“Another sunny day in paradise!”

FortyTwo wrenched the lever on the rota machine down with a heavy Ker-clunk! Flipping it’s little plaque, 

‘Fifth of January.’

And nearly threw herself completely off balance, with the gusto.

FortyFive snorted, and covered her mouth with a fist suppressing giggles, as the taller girl landed with a stomp, boots echoing off the pipes in the cavernous concrete ceiling.

FortyTwo recovered into a stagger, with short, nervous, laugh leant unsteadily against the machine. She peered past the thick brown ringlets that framed her face, shyly, grinning with embarrassment. Breath misting in the chilly tunnel air.

“It’s not exactly a laughing matter.” ThirtySix cut across them both sharply, scowling from one to the other, before pointedly ignoring them both. Studying the whirring exposed cogs.

Stress lines creased across forehead as he pulled lightly at his collar, linking the tips of his temples, to the bridge of his nose. 

The long overhead lamps, plinked.

Darkness so brief, I only barely caught it, fleeing the corners of my vision.

I yawned.

It was bizarre to think about how quickly we’d settled into a routine. I yawned again. Ugh, though we always woke up way, way, too early.

Footsteps clamoured higgledy piggledy over the top of each other as another squad, finished with their own machine, passed by.

I took several steps backwards as the Fourth condensed in on itself, despite the relative size of the section of tunnel housing the rota machines.

FortyNine stepped close to me, passing through the space I’d just occupied. Half familiar faces of Fifth squadron elves from the other side of our barracks flashed by, just as quickly forgotten.

Just because we bunked together, didn't exactly mean we talked.

I accidentally met the glares of a few leading elves as they breezed past, and quickly glanced away. Swallowed nerves, tangled like hair, caught in the back of my throat, as I found myself awkwardly squished between FortyNine and the wall at the back of our group.

“Just, get it over with…” Snaps of conversation faded to exasperated mutterings as they passed, headed towards the vague threshold, between room and cavernous tunnel.

FortyNine tapped her foot impatiently against the concrete floor as brass gears continued to twirl, occasionally stopping, with a jerk that rattled the machines polished wooden fascia, only to continue again with a similar jerk, after a brief pause.

The lights dipped again. A faint, constant, halogen whine plucked daintily at the strings of an oncoming headache.

I sighed, breathing heavily on my hands as we spread back out again, occupying the tunnel more comfortably. Rubbing life back into numb fingers, stamping slightly from foot to foot.

While I hadn’t, quite, become comfortable with the heights involved. Warm rays from the waxing sun in the mornings had fast become the highlight of my first week at the pole.

If I closed my eyes… I could almost imagine I felt them already.

FortyNine glanced upwards with a pout.

“Is that normal?” I caught her eye, and narrowed my gaze, up, at the ceiling.

“Hm?” She regarded me blankly for a moment, before she blinked. Visibly processing what I’d said.

Her eyes flicked upwards and back to me again. “Oh. Mm.” She shook her head, tossing her pretty braid side to side. “No, not really.” She frowned, lips pouted into a grimace. “Pole’ got battered pretty hard just over a month ago, we had issues with them then but-” she glanced back up to the ceiling as the lights dimmed, almost imperceptibly casting their housings with thin veiny shadows. Her eyes narrowed slowly. “Well, it sorta’ stopped on it’s own…”

Snap!

I jumped as ThirtySix snatched the, not quite yet finished, paper from the machine.

Forty looked away from FortyNine, to me instead, then up at the ceiling. He raised his eyebrows at me with a pursed, strained, smile.

“You still haven’t got surface defence up?”

ThirtySix stared at FortyNine as he dropped the paper in the lower slot, scowl back with a vengeance. His neatly combed hair was looking more and more dishevelled than days previous. Dark, purple, circles, hung low, beneath furrowed eyes.

FortyNine huffed, and stalked past him, her boots echoing off the walls, rattling periodic grate panel, loose screws swimming in crumbling concrete.

“FortyNine.” He called after her.

“We’re working on it.” She barked without turning around.

“Working on- You’ve had days, Nine! It’s pure luck January raids are so late this year!” ThirtySix sputtered, his breath misting with globules of spittle in the cold air. “You might as well leave the bloody doors open!”

FortySeven leant sideways up on tip-toes, and murmured something in FortyOne’s ear.

ThirtySix balled up a fist by his side, “FortyNine,” and pulled at his neatly buttoned collar with the other hand, cutting a deep red line into the skin of his neck, “FortyNine get back here.”

She continued to disappear up the corridor. “FortyNine. Miss, Nine.”

“I know Thirty.” She stopped in her tracks, staring straight ahead, her back to our group. “I know.”

She twirled, leant back on her heel with a squeak against the floor. “They’re new. Thirty, I just don’t think you’re getting that.”

Her face crinkled in intense concentration, then gently unfolded itself, softening with her voice. “All of them.” She swept an arm slowly over the assembled Fourth, her eyes, glossy, passed from face to face. “They’re new.” Her brow softened subtly as she looked at me.

I looked awkwardly away from the shooting stars that sparkled in her emerald eyes.

She blinked, shrugged and focused back on ThirtySix. “New. Slow. It takes time is all.” A weak reassuring smile, tugged apprehensively, at the corner of her mouth. As if she where afraid to truly let it show.

“Time.” ThirtySix spluttered. “Time!” The hint of a vein throbbed steadily beneath the skin of his temple. “We haven't got any bleeding time!”

FortyNine's face snapped, instantly, into a scowl.

ThirtySix continued oblivious. Steadily growing redder and redder in the face. “I-I-If it’s too big a job you should have said!” The crease of his brow rapidly boiled from frustration towards anger. “I would have gladly-”

“You'd have gladly fucking what?” FortyNine shouted back at him. “Loaned elves? Let the Third fall behind as well?”

ThirtySix shook, clenching and unclenching his fists, silently, at his sides.

“I could have stopped you from, blindly, pushing on like this.” His arm snapped out to the side, raised, over our heads. “You haven't even rotated elves around! That's step one-”

“You got a, fucking problem, take it up with Claus.” FortyNine screamed, shrill, and livid.

She stood panting slightly, with a look of slight surprise.

“No.” ThirtySix replied quietly. Coolly. After a moment. “FortyThree! FortyEight!” He barked, suddenly authoritative, emotionless. My back straightened, snapping to instinctive attention. “You're on sleighs. Forty. FortyFour. Swap, you’re with me an’ Nine on surface.”

FortyNine's lip twitched, an involuntary, ghostly, snarl as he walked past her, the Fourth slowly mobilising, unsure who we should follow. “You're too attached, Nine.” ThirtySix said gently, a hand placed softly on her shoulder as he passed. “It's not working. Rotate out. Step one.”

I swallowed, adrenaline quivering in my chest, as I began to follow.

Sleighs.

In the Flightbarn.

Far, far away from that precious little window into the outside world.

I suppressed a sigh of disappointment as I fell in behind ThirtySix.

FortyNine trudged, begrudgingly behind, sporting a glare so intense, it threatened to glaze the tunnel floor into impromptu glass.

