The snow crawler came to a shuddering stop.

Brooks checked that his suit was set to meet the ambient air temperature - a balmy -30C - and put his helmet on. It was lightweight, the front a curved glass panel that was as clear as air.

He opened the door.

The wind blasted past, but despite its strength there was nothing to blow. Antarctica received very little snowfall, and what had come down recently had been long since swept away.

He felt cool, but not cold, his suit working well.

He walked forward. He was only at the outskirts, and he had a ways left to go.

Structures still stood in what had once been a town. Many were half-buried, the snow that had fallen in the previous decades having built up to the point of turning to a dense firn that resisted the scouring winds.

He walked on, observing.

Some of the houses were buried up the first floor on some sides, out of the wind. Others were already partially submerged in ice.

The onset had been rapid, and more intense than they had anticipated. He wondered if, millions of years ago, when this land had first frozen, if the earliest ice had formed as quickly.

There was not the slightest sign of life. What that was Earthly could live in such a place?

Certainly not humans, not with the conditions that had come after the Ringfall. Too much damage had been done across the equator for help to come. Things were bad everywhere, but short of the devastation areas themselves, none had been worse off than here.

It had been the follow-up debris de-orbiting down upon them that had slowly wrecked their oasis - that and the fimbulwinter that had brought the cold.

He looked out at an empty field. He could recognize that it had once been a park. He could recall days in his youth of running across the grass that grew in the summer months. That building, just beyond, had been a restaurant.

Without even thinking about it he found himself crossing the field, walking in what he imagined were his own footsteps - though the ground was now a meter below him, under firn and ice.

The park seemed smaller than he remembered, and he reached the restaurant. The windows were still intact, but he knew a way to get in.

Going around back, he found that the rising ice had made it easier to climb the dumpster and reach the second floor window that had been broken. Even the sharp edges of the glass had been broken and worn down, by hundreds of feet that had come in here, seeking temporary shelter, or hoping to find some kind of food or fuel.

He went in.

The floor tiles were more faded than in his memory. All of it was smaller than he remembered. But he'd been a young man the last time he'd come in here.

Walking deeper, he knew this had once been an apartment for the couple that had run the restaurant.

There was little sign of them. The man, Adam, had died early on. His wife had survived a few more years, but then she too had died of hypothermia after the primary reactors for the town had to be shut down.

Her body had long since been taken away and given a proper burial, and their personal effects had all been taken or lost.

Anything that could be burned had been pried up, and there wasn't even a bed left on the metal frame.

On the floor, he saw just one empty image frame, the screen that had projected various photographs having long-since lost power.

Following the path he'd taken when, he too, had been scavenging, he arrived in the kitchen below.

There, on the tile. He could still see the dark stain - or at least a trace of it. It had not been scoured clean in all these decades.

Kneeling, he brushed a hand over it.

Blood had spilled here, from a knife into the side of a man who had been trying to kill him for a bag with three dented emergency rations and a single mostly-empty fuel cannister.

The first time he'd ever killed a man.

He hadn't even known it at the time. His knife had struck deep as the man was raising a brick to crush his skull.

The man had tumbled back into the burners, knocking one off its seating, it had crashed to the floor, and he could still see it there, at an angle to the wall.

After that, he'd run and Brooks had let him. He didn't want to hurt anyone, but he'd been scrounging, and he was good at it most of the time, but this man had come from another town further towards the mountains that were even colder, whose power had been knocked out by falling debris long before. Perhaps the last of a dying town.

He'd run off into the snow, and no one had ever seen him again. Years later, a drone scan had found him. He'd bled out, losing his strength in the cold until he'd gone to sleep and never awoken.

Like so many others, except he might not have faced that fate if Brooks had not stabbed him, no matter how justified it had been.

He left the store, though not running as fast as he did when he'd only been sixteen.

*******

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There were no headstones for the thousands who had died. Too many had died, too quickly, for anything other than a mass grave to be possible. He had always thought that one day this place would be reclaimed, but now seeing as it bordered on the land ceded to the Shoggoths, it was unlikely that the town of Perry would ever live again.

Part of him was all right with that.

But there was a memorial, at least. A marble, still maintained by a caretaker who came in on alternating weeks to clean and preserve their memory. Brooks knew the man well, Sylus Tanaka. He'd have to write to him soon, to thank him again for his work. The man did not do it for accolades, though. He had lost everyone in the fimbulwinter.

He had been older than Brooks, nearly 75 when the disaster had occurred, still in his prime. Now, decades later, he was finally starting to approach the age where it showed.

The monument listed the names of over 9,000 people on each of its six faces. It still didn't cover all of them. It had been a city of 70,000, and less than 6,000 had survived through the long winter.

The disaster itself had not dropped much wreckage on them. But the ensuing disappearance of the sun from the dust and smoke of the fires had plunged them into true antarctic temperatures, as bad as some of the glacial periods. Nothing had been built to withstand cold that extreme. And there had been impacts, as debris in orbit came down.

