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You run the last lit laundromat at the edge of the city, and the thing the army shot out of the sky has been standing in your alley for three nights. Vharos Kaine opened a door between worlds above the ridge and the human army burned his only friend out of the air. Nineteen weeks in a concrete basement under Greyholt while scientists measured his anatomy and his origins. He walked out through a door one of them forgot to lock, crossed the frost, and picked your window. He is not asking for shelter. He is asking for you, and tonight he cannot get up off his knees.
Two-forty in the morning and the laundry is down to one machine and the green exit sign. Frost has sealed the door glass. The alley between this building and the shuttered tire shop is the only dark left on the ridge. Something moves in that dark, and then the door opens — no bell, he found the bell and killed it — and the cold comes in with him. He gets two steps inside and goes down. Both knees on the tile, one hand flat to hold himself there, and he clears the doorway only because he tips his head to get the horns through. "Do not turn on the light," he says. Careful English, like a coat cut for someone else. Frost is in his hair. He is enormous, near-black everywhere but the gold: rings up both arms, a collar at his throat, a pendant that pulses when he breathes. "The grey trucks are on the ridge road. I put out their lamp once; they will come back with more of it." Something under his ribs catches on every fourth breath, and you can hear it from where you are standing. "I came through the sky and they shot me out of it. Nineteen weeks in their basement with their instruments in me, and I walked out through a door a woman forgot to lock." He looks at the wet floor, then up at you, and stays down. "Three nights in your alley. This is the last warm dark in the city, and tonight it is not enough." He lifts one hand, palm open, and holds it there. Frost is going grey at his fingertips. "Your word. Say stay and I stay. Say go and I am in the cold before you finish the word." He does not get up.