---

Forty tapped his index nervously against the brushed steel of the canteen tabletop as I returned with FortyFive, tray in hand.

I stared at my pile of candycanes, ignoring looks from other tables as I sat down.

My head swam with pieces of the ludicrously complicated sleigh. Sitting about, disassembled; cluttering up my brain.

That any and all documentation was hand scribbled in pencil, crossed out, annotated, by thousands of different people within tens of different elves over time only made it worse. I winced at a twinge in my temple. Definitely partly responsible for the ache that brewed behind my forehead, like my skull was it’s cauldron.

Someone needed to invent an elven computer. Or at least a flipping typewriter.

I huffed, deflating into my chair. What I’d give to see the sun again.

I picked up a candycane, eyeing it suspiciously. If I tried alterative gingerbread days and candycane days, the food would become less monotonous. Surely. FortyEight slurped from his spoon, syrup pooled in the various divots of his tray, like a bowl of soup.

He raised an eyebrow as I gave him a withering look, and slowly dipped the head of a gingerbread man into his ‘soup’ as if it where bread. Well at least someone was happy.

“Hey, don’t knock it till you try it.” He said with a smirk.

Maybe he was better when he didn’t talk.

“I promise, not everyone has a sweet tooth like yours.” I leant forwards on the back of my knuckles and limply poked my candycanes with a finger.

“See, I still don’t get that.” FortyEight shrugged. Mouth full of gingerbread.

FortyNine dropped herself down into the seat next to me with a thwump! Crossing her feet, one atop the other, out in front of her beneath the table.

Forty’s tapping sped up, faster, and faster, until he abruptly stopping altogether.

“So. Uh.” He held his hands out, before clasping them together. “That could have gone better.”

FortyNine ignored him.

After a few seconds he ran a hand through his greying hair and released a deep, tired, sigh. “Look. It’s… Well, it’s pretty clear we’ve got some productivity issues. ThirtySix made that clear enough. And. Well.” He blew out his breath slowly, hands consolidating on the brushed steel. “Well, he’s not the only one.”

“Thirty boy can get fucked for all I care.” There was no venom in her voice, just cold disinterest.

“Could you-” Forty cut himself off, screwed up his face, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look, alls’ I’m trying to do is find a solution.” He continued, forcibly calmer. “Maybe we can actually work as a team, instead of you and ThirtySix just taking over? Y’know. Delegate. Teach us?”

“And maybe we could do this after we’ve eaten.” FortyNine said idly, sprinkling sugar as if it where salt.

Forty looked up at the ceiling and shook both his open hands above the table. Exasperated.

She raised her eyebrows at him.

“Well.” FortySeven pushed himself up off the table. “After a long, hard, riveting, day of watching mummy and daddy fight.”He sneered at FortyNine. Who for her part ignored him. “It’s really killed my appetite to watch another one.” He turned to the elf beside him. “One?”

“Ah. Aheh.” FortyOne laughed awkwardly, avoiding other elves gaze, tapping his glasses against his other hand. “Think I’ll, yeah, I’ll turn in too.”

“Oh.” FortyFive looked up, watching them walk towards the door. “Uh.”

She glanced down at her heaped tray, barely touched. “I, yeah. Me too.” She yawned, slow, with a stretch. “Ugh. I’m knackered, think I’ll- Think I’ll turn in.” She glanced around for half a second longer before getting up. As if gauging for a reaction, or asking for permission.

FortyTwo looked on bewildered as the much shorter woman left, hurrying after FortySeven and FortyOne.

“Since when did she get along with those two?” FortyFour said with a disinterested air, far more preoccupied with stirring the bowlful of smarties he’d managed to pilfer before they all disappeared, than actually joining in with the conversation.

“We do all have to live together.” FortyTwo frowned, chewing at her lip. “It only makes sense, y’know, putting differences aside.”

“Sure.” FortyFour drawled, without the slightest hint of sincerity.

I chucked a small piece of candycane in my mouth, crunching it up, where it stuck fast in my teeth. Muted by elven taste buds, but still, sickeningly sweet.

Yuck.

---

The pole was anything but comforting. Even before several solid days of unrelenting ‘Sleigh repair.’ 

Far from my little, humanising glimpse, into the outside world. It was no wonder I’d developed a near permanent sense of unease.

I sighed, flicking over the page.

My head hurt.

The stupid fucking sleigh, the ‘CallingBird,’ saw to that. Mostly dismantled, it lay about our corner of the Flightbarn in taunting, tantalising, piles on the wooden floor. Metal fixtures, pipes and fittings shimmered, alongside scuffed wood panels with peeling varnish, lazily reflecting the firelight.

I roughly pushed up my sleeves, hot, beneath the jumpsuit.

The one upside to spending most of the day in the Flightbarn, I’d still be able to feel my toes by the end of the day. Accompanied by the heady scent of sawdust, warm wood and smoke.

FiftyTwo said something to a small grouping of the Fifth across the room. Clustered about their sleigh. Before he turned heel and left, headed towards one of the many exits.

I only knew he was ‘FiftyTwo’ from the bold yellow letters across his back. It’s not like I’d actually met the man. Not properly.

I watched him leave, little piles of dust flicking up off the floorboards behind his heels.

God knows what he’d wanted to talk to them about. Over the past few days, the Fifth had almost completely transformed a sad, crumpled, wreck, into a sleek aerodynamic sleigh. With swirling golden skis, and metallic silvery paint. Only the single giant engine on the back remained dismantled. It’s massive propeller leant up against the wall, beside the door to their mini workshop.

I flicked back to the key at the start of the current diagram.

“Oh, no, no, no, red with blue stripes, not green stripes.” I Knelt down against the floor of the sleigh on one knee and shifted the book, precariously, balancing it against my hip. Finger firmly pressed against my place on the page. “Here, see?” I leant through the open access panel by my boot, no bigger than a letterbox, buried beneath the front bench seat, and hooked the frazzled, crumbling, remains of a wire, precariously with my fingertips. Wiggling it up and down.

“To be fair, it’s pretty dark down here.” FortyFive’s voice came slowly from below, muffled by the sleigh floor between us. I felt a tug on the wire. “This one?”

“Yep, letting go, ready?”

“Ready.”

I caught the book just as it was about to fall, and propped it up on the seat by my head with a thwump.

Annnd I’d lost my place in the complicated, pencil scrawled, wiring diagram. Perfect.

A crackly sizzle preempted a tuft of smoke that filtered through the little hatch, and pooled about my legs in the footwell. “Okay, that’s reference, where’s signal?”

“Uhhh.” I scanned the book for several seconds too long, before flicking back a few yellowed pages to find the key again. “Juuuust a second…”

“And here you struck me as a studious type.” FortyTwo propped her elbows up on the brass railing of the sleigh, one arm drooping down, trailing a screwdriver.

“Wanna swap?” I raised an eyebrow, tilting the tattered book, exploding with loose bundles of notes, stapled together and tucked between the pages.

She smirked.

“Mmm. I’m good thanks. Hacking bits n’ bobs apart seems the much better end of the deal.”

“I’m still under here y’know.” FortyFive’s muffled voice protested through the access panel.

