel thick and viscous, frozen at the bottom but still liquid near the center where ground insulation had preserved residual warmth.
He opened a void tear inside the first tank. Drew the fuel upward through the channel like siphoning water through a straw. Four minutes. The second tank took six. The third was nearly empty.
Three tanks. Approximately twelve hundred liters.
His nose was bleeding when he stood.
"Enough?"
"Three weeks. Maybe four, if we ration the heaters."
The informant raised an eyebrow.
"Forty-three people across four units. That's a lot of heaters."
"Then we get more fuel next trip."
They moved.
...
The police station was four blocks north. Small precinct. Two stories. The reinforced armory door was locked, frozen, bolted from the inside.
Jae-min tore a void opening directly into the armory — a rough, jagged tear through reinforced steel. Gun oil. Metal. Gunpowder residue.
He pulled. Rifles first — a dozen M16A1s, stock-folding variants with cracked plastic furniture. Sidearms — Glock 17s in holsters, stacked in a locker. Shotguns — Remington 870s, pump-action, four with sling attachments.
Ammunition next. Crate after crate. 5.56 NATO. 9mm. 12-gauge buckshot. Body armor — Level IIIA vests, six, stiff with cold. Flashbangs. Smoke grenades. A riot shield, cracked but functional.
Fifteen minutes. The void sorted everything into rows.
The informant was standing in the lobby.
"You can reach through walls."
"When I need to."
...
The army base was twenty blocks southeast. Fort Bonifacio. Perimeter fence collapsed. Guard towers empty. Barracks dark.
The armory was in the basement. Stocked for a company. M4 carbines, forty of them, in storage racks. M203 grenade launchers, six units in a separate cage. Ammunition — thousands of rounds in sealed crates. Fragmentation grenades. Smoke. Flares. Night vision. Communications equipment — radios with frozen batteries.
He pulled it all. Rifles by the dozen. Crates by the dozen. The M4s took longest — one at a time, fifteen seconds each, ten minutes total. Ammunition faster. Bulk pulls through sealed crates, brass links clinking through the void.
When the armory was empty, bare shelves. Racks without guns. Lockers without vests.
...
IKEA was a tomb.
Three floors of display rooms buried under snow through cracked glass. Jae-min bypassed the showroom. Tore through the employee door into the stockroom warehouse.
He pulled selectively. Mattresses — vacuum-sealed roll-packed units, twenty of them. Thermal blankets. Sleeping bags rated for sub-zero. Table frames. Chair kits. Shelving units. Cabinet flat-packs. Kitchen supplies — pots, pans, utensils, plates. Each piece went into the void, stacked in a section he tagged as furniture.
Twenty-five minutes. The stockroom stripped of everything useful.
...
Mall of Asia was a frozen maze.
Jae-min entered through a loading dock on the east side. Frozen bodies near the entrance. He stepped past them.
The supermarket on the ground floor. Massive. Aisles stretching into darkness, freezers frozen solid. The cold had preserved everything. Canned goods fine. Frozen meat still frozen. Dry goods untouched.
He didn't browse. Opened void tears at the end of each aisle and drew contents in bulk. Canned tomatoes — gone. Beans — gone. Rice, sack by sack, twenty-kilo bags vanishing in steady succession. Pasta. Cooking oil. Salt. Sugar. Coffee. Powdered milk. Cereal. Bottled water.
The freezer section. Void tear inside the industrial unit. Pulled everything — meat, vegetables, meals, seafood. His nose bled again. Wiped it on his sleeve. Kept pulling.
The pharmacy in the adjacent anchor store. Tore through the wall. Antibiotics. Painkillers. Bandages. Antiseptic. IV fluid bags. Syringes. Surgical tape. Everything a field hospital needed.
Forty minutes. Supermarket shelves bare. Pharmacy counters empty.
The informant appeared at the end of the aisle. Stopped when he saw the empty shelves.
"How much?"
"Enough."
...
The walk back took an hour.
Jae-min's frozen joints ached with every step. Left hand a solid block. Shoulder locked completely. Vision degraded from blurred to almost useless. The repeated void tears had cost him.
The informant navigated. Jae-min followed.
Shore Residence 3. Fourteen floors of ice and concrete.
They climbed the stairs. Fourteen flights. Jae-min's legs burned. The informant went first, testing footing, pointing out hazards.
The hallway. Unit 1418.
Jae-min opened the door. Stepped inside.
Twelve degrees. Felt tropical. His frozen skin screamed with the sudden shift.
Uncle was in the living room. He stood when Jae-min entered.
"You got it all?"
Jae-min pulled the first item from the void. A twenty-kilo bag of rice. Set it on the kitchen counter. Reached back in. Another. Another.
Fuel cans next. Jerrycans, each one full, set beside the storage room door. Then ammunition crates. Medical supplies. Furniture flat-packs came last — mattresses, shelving, chairs, each one pulled slowly from the void and stacked against the wall.
He unloaded for twenty minutes. The living room floor disappeared under bags of rice, cases of canned goods, and boxes of medical supplies. The kitchen counter vanished under pots, pans, and utensils. The hallway filled with jerrycans and ammunition crates.
Uncle opened the storage room door and started transferring diesel from the jerrycans to the tank. The generator hummed. Steady. Fed.
Jae-min sat on the floor against the wall. His hands were shaking. His vision had gone from bad to worse.
"Thirty-six hours?" Uncle asked, not looking up from the fuel transfer.
"Three weeks now. Maybe four if we ration."
Uncle paused. Looked at the line of jerrycans. Counted them. Did the math.
"That's a lot of generators."
"Four units. Forty-three people. Every heater counts."
Uncle nodded. Went back to pouring.
Jae-min leaned his head against the wall. Through the wall of the neighboring unit, he could hear the faint hum of its heater — forty-three people on the fourteenth floor, warm because he'd emptied a gas station, a police station, an army base, a furniture store, and a shopping mall.
The informant stood by the front door. Coat still buttoned. Watching the supplies pile up.
He didn't say anything.
He didn't need to.