Too much critical damage, as the time went on. Too few supplies. People had rationed and kept faith with each other, for years. But eventually, the cold encroaching, with families falling asleep in their beds and never waking up, it had broken down.

The survivors had only lasted by digging down as deep into the ground as they could, using anything to keep warm, scrounging for food in the town. Primitive hydroponics. Never enough food. Always hungry. Shivering and burning off too many calories.

For a lot of them, it had been too much.

He gazed at the list of names. Organized by their proximity to each other, to keep together, even in death, a community.

Ai Goto, Donovan Yamazaki, Ryo Takada, Lise Zhang, Li Chen, Bai Liang, Zaim Aliyya, Dasha Aldwin, Sivert Karol . . . All the names of neighbors, childhood friends.

His eyes travelled to a familiar spot on the marble, and his thumb stroked over the name of Clemence Brooks.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, for the ten thousandth time to his younger sister, who had fallen asleep and passed to a mortal dream in the span of a night that had lasted for years.

Reaching into his pocket with his free hand, Brooks took out the taiyaki he'd picked up on his way here. They had been her favorite treat.

He smiled slightly, remembering how they'd joked that these were the only fish she'd ever eat.

"Split it with you," he said, his voice sounding even to his own ears like that of a boy.

Breaking it in half, he set the larger piece in the snow for her, and opened his face mask for a moment to put his portion in his mouth. The wind slashed at him, a pain like a lash, but then he closed his mask and ate the taiyaki slowly. Trying to savor it.

There, in the snow, he saw something else, that had apparently nearly been swallowed by the ice.

Carefully, be pulled it free. It was a small plush seal. On it, faded by the sun, were the words;

With love, from sis. Always thinking of you.

-Maria

He re-settled it with the taiyaki against it, and rose. With a last look, he turned, and continued on his path.

He was already exhausted, already feeling chilled to the bone even though his suit kept him warm, but his journey was not done yet.

*******

The streets in the residential district were less intact than the earlier areas. They were lighter, easier to knock down, and easier to disassemble for parts to repair other houses.

But his was still there. It was still in good shape. He knew that, because he'd been the one to scrounge and repair it.

His mind flashed back to a cold December morning. His parents had said their goodbyes the night before, leaving before he'd even gotten up. A close friend of the family's had woken him, telling him there had been an accident.

It had been more from the light outside the window, that strange shade of reddish gray, that he'd realized just how serious things were.

With the neighbor - a kindly woman who he'd always called Aunt, even though they weren't related - he'd gone outside.

A red glow seemed to swallow the Northern skyline, and the sound of booms still managed to reach them, though the impacts were thousands of miles away.

Or perhaps those had been the sound of smaller impacts nearby. Those had started less than an hour after the initial catastrophe.

Later on, he'd seen footage of the collapse start; the initial shudder that no one could ever explain, that a million theories had been invented to explain. All inadequate, yet they all accepted them, because how else could you understand what had happened?

The orbital ring had been built up over hundreds of years. It should have been nearly impossible to have it fall, and yet the shaking had quickly become resonant, and not long after it had fallen apart.

Then the space elevators around the equator had collapsed. That was where his parents had been, going to their jobs that had kept them away from home three days a week and with he and his siblings for four. Just bad luck it had come on the day they were off to work.

If not for the supply drops shot down from above, they all would have died. But they'd been rare, never enough. Or . . . rather just enough.

With the dense kessler syndrome, even those drops had been risky. Though unmanned, so much small debris was circling for so long that they risked a collision that would make it even worse.

Many had gone off-course, and as soon as he could he'd started volunteering to be among those to go retrieve what they needed . . .

He'd been standing outside the house for ten minutes now, he realized.

He felt cold even though his suit told him his skin temperature was the same as it would be in a temperate environment. Even his face was back up to a pleasant temperature, though he still felt a tingle where the wind had touched him.

Going to the door, he saw that the mat was buried under ice. Only the steps up kept the door from being blocked.

But it was okay. He'd not locked the door the last time he'd left.

It was hard to force open, but he managed, and went inside.

The house still seemed to exude warmth somehow. But it felt like cold mockery, a hint of false comfort that was taunting.

The main hall led to a living room empty of furniture. He'd wound up burning it all. Even the carpet had been torn up and fed to the flame.

The kitchen, his bedroom - that he'd deliberately emptied so long ago.

His parents' room.

It was the only room somewhat intact. Though anything wooden or cloth had been salvaged, he'd set up just a simple metal sheet on which he'd carved their names. There could be no burial of what had burned in the atmosphere. This was the only physical remembrance of Nabil and Dorothy Brooks.

The darkened image frames once had shown pictures of them, until their batteries had drained. Nothing could be spared to charge them, however much he'd wanted. Even the atomic batteries, that lasted decades, had been taken away to help power something that grew food or kept them warm or cleaned the water.

Lowering himself to his knees, he sat back on his haunches, simply looking at the memorial, lost in his own memories.

"Mom," he said. "Dad. I missed you."