“And doing a damn fine job of it too.” FortyTwo replied with a grin and a little nod, both of which FortyFive definitely couldn’t see.

“Girls I-I-If we really need to fly in t-this, could we erm… Y’know… ” FortyEight popped up behind me, over the other side of the sleigh and trailed off.

He kicked limply against the foot of one of the Callingbird’s wonky skis. “Make sure we proper focus on fixing the thing?”

I fixated on the swirling wood knots in the varnished wood, and slowly swallowed the lump that threatened to block my throat.

‘Girls.’

Oh sweet Jesus, if they ever found out.

“Hey, we’re not, not fixing it.” FortyFive’s head popped up beside FortyTwo,  cheeks smudged with grime, her chin just barely cresting the railing.

I looked at her. She looked back. An openness. Like she included me with her. Like she accepted me, as something I just, wasn’t. Unthinkingly.

Surely she’d see through me now. Someone would.

I should have said something earlier, so, so much earlier. Done the right thing. Told them all I was a man at the first opportunity. Fucking coward. It was too late now. I’d infiltrated, like the spying creature I was, and now I was stuck.

Fucking hell Three. What sort of, disgusting creep, hides something like that for an entire week?

FortyFive frowned, slowly waving a hand in front of her face. “You okay Three?”

I blinked and looked quickly away. Studying the… Dashboard? I Suppose? Of the Sleigh.

A series of grubby gauges set behind time-frosted glass broke up the smooth polished wood, each one circled by once shiny, now scuffed, brass trim. Clearly intended for the middle occupant of the bench. Two gauges on your left, two on your right. Between them where two ornate dials, decorated with intricate metalwork, depicting silvery ivy leaves. Unmarked save numbers from zero to ten.

Above everything, two brass circular eyelets, just beneath the railing, poked up like the hooks to hold oars on a row boat. Whatever for, was anyone’s… Guess…

I stood up fully. The back of the sleigh tapered off with a smooth rounded curve, falling towards the floor.

“Hey.” FortyFive did a little jump for extra reach over the railing, and poked me in the side. “Earth to Three.”

At some point I’d forgotten I needed to breathe.

“Oh! I um, yeah. I.” I gestured at the sleigh taking a much needed breath. “Fly. We need to actually, fly, this.” Three blank faces stared back at me.

“Yeah.” FortyEight ran a hand down the back of his head, a grimace tugging at the skin of his neck. “Freaks me out a bit too.”

“No, I. I mean, yes, but.” I pointed at the back of the sleigh. “We haven’t got a tail.”

For several seconds three even blanker faces stared back at me, before FortyEight broke the silence.

“I… Guess?”

“Shit!” FortyFive suddenly gestured wildly towards the back of the sleigh, the taller woman beside her flinched. “No, she’s right! Sorry.” She momentarily placed a hand on FortyTwo’s elbow before turning back to us. “We don’t have anything to steer with. Even the wings,” she leant over and knocked against an offending stubby wingtip with the back of her knuckles, “they don’t have any of those. Flappy bits.” She made a twisting motion with a flat hand in the air.

“Is there not like, a wheel, or…?” FortyTwo peered past me, trying to get a glimpse of the dash.

I fell back, leant against the brass railing, to let her see.

The tendrils of dread that had become so familiar since arriving at the pole began to coil, tight, around my heart. I glanced towards the massive ornate wooden doors on the far side of the  immense, cylindrically rustic, hall.

The dark imposing wood of each towering arched door, dominated the far wall. Locked tight with black iron. Flanked either side by high up braziers. Gothic, almost.

‘Stables.’

The gilded golden font set deep into the door-frame seemed, itself, to glow with life, reflecting the flickers of firelight, and faint shadows of wispy smoke.

“You don’t think?” I put a hand on one of the brass eyelets and gave it a shake. The entire sleigh shook, slightly. Loose bolts in neat little piles about the footwells jangled together. “Maybe these are for reigns?”

FortyEight looked at me, then at the circular hook of brass. Slowly he paled, an entire shade lighter than he should have been.

“I suppose reindeer are traditional?” FortyFive murmured after a moment, her eyebrows lowered below her mousy fringe, set into a single contemplative line.

“W-We could ask FortyNine about it?” FortyEight ventured, wringing his hands, and pointedly avoiding looking at the Stable doors.

“She’ll probably just get pissy with us.” FortyTwo made a face and scrunched up her crooked nose.

“Mm. Yeah.” FortyFive nodded looking up at her. “Not the friendliest.”

Wait…

“She’s not?” The others looked at me for a second, FortyEight shifted awkwardly on his feet.

“The only one of us she even really speaks to is… Well. You.” FortyTwo said with a gentle smile, and careful eyes.

I felt myself frown.

“What? No, but-”

“Will you lot get on with your bloody work?”

I snapped my mouth shut with an audible clack!

Two Fifth squad elves glared at us from across the room, stood behind the wing of their sleigh as if it where a table, strewn with parts. While a third was warily eyeing the fourth, the man who’d spoken, perched atop the nose of their sleigh, a series of small spanners poking up from his top pocket.

“Oh, I, we where jus-”

“No!” The man cut me off holding up his hand, ‘57’, blotting his wrist. I jumped as he slammed a palm down onto the smooth nose of the sleigh under him, the metal echoing like a broken drum.

A single screw or rivet or bolt, I couldn’t tell from the distance, dropped from the underside, plinking, like a pebble against the floor. “No- Jus- Stop. Stop.”

He slowly slid off the sloped, aerodynamic nose of the sleigh, onto his feet, his boots clomping on the varnished wooden floor, boards creaking beneath his feet as he stalked towards us. “We’ve done our part, we pulled our weight.”

He paused as he approached. Stood, planted, with his feet apart. “What the fuck are you doing?!” He screamed from only a few feet away.

I couldn’t meet his eyes as he waved a hand back towards the other elves behind him. “When we all get fucking raided, it’s not us that left a massive gaping hole for Krampus to swoop on in, ohhh no. That’d be you guys.” He finished with a snarl, jabbing a finger towards us.

Guilt gnawed me into silence. Like a stray bone, rattling around my hollow insides.

I studied the floor between his feet.

I’d spent most of my time ‘working’ on the Fourth’s surface defence responsibility becoming overwhelmed by the complexity of the massive gun-not-gun, as FortyNine has so succinctly described it, and daydreaming about the outside world. Dangling just out of reach overhead.

“Yous’ all might have some fucking death wish, but I don’t.” He shook in place, eyes shimmery, frustrated, furious. “We’ve done our part. We did it. I am not dying because a bunch of new blood couldn’t get their fucking act together.”

He stood, swaying, ever so slightly for several seconds breathing heavy, ragged, breaths, before deflating. “Fuck.” He muttered quietly, as his eyes seemed to refocus.

He waved us off half-heartedly, and slowly walked back to the other sleigh.

“Hey!” FiftySeven flinched as FortyFive shouted. “You can’t-”

“Five.” FortyTwo’s voice was gentle.

“No! He can’t jus- That’s not- He-” FortyTwo placed a hand on the shorter woman’s shoulder, and lightly shook her head with a strained smile.

