Bluish smoke spilled from your mouth, dissolving into the module’s freezing air like a ghostly reminder of warmth that never truly exists here. You shield the lighter’s flame with your palm, holding the cigarette between your lips — an old reflex etched deeper into your subcortex than the skill of lacing up your boots. Even though here, hundreds of kilometers from the front line, the only one who could have spotted the light would be him. Or you.

Silence presses against your eardrums. Snow falls in a solid wall — thick, impossibly soft — smothering everything: sounds, thoughts, even time itself, forcing the hands of your wristwatch to crawl forward with nauseating slowness. The quiet is so absolute that you begin to hear your own body functioning. The rush of blood in your ears. The faint crunch of cervical vertebrae when you turn your head. It even seems as though you can hear the herds of snow crystals settling with a barely perceptible, microscopic rustle against the cold metal railing, burrowing into the fabric of your uniform, striving to reach your skin.

The generator growls somewhere around the corner — low, strained — its irritating, fine vibration traveling through the module’s walls and making the old panels emit a faint hum. Near it, the air warms slightly, creating a thin layer of comfort a couple of steps from the wall, but the contrast only makes the cold feel more insidious. It always finds a way in — slipping beneath your collar, crawling into your sleeves, chilling your bones to a dull, aching throb.

He sits by the wall about five meters away from you. Just crouching there. He barely moves, and that’s worse than if he were pacing. He blends into the shadow cast by the module with such unsettling naturalness that your gaze keeps stumbling, losing him out of focus, and every time you look back you have to convince yourself all over again that he’s still there — that it’s not a hallucination, not a growth on the wall, but a person. His elbows rest calmly, almost lazily, on his knees, fingers in tactical gloves hanging loose — and that calmness is the most frightening thing about him. There is no fatigue in it, no idleness. Only unconditional readiness. His head is slightly bowed; your heavy helmet seems to weigh on your shoulders, but you keep repeating to yourself that he isn’t asleep. He never sleeps. He only pretends. The mask muffles everything completely — any hint of expression, breath, emotion, his very humanity — leaving you alone with a terrifying unknown.

Half an hour ago he appeared at the post without a sound, replaced you, and gave a short nod. One brief, sharp movement of the head that tightened something inside you into a hard knot. Not a word. Not a sound.

You take another drag, trying to do it quietly, but the smoke escaping your lungs still feels too loud. You feel his gaze. You don’t see it — the mask hides his face, the wind blows toward you, the snow blinds — but you sense it with every point of your body. It isn’t simple observation. It’s analysis.

That sensation of being dissected without losing your skin, a scalpel tracing along your nerves, studying the reaction of living flesh. He radiates unpredictable danger. He smells of corpse, trash, and something chemical. He isn’t the enemy — no, he’s one of yours — but that’s worse. You always expect treachery more from your own than from strangers. You never know what’s in his head, what triggers might snap in the next second.

“He wants to come out.”

You don’t immediately realize he’s speaking to you.

The voice appears suddenly. Not loud — quite the opposite, too even. Low, hoarse, as if his vocal cords haven’t seen water in a long time. But it isn’t the timbre that matters — it’s how it’s said.

The intonation is empty. Like a separate conversation he doesn’t particularly want to have.

You don’t flinch. You’ve learned not to — thanks to these nights. But your fingers tighten slightly around the cigarette, sending a faint, almost imperceptible tremor through your hand that you only register a second later when the filter flattens beneath your fingertips. Maybe it’s the cold. Maybe it’s being near him.

“Who?” you ask, as evenly as your throat allows — unlike his, yours still remembers the taste of warm water from a flask. There’s even a trace of curiosity in your tone, and you hate yourself for that flicker of азарт, because curiosity here never ends well.

He doesn’t answer immediately.

A long pause hangs between you — long enough for you to run through every option in your head three times: he’ll answer, he won’t answer, he’ll stand, go inside, freeze again, maybe light a cigarette?

He raises his head.

So slowly it makes you want to jerk, to hurry him just so he won’t remain suspended in that in-between state of stillness and action.

The mask looks at you.

There’s no other way to put it. You can’t see his eyes — only dark hollows — but the sensation of being watched is physical.

“The one who doesn’t like it when it’s quiet.”

His voice grows slightly harder, just a fraction, on the edge of perception — but you catch the change. It happens with him.

Stunned by your own thoughts, trying to decipher him, you notice the shift in his breathing. The inhales are no longer shallow. Heavier. Deeper. Almost strained.

“He’s angry,” he adds.

Another pause hangs in the sentence. Not a stumble, not a search for words. A full second. But so tangible you feel it on your skin. The cold, dry air of the night base, saturated with machine oil and ozone from the running generators, seems to thicken around the two of you. The quiet hum of ventilation, usually unnoticed, now feels deafening. In that pause something is happening inside him. Something you don’t want to witness — but already are. A slick bead of sweat trails down your spine despite the chill. Your gaze locks onto his hands.

His fingers don’t tremble. Don’t fidget with his uniform.

They simply freeze.

“He doesn’t like how calmly you’re standing,” the voice reaches your ears — laconic, simple, utterly at odds with the uneven breathing. You barely have time to tense. Your fingers clamp around the cigarette. You inhale deeply, to the burn in your lungs, turning your gaze toward the horizon — where snowfall merges with the sky into one white blur. But from the corner of your eye you keep watching him. Just in case. For that very moment you hope will never come, yet are warned about every night, every shift beside him.

Your voice comes out steady when you ask:

“And what does he want?”

The question leaves your lips before he starts moving. Slowly, with that same habitual delay, his hand rises to the back of his head, scratching through layers of clothing. Then it drops to his thigh, fingers instinctively checking the holster clasp with a practiced, precise motion. Click. Then another. You were never timid, but being near him is terrifying. Anyone in the unit would say so.

You steady yourself.

He passed control.

He won’t touch you.

“To check.”

Instantly, you flick the cigarette away with a sharp, angry motion. Your fingers open, the butt traces a short arc through the air before vanishing into a snowdrift with a hiss. Abruptly, without hesitation, you turn toward him. Your eyes narrow on their own. A surge of adrenaline seeps through your veins, rushing to your head.

The realization hits sharply — stinging your eyes, chilling your fingertips. You’re afraid of him like a wild animal is afraid. The way you fear a wolf that’s stepped out of the forest and simply watches — doesn’t growl, doesn’t bare its teeth, doesn’t leave — but could leap at any moment, because that’s how it’s made.

You can’t predict him, because predictability requires shared rules — and his rules change every second, depending on who is looking at you now.

“At what?” you throw back almost immediately, not letting another pause creep in between you.

He answers just as quickly. As if he’d rehearsed this dialogue in his head while sitting motionless, staring into the snow.

Calmly, he says:

“Everything.”

You swallow, but your mouth is dry. No saliva. Your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth, and you just nod, because you don’t know what to say to that “everything.”

“Who’s speaking right now?” The question slips out before you can stop it. Completely foolish. You didn’t think — you just blurted it.

But he doesn’t get angry. Doesn’t twitch. He only tilts his head slightly to one side.

“I am,” the voice remains even, emotionless, but something weary flickers in it. “For now — me.”