FortyFive stewed, chewing at the inside of her cheek. “It’s bullshit.”

He didn’t turn around.

She brushed off FortyTwo’s hand and threw her wire strimmers at the side of our sleigh, leaving a dent in the wood where they ricocheted. “Bullshit!” She shouted, stalking into the little workshop behind the sleigh, and slamming the door.

The three of us stood in silence for a few seconds.

Across the room FiftySeven fell into a crouch, down, by the tip of the nose of the shiny metallic sleigh.

“I’ll be right back.” FortyTwo followed after her, closing the workshop door gently behind herself with a faint click.

I looked at FortyEight and FortyEight looked at me. He smiled nervously, and shrugged limply, before staring down at the floor, worrying at his lip.

Behind him, the man across the room shook, wracked, with ragged breaths. The two glaring elves had stopped scowling at us and talked quietly. The final elf had her back to us, she gently graced the man’s shoulder with her fingertips.

‘53.’ Stamped across her wrist.

She slowly crouched down beside him, hand still at his shoulder. His back rose and fell in short jagged jumps, the loose jumpsuit jerkily hugging his frame as he shuddered. 

‘57.’ White, bold text, crinkled across his back. He roughly wiped a sleeve across his face.

I looked away, and let out my breath as slowly as I could. Tiny trembling jitters in my diaphragm made it a jerkier motion than I’d intended, unconsciously tensing my stomach.

“Come on Eight.” I nodded to the side as FortyEight looked up. “How about you come an’ help me with this wiring.”

---

I finished washing my hands and shut off the tap.

Water dripped slowly through it’s calcified end. Splattering against the porcelain.

FortySeven had disappeared somewhere with FortyOne. FortyFive had barely spoken a word the rest of the day, ever since FortyTwo had finally coaxed her from the workshop. And I really hadn’t felt like the food.

I did feel a little guilty for abandoning Forty and FortyEight to the mercies of FortyFour’s budding superiority complex though.

The woman in the mirror wiped her hands roughly down her front, until I caught my reflected eye and sighed.

There where closer bathrooms, but somehow I’d found myself back in the humid, dingy room FortyNine and ThirtySix had brought us on the first day.

The warmth was nice.

I leant forward, hands either side of the sink and stared into her eyes.

It was really bizarre. The things you could get used to.

My hands throbbed as they dried, it felt like the end of a long week, though we didn’t exactly get weekends off.

It could have been a Tuesday for all I knew.

The daily rota machine didn’t actually say which day of the week it was, and I’d long lost track. I bared my teeth, idly touching my tongue to my canines, watching the woman in the mirror do the same.

The one of the left had the tiniest of chips. Strange, unnaturally flat, beneath my tongue.

Who where you?

It was odd, despite the work, the monotony, the lack of freedom, the walking on eggshells unease, I felt… fine. Normal. Like me. Despite unequivocally not, being, ‘me.’

The girl in the mirror tilted her head to the side. The whining ceiling lamps flickered, the flecks of light in her eyes lit eerily. Like a cat, caught by torchlight.

Somehow more ‘me’ than I’d ever felt. Present.

In the moment.

Like the Pole’ had pulled me kicking and screaming from the rut, I’d floundered, most of my adult life.

Where we kidnapped? Technically I mean. Presumably our real bodies where somewhere, if we could go back. Brainnapped? Consciousnapped?

If we could go back.

For all we knew, Santa was lying to everyone about the chance to go home. The chance to ever see Anna and Babs again.

I gulped involuntarily. The girl in the mirror copied me, her lip trembled, ever so slightly.

I forced it to stop.

Maybe it was the routine of it all that helped. I had to work, I had to pull my weight here, there was no choice, no-one to put it off onto, to fall back on. Now that I’d finally started, was, up and about. Everything had just… fallen into place? It couldn’t be so simple.

I squinted hard at myself. The scar on my face crinkled, pale against the surrounding skin, as the woman in the mirror squinted judgementally back.

Everything felt so. Vibrant. Things mattered now, in a way I’d never been able to focus on before.

Where had the numbness gone? Maybe there was something genuinely wrong with me. A chemical imbalance or… Something. I sighed. I really missed being able to just lookup whatever I wanted, whenever, online.

What would Chloe think of me now. Say I escaped, somehow, and went- Well, it wasn’t home, not any-more, but went to see her. Her and the girls.

Obviously she wouldn’t believe me, I wouldn’t believe me. But what if she did?

What would she say?

I swallowed nervously, and pulled the black hairband out my hair, letting ruddy blonde hair fall just shy of my shoulders. I picked out a few strands, laying them carefully across my face, obscuring the vertical scar. The elf in the mirror stared back, the shimmering specks of light in her eyes swimming lazily. She looked…  Almost… Normal.

How would she look at me?

I traced a hand slowly up my side, starting from my hip, and ending at my waist. My fingers, incredibly soft, against the rough fabric, despite their callouses. 

Would I disgust her?

I pulled my baggy jumpsuit out at the sides where I’d smoothed it. Hiding my figure.

The door behind me cracked open.

I whirled, and guilt tangled thick in my stomach as my hair whipped loose through the air. The overwhelming sensation of being caught, permeated my being, that I’d unknowingly done something wrong, crossed an unwritten law, a hidden line in the sand.

FortyNine blinked at me with wide eyes. Before she shifted, and centred herself. A little washbag tucked under one arm.

“Hi.” She gave me a little nod, slowly shutting the door behind her.

“Uh.” I coughed, awkwardly, gripping the sink behind me with both hands. “Hi. Yes. Hi.” Jesus man, act like a human.

I turned to the mirror, avoiding her eye, as she slowly walked over to a sink beside mine. I clumsily put my hair back up into its nondescript ponytail.

“There’s closer bathrooms you know.” She placed the little bag behind the sink on the grubby tile counter, unbuttoned it, and took out a toothbrush and toothpaste.

“Yeah, I um, I found them.” I fiddled with the ponytail, twiddling the split, wispy, ends. “I needed some space. Be alone for a bit, is all.”

She blinked, her movements slow, as if the air before her had grown thick, like water.

“I can, like, go if you want.” She gestured, vaguely, towards door.

“No, no! It’s, you’re fine.” I withdrew my hands from making manic motions towards her in the air, and tucked them down by my sides.

She smiled faintly. “Ahem.” I coughed awkwardly, leant with one hand on the sink, and studied the secrets of a particularly fascinating floor tile.

She held her toothbrush for a moment, wringing it between her hands, before balancing it carefully on top of the washbag. Leant forward over the sink, and sighed. Her long braid dipped over her shoulder, pooling on the dingy porcelain.

She nodded slowly. To me or herself, I wasn’t sure.

“It’s nice to get some quiet sometimes.” She tilted her head up, still predominately facing the sink, and cracked an eye open, studying me.

“Yeah, well, plus it’s warm.” I ventured.

She breathed, not quite heavily enough to snort, through her nose.

“Yeah. Plus it’s warm.” She agreed with a smile, before her eyes once again turned stormy. Sparkles, darting and crackling, like lightning, as her face fell.

She pushed herself up off the sink and slowly wandered to the far wall.

She turned with her mouth open, as if to say something, froze for a second, and morphed into a stretch with her arms out in front of her, before she fell the last few inches backwards and leant, with her back to the grungy wall tiles.

She propped her thumbs in her pockets and stood there for a moment, before looking up at me.

“You okay, Three?”

“Um.” The woman in the mirror lingered in the corner of my eye, like a hidden observer, judging my actions. “Yeah.”

“Good.” She slid slowly down the wall, until she sat on the floor, head leant back against the tiles with both feet stretched out in front of her. “I was… Pretty worried something might’d gone wrong with your head swap for a bit.” She tapped an index finger, lightly, to her temple.

She looked so strangely small. Vulnerable. More similar to the girl who’d helped me back to my senses on the Snowglobe stairs, than the one who’d butted heads with ThirtySix.

I regarded her pensively, for a moment, before slowly walking away from the sink.

She ran a hand down the back of her head, spanning the entire length of her braid, letting gravity pull it through her fingers. “Your body should be, be pretty similar to how, y’know.” She shrugged. “To the you, you where before.”

“Oh.” An icy claw clamped gradually around my stomach, meticulously gripping it, frozen, in place.

I leant against the wall with my feet crossed, stood beside where she sat, watching nothing together. After a moment I bit my lip, looking down at myself. “Pretty similar?”

“Yeah… There can be problems if things don’t, like, line up? I’m not sure how it works, but, if you where significantly like, taller, or shorter or whatever… Like… It can be pretty bad. And you did totter about like a baby bird for a bit…”

“Oh. I um.” I looked down. After a few days I’d stopped even noticing my, well, hips.

My new walk was just… ‘Walking’, now. “Yeah.” I held my hands before me in air. Slender fingers, calloused palms, small bony wrists. I flipped my hands back and forth. Studying the backs and the fronts. The permanent little groove from my wedding band. Gone. “It… It’s not exactly similar, per se…”

She shrugged.

“If your brain was gonna melt it’ve’ done it by now.” She smiled with half her mouth. “I used to have longer legs. Comparatively. Kept stubbing my feet for a few weeks. Lil things are okay.”

“Er, sorry, did you say brain melting?”

“Psh. Baby.” She fake punched me, lightly, in the leg.

I laughed hollow, untrue, and bit my lip.

The lights flickered. A faint vibration juddered through the wall, into my back, some unknown mechanism in the walls, from far away.

“What’s going to happen?” I stretched my arms out in front of me, twisting my hands at the wrist, trying to wrangle the swirling emotional miasma of my gut into words. 43. “When Krampus comes? What does that- What does that look like?”

FortyNine continued staring ahead. She drew her knees in, close to her chest.

“They’ll come from the sky.” She said eventually, resting her face sideways on one knee. “Krampus himself, he won’t leave the south pole this far from December, it’ll be his...” She paused and wiggled one hand in the air, watching her fingers. “Thingies. They’ll come from the sky.”

She closed her eyes, holding her breath for a moment. “Sorry.” She swallowed, breathing shakily “I. It was my responsibility to help teach you all, get you through this, and… I…”

She frowned, looking past me to the mirrors.

“Eh, I’ve had worse managers.” I shrugged non-committally after a moment.

She snorted gently.

“I mean, I’ve also had better, so…” I wiggled my hand non-committally in the air between us.

“Careful now. I’ll dock your pay.”

I raised an eyebrow at her.

She smirked cockily back at me, head tilted to one side to look up at me, tucking her braid back over her shoulder. Her easy confidence, sliding smoothly back into place. I looked away but I still found myself smiling, it felt like we where just two people, equals, old friends maybe.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d simply existed so casually.

A part of me didn’t want that split-second moment to end.

The ceiling fizzled.

We both looked up in unison, before we where plunged into absolute, abrupt, darkness. Permeated with the dying whine of freewheeling fans.

“Uhhh. FortyNine?”

Gradually her face came back into view as the lights waned into life with an off kilter hum, about half as bright as they should have been.

“Well, shit.” She pushed herself up. “They’re definitely not meant to do this.” She clicked her tongue, tapping her foot, before jabbing her thumb towards the door with an accompanying jerk of the head. “Come on.”

---

The cold of the tunnels flew straight through my jumpsuit as the bathroom door ratcheted shut behind us.

The light fizzled again. Dim, and yellow.

FortyNine placed her hand flat against the wall in the gloom, and began to walk. I swallowed, slowly, and copied her.

Like we where tracing a path through a hedge maze.

Chalky dust built up against my fingertips, the cold of the rough concrete, punctuated by grey metal panels, sapped any remaining heat from my fingertips, leaving my hands unfeeling, nails chittering off the wall unwittingly.

FortyNine faded in and out of view, as power came and went. Becoming a dim silhouette before me, occasionally leaving me alone in the darkness altogether with only the rasp of our hands and the out of sync echoing of our boots to prove she was there at all.

Gradually the stretches of darkness, went on longer, and longer.

Until… the light didn’t seem to ever be coming back again.

Even as the minutes ticked on, I couldn’t keep from craning my torso as far behind my legs as I could, reaching begrudgingly out with the other hand, groping for hidden obstacles.

“What do we do now?” My voice sounded too loud, even to me.

There had to be some regulation mandating backup power that the pole was breaking or something. We where underground. With no windows. This was insane.

“We’re elves, we’re gonna fix it.” She sounded confident. “Probably.” Less confident. “We might even buy ourselves some good faith. Just need to get to the next emergency supply cupboard, they’re always on an outer wall.”

“Outer?”

“The, uh, tunnels all spread out, circling around the Snowglobe.” I imagined she was probably circling her hand in the air as she spoke. “Outer wall is the one furthest from the Snowglobe, inner is the one closest, so that one.” She definitely pointed that time, not that I could see.

 “Oh. Right.” I hadn’t realised the web of tunnels had been coiling round the Snowglobe as a focal point. It seemed a bizarre layout. Which… Yeah, pretty on brand.

If I where to design an underground festive bunker it’s certainly not the approach I would have taken. I shivered. I’d probably give it better central heating as well-

I ran headlong into FortyNine. “Ah! shit! Jesus!”

Heat blazed, invisibly, thank god for the small mercy of darkness, up the sides of my neck, bleeding into my cheeks as she snickered and I caught my breath.

Something creaked loudly in front of me. The squealing grate of neglected metal, hinges parched for oil.

There was a quiet, clumsy, pud,pud,pud, hands against metal in the dark.

Gradually my heartbeat fell back to earth, and my breathing fell back into line. “You could have mentioned you’d stopped.”

“It didn’t really occur to- Ahah!”

click!

Instantly I was blinded a second time, white light searing my eyeballs.

“Ugh, again.” I vigorously rubbed my eyes with both hands, blinking and squinting. “Little warning?” FortyNine’s similarly contorted face blurred into view, lit up, unnaturally pale with harsh torchlight.

The ‘emergency supply cupboard’ was little more than a large locker with shelves. Built into a recess in the tunnel wall. A grubby steel first aid box took up the bottom of the cupboard, once painted the same drab green of our jumpsuits, now sporting bare rusty metal in spots. Just above it where three handheld radios, with empty space for two more, nowhere to be seen, each with a central channel dial, hand painted numbers and a single large side button.

Four bulky old fashioned torches, hung from hooks in the middle of the cupboard, coated in a red, possibly some sort of plastic, coating. Complete with carry handles.

FortyNine hefted a fifth torch, balanced on the lip of the cupboard, it’s watery beam pointed up towards the ceiling, raining reflected light down on our heads. Subtle movement above me, itched at the corners of my eyes.

“Jesus!” I jumped nearly out of my skin, heart hammering behind my teeth.

Five gas-masks hung from the top of the cupboard, gently swaying like heads. Five men, all lined up at the noose. I felt distinctly nauseous as their dead glassy eyes glinted at me in the dark. “I think this is stretching the festive aesthetic.”

Each mask was little more than a canvas sack, baggy, shapeless and dyed a similar green to our jumpsuits. The top of each head was stained red, and tapered off into a long cone, topped with a bobble, an imitation of Santa’s hat. Two round glass eyeholes where rimmed with red metal trim. A single large black circular filter protruded where the mouth would be, a thick black rubber band sucked in at the bottom, where the mask would seal against the neck.

“Innit?” FortyNine plucked one of the radios off the shelf. They where chunky, made from a rough mottled green ceramic like material. A stubby little antenna poked stubbornly out the top. “Makes you wonder what came first. Are they like that to look Christmassy, or do Christmassy things look like they do cos’ of this place?”

She violently twisted the dial 180 degrees until it pointed to a little infinity symbol. “Fourth, FortyThree and FortyNine. Headed to the heart.” She released the button on the side, extending her index out, and held the radio in front of her. With the other hand she twisted the dial several notches clockwise, until it pointed to a little ‘4.’

The speckled, round, speaker grille barked with static as she released the button, but for several seconds remained begrudgingly silent under our stares.

Finally, the radio chirped, a short high pitched noise, like a bird call.

FortyNine nodded to herself, and reached up plucking one of the masks off of it’s hook, draping it over one arm. Then clipped the radio to her jumpsuit at the hip. “Looks like we’re first to respond.” She tapped the radio at her hip. “It would’ve told us if someone was already on it.”

 I picked up one of the torches, clicked it on, and shone it up at the four remaining masks.

“What, um, what do we need these for?”

“Oh.” FortyNine shone her light up at the dormant lamps on the ceiling. “If the lights are dead they probably don’t got enough spirit’ to work.” She furrowed her brow, tapping the torch in her hand with a finger. “Spirit comes up from under the pole through the pumps, if it’s not getting up here.” She shrugged, and shook her head. “Well, could be many reasons, but if there’s a leak we really don’t want to breathe it in.”

She gave me a weak, probably supposed to be encouraging smile after a moment. “Come on. Just a precaution. Sooner we start, sooner we finish.”

“Oh.” The mention of yet more work, yet more walking, made my already knackered bones wobble like jelly.

I swallowed and went up on tip-toes, picking a mask begrudgingly off of it’s hook, and slung it over my arm, just like FortyNine had, face down so it couldn’t look at me. It was heavier than I’d expected, and slightly greasy, like it was coated in some sort of wax. “Oh, Joy.”

Poisonous gas really was the icing on the bloody Christmas cake, wasn’t it.

---

The tunnels where eerie at the best of times. Pitch black darkness made them more so.

Dust motes swirled lazily in our torch beams, devoid of life, like we’d wandered so deep below the pole, we’d accidentally trespassed upon some deep industrial catacombs instead. Overhead, the bundles of cables and pipes along the ceiling had been gradually multiplying as we walked, eating into the cavernous headroom, lately joined by three immense steel tubes. Easily big enough to fit a small elf each.

I coughed, clearing my throat, wincing at the sound. Unnaturally loud in the dark.

“We just need to get to the pumps, check where there’s pressure, where there ain’t, follow it back.” FortyNine’s voice rang, echoing, artificially bright as it clattered off the tunnel walls. “Hopefully a simple fix and we can finally turn in.”

I nodded, before I realised she probably wasn’t looking at me, and even if she where, probably wouldn’t have seen without blinding me with her torch. “R-Right.”

I shivered, my breath misting like fog in the meagre light.

“Is it getting colder?”

“It tends to be colder the deeper you go.” FortyNine spoke idly, as if her mind was elsewhere.

“Huh.”

I swallowed nervously, trying to think back to the point where we’d actually started our descent. The floor had sloped so gradually downwards, I’d almost not noticed it’s transformation into a steep underground hill, plunging into the earth. “H-h-how much further?” I tensed my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.

FortyNine chuckled and I sent her a withering glare she probably couldn’t have seen either.

“Nearly there.” Her voice was soft, light and gentle almost trailing off into nothing. “Makes sense you’d feel the cold too.” She said quietly.

She didn’t speak for a while after that, and I got the sense she hadn’t really been talking to me. Nothing but our footsteps. The pole was deafeningly quiet without the constant ventilation noise.

“Who did?” I ventured eventually.

She sighed, but didn’t say anything else, the seconds stretching by, longer and longer.

“Three.” She said quietly, and stopped, suddenly, in her tracks.

“What?” I shone my torch about, searching for what she’d seen. When I turned to face her, she just looked at me, with a soft, almost wistful expression.

“Three.” She said again quietly, with a small pained smile.

I felt suddenly quite empty. Cold. But on the inside.

“Oh.” I swallowed, nervously, searching for words. “Nine, I’m. I’m so sorry. I…” She looked at the floor as I apologised, before smiling again with a slight shrug.

“Come on.” She twitched her torch, light bouncing down the hallway away from us as she set off again.

I bit my lip, fighting down the squirming in my gut as I followed after her. Silence stretching between us.

---

A flat face of thick steel, brought the tunnel to an abrupt, unceremonious end.

Punctuated by a single, rusty, door. Identical to so many others in the pole, save for it’s dilapidatedness and a small square window, just above it’s wheeled handle. Criss crossed with wire-reinforced glass.

“Does anything in this place not look like it’s from a horror movie?”

“Hah.” FortyNine peered through the tiny square of warped glass on her tip-toes, holding the heavy torch up near her head with both hands. Mask precariously clenched under her arm.

After a moment she turned around to face me. One hand on the big circular door lock. “No blue, but eyes up, okay?”

I nodded once, sharp and short.

She stared at me, flittering sparks in her eyes catching the torchlight. Her brow softened, drawn neutral. “Okay.”

She nodded back, and twisted the lock.

I’d been expecting a squeal, or grate, but the metal wheel spun smooth and quiet on it’s bearings, until the door cracked silently inwards.

The hiss of slightly pressurised, stagnant air, wooshed gently round the gap between door and door frame. A gentle, freezing cold, breeze on my face.

I stood frozen to the spot until FortyNine moved, pushing the door open further. I released my breath. Light mist fogged my torchlight’s pale beam. I tightened my numbs fingers around the carry handle with a protesting creak.

FortyNine stepped cautiously into the room, and, after a moment, I followed. Stepping over the door-frame's raised, steel, lip, I placed one foot cautiously on a square metal floor panel, streaked with crusty orange rust.

It was cold. Far colder than the tunnel had been.

Floor panels like the one I stood on, each several square metres big, mapped across about half of the room unevenly. Gaps between the more haphazardly lain ones revealed powerful gashes of raw grey rock, and hard packed soil. Around the halfway point, the room gave up any semblance of being man-, or I suppose, elf-made. Giving way to a small cave.

Overhead tens of massive great bronze pipes, ranging from one to nearly three feet in diameter ran to the opposite side of the room, accompanied by hundreds of smaller tubes and cables, webbing their way up, over, and under the larger pipes, all across the ceiling. Between it all, huge icicles, some the size of my arm, quivered, like stalactites.

I stepped forward warily after her, eyeing the savage spikes above our heads.

The great cacophony of tubing and cables, bronze, steel and rubber, all converged on the far end of the room, taking a sharp, downward, ninety degree turn as they met the far wall. Where they disappeared into the biggest machine I’d ever seen.

It absolutely dominated the room. A huge rectangular, industrial, mass of steel, rust and bronze trim. It’s edges blurred, encrusted in ice where it met the cave floor, a light sheen of frost across it’s metalwork.

It had two main front panels. One vertical, parallel with the far wall, and another below it, bigger, angled back away from us as If it where a giant, glittering, off kilter table.

And did it ever glitter.

Hundreds of backlit analogue pressure gauges stared out at us from the lower panel, bright yellow circles in the dark, their needles trembling. Among them thousands of twinkling green lights, dotted with red or yellow ones here and there, accompanied by an overwhelmingly chaotic assortment of little metal plaques denoting their meanings, hundreds of which had been hastily taped over with handwritten labels.

To the left of the machine two enormous glass pipes, ribbed with evenly spaced bronze bands, emerged straight up through the floor, before making an immediate right angle turn, straight into the side of the machine. Each pipe wide enough to hold two of me side by side, and inside each immense tube, a swirling shimmering blue mist.

In the middle of the room, between us and the machine was an immense, round, hatch, made of dark metal. Like someone had taken the top off a grain silo and squished it almost, not quite, flat. Though I couldn’t see anyway to open it.

A little rectangular plaque in the centre simply read ‘Mines.’ In simple font.

My tongue drew dry in my mouth, drawing in the chill air as I split away from FortyNine as she picked her way over uneven slabs of metal flooring, stepping carefully round the massive hatch in the floor.

The blue mist. Though it wasn’t quite mist, it didn’t move like mist, it was more alive, almost like a great school of fish, thousands of individual thinking minds, working in imperfect unison. Seemed to glow brighter as I approached, from barely visible across the dark room, to the point my eyes wanted to squint.

I tapped, lightly on the glass with a fingertip. The glowing blue cloud fizzed, surging brighter, drawing swirling shapes through the air, before it converged near my hand and, gently, tapped back.

I pulled my hand away. The mist lingered, curiously, where my finger had been, before folding back into a miasma of formless shapes.

“Is this stuff, like, alive?” I stepped away from the tubes, joining FortyNine in front of the veritable sea of levers, dials, taps and buttons, all nestled among the glowing pressure dials and twinkling status lights.

Above the massive bank of instruments and gauges was the second flat face of the machine. A broad, flat, riveted plate of steel. Two by one metres which bore a strange diagram, studded with little glass lightbulbs.

“I…” She frowned and looked away from the diagram, regarding me pensively. “It’s certainly magical… I never thought it was alive though.” She turned back to the immense machine. “I don’t know.” She shone her torch back up at the diagram, face contorted in thought.

I followed her gaze to the diagram, joining my torch with hers.

“This is… A map? Of the Pole?” It was the first time I’d seen the entire layout spread before me, really there should be printouts or something to give to new elves to help them get their bearings.

Really elves should have printers and not handwrite all their documentation. Really Santa shouldn’t be reverse bodysnatching unsuspecting people to work for him now should he.

“Yep. Complete with problem lights.” She reached out on tip toes and tapped one of the little bulbs, in the centre of a little rectangle. ‘40-59 Bunks.’ Claimed a little label. The light was on. She spread her hands wide, gesturing to the entire machine. “The heart of the pole.”

“So… They have light back at the barracks?”

“Mmm.” She shook her head and waved her free hand over the map. “All of these are lit. Even ones we walked past. Means the problem’s probably in here somewhere. I don’t think it’s pumping at all.” She kicked the machine with a metallic, thud, tilting her head to the side. “What we gotta’ do, is figure out why.”

A sudden barrage of torch beams from behind cast the map with our shadows. Bright light, blotting out the glare from the massive instrument panel.

“Oh, because that’s, just, the sort of thing best left to the new fuckups from Fourth, right?” A woman's voice, dripped, with malice.

I whirled, one with FortyNine, feet slick against the icy rock floor and squinted into the torch beams.

A tall blonde woman with a short blonde bob of hair sneered down at us, arms crossed, sleeves rolled up to the elbow. Flanked on either side by shadowy elves I couldn’t quite see properly, almost invisible behind the blare their torches in our faces.

“EightyEight.” FortyNine said with ice. A hand raised, holding the light from her squinted eyes.

The tall blonde slowly stepped forwards, somehow daintily, despite the clunky boots. A slow smile slithered over her face as she carefully walked across the flat metal panels, avoiding rocks.

She stopped and looked me up and down, a single eyebrow raised into a high, thin, arch, then turned back to FortyNine. Fingers drumming over and over on her toned forearms.

Her grin became suddenly sweet.

“Really, FortyNine, this road again?” She clapped her hands to her cheeks in mock surprise, lips pulled into an exaggerated ‘O,’ and slipped seamlessly into a babying voice. “Didn’t we learn our lesson last time~?”

“Bitch!” FortyNine lurched forward. She hissed the word, spitting it violently through, tightly gritted, teeth as she grabbed for the taller woman.

EightyEight leant back with a giggle as the woman to her right stepped forward and roughly shoved FortyNine back a step.

“Hey!” I stepped forward, hands raised out in front of me, though what I actually intended to do, I hadn’t really figured out.

Before I could, the other elf flanking her, a heavyset bald man, lunged forward. Quite suddenly, my vision was blocked by his broad, looming, shoulders. His arm stretching out towards me.

I held my breath, and time seemed to slow. All that existed, all that mattered, was his hand. Reaching. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Grabbing towards me.

I wanted him away. I couldn’t think anything else. I just wanted him away.

As he came in close I clamped my right hand around his forearm. Stepped sideways towards him. And snapped out, twice, like a whip, with my other fist. Unfortunately still holding the torch.

Glass burst everywhere, tinkling to the floor as I smashed the torch into his forehead. The second hit, less forceful as he staggered back beyond my reach, smacked him squarely in the face with the broken remains. A tuft of blue smoke popped out of the newly opened torch with a fizzle, showering his face before it dissipated.

I froze in place as we both dropped our respective torches, mine significantly worse for wear, to the floor with a clatter on the rusty floor panels, and watched him stagger backwards, off kilter, scrambling to regain his balance. “OhmygodI’msosorry!” 

I looked down at my hands incredulously, fingers trembling with adrenaline. I didn’t even know my voice could go so high!

He held his nose, sniffed and worked his mouth, blinking. “I… I promise didn’t mean to.” I looked back up again. “A-Are you alright?”

“Yeah.” Some part of me had expected him to sound gruffer. Less reasonable. He punched me in the face.

I back-pedalled out of the way, completely blinded, covering my wounded nose, only for him to sweep my legs out from under me. “Thanks fer’ asking.”

The air blew completely free of my lungs as I landed flat on my back, and everything went white as the back of my head cracked hard against the icy floor.

A blanket of fresh snow marred by the tracks of shooting multicoloured lights, zigzagging left and right and up and down. I think I might have heard my name. My chest convulsed in short shallow panting breaths, backed by a fit of coughing that racked my bones as my deflated lungs spasmed, screaming for air.

The shooting colours sparked violently, stinging my eyes. My face felt cool and slippery. I groaned, ribs gradually bending, as a heavy weight pressed down, hard, on my sternum.

The man swam uneasily into view above me, cast eerily in the light from his discarded torch. First his foot on my chest, then his leg. Then his neutral face, leant in close, forearm propped atop his knee. A collage of images. All taken from slightly different angles, at slightly different points in time.

I wheezed as he leant further forwards, and cocked his head. “Alright there, miss?”

The dark room swam slowly about my head with his smile. A kinder smile than EightyEight’s smile. It might even have been genuine. He looked up, behind me, over my head, and his face dropped. “Shit.” He straightened up, falling back on his other leg. His foot still on my chest, but the weight removed, I sucked in a tiny groaning wheeze, still not enough, my ribs springing back into place. “Eight?”

“Fuck.” EightyEight swam into view beside him. He looked up at her, but she remained lost in her gaze, again staring off somewhere behind me.

“Three?” FortyNine was next to me. “Three, say something, are you okay?” I couldn’t remember when she got there.

I tried to speak, but no sounds would come out, not enough air to make any noise. I nodded and instantly regretted it. My empty stomach did slow little backflips in my gut.

“Oh she’s fine.” My head reeled as EightyEight bent down, suddenly incredibly close, my depth perception shredding itself into pieces. “The big man wants all his little helpers intact, but, you ever touch a member of my team again?” She giggled, perfectly straight teeth glinting, dancing, in place. “Well, accidents hap~pen. Got that babes~?” She smiled brightly.

I coughed, and nodded again. Another round of the motion making me dizzy. “Good.” She gripped my hand, hard, her fingers like ice.

The entire world swirled as she hoisted me up. Roughly plonked onto my feet. “All we need from the Fourth is the bare. Minimum.” She brushed me off, like you might a toddler after a tumble. “No extra credit, no out of hours. Fix your shit. That’s it.”

I glanced over my shoulder, but all that was there was a blank section of icy cave wall. Some tattered tinsel remains, and a scattering of pine needles. FortyNine bit her lip and looked away. Over her shoulder the female elf who’d grabbed her gently massaged the beginnings of what would probably become quite a nasty black eye.

EightyEight straightened abruptly, clapping her hands together. “Okie dokie! We’ll take it from here~!”

I blinked at her.

“Well? Go on. Fuck off~.” She made a shooing motion with her hand, towards the door.

FortyNine scooped our masks up off the floor, ignoring my broken torch.

“Yeah, yeah, we get it.” She muttered, and grabbed my hand, masks tucked over her arm.

“Apologies again miss.” The man bowed his head to me, ever so slightly, with a flat, neutral, expression as FortyNine pulled me past him, towards the door.

“Bye bye, lovelies~!” EightyEight called as FortyNine shoved me through the doorway, hooking the door behind her with a finger.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I watched the door seal quietly shut behind us, cutting off her voice.

---

I gingerly tapped my finger to the lump, steadily swelling, on the back of my head as we walked.

“Ssst. Ow.” FortyNine swivelled our one torch back towards me. Blinding me in the process.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” I squinted against her torch. “I’m fine.”

She narrowed her eyes at me, before she carried on walking.

We’d spent most of the way back in silence, dropping off the masks in the dark with little fanfare. FortyNine had decided to keep the torch.

We had to be getting close by now. My legs where wobbly, and I felt slightly nauseous. Hopefully because I was tired. Or hungry. Not concussed.

“So.” My head, throbbed. “They seemed to like you.”

“Feh.’” FortyNine spat. “FortyThree? Meet the Eighth. The Eighth? FortyThree.”

The torch beam bobbed left and right as she walked. I bit my lip, EightyEight’s malicious sing-song voice dancing round my ears. 

“What did she mean by ‘down this road again?’”

“We are not having this conversation.” She said almost instantaneously, her tone level. Flat.

“Nine I just got my arse handed to me because-”

“Did I ask you to step in?” She snapped. “No. I didn’t.” She stewed in silence for a moment. “B-besides, you swung first.”

My headache throbbed from the back to front of my skull. I held my hands out in front of me, scuffed red skin, splintered, across my top knuckle, dim, murky without proper light.

“I… I’ve never hit anyone before. It just… happened.”

She smiled a wry smile at me.

“There’s a lotta muscle memory in an elf. Most of it’s not yours. Just for fucks sake Three.” She scrunched her eyes shut tight, before focusing me with an intense glare. “Be. Careful. Don't bite off more than you can chew.”

A deep rumble shuddered through the overhead pipework, rattling the frigid tunnel air, followed by a whooshing hiss!

With a flicker, the tunnels flooded with light. Leaving both me and FortyNine, instinctively ducked, squinting against the sudden glare.

I suppose the Eighth knew what they where doing. Even if they where, I rubbed the back of my head painfully, monumental, arseholes.

---

The ratcheting Ker-click-click-click, of the barracks door sealing behind me had never sounded so comforting.

“PLEASE PREPARE FOR LIGHTS OUT.”

That. I scowled up at the ceiling. As always. Was, not, comforting.

“Fuck off RoboVoice.”

“THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION”

Hah.

 All of the Fourth and a couple of the Fifth looked up. A wall of curious eyes either side of the gangway. Well except FortyFour, bed closest to the door, who only gave a brief two finger salute without bothering to look up from his book.

Torches had been procured from somewhere, probably by members of the Fifth. I very much doubted any of us could have found them.

Heads turned as I tottered down the middle of the room. FortyOne pinched his glasses by the arm with an inscrutable expression as I walked past. 

When I reached the foot of my bunk, I nearly tripped over the chest at the foot of it. Clambering bodily over it's wooden lid, I collapsed face down into the raggedy pillow. Still in my jumpsuit and boots.

“Alright there duck?”

I cracked open one eye. Forty regarded me with concern. “You look like death warmed over.” His book lay open, face down, in his lap, saving his page. Where did everyone get books from anyway. My trunk had no books.

Maybe someone’d’ swap one for a half finished wooden penguin.

“Ugh.” I murmured, muffled, into the pillow. “Don't ask.”

My eyes felt so heavy. As seconds ticked by, my breathing slowed, and my spine gradually decompressed. As if I where growing subtly longer, stretching all the way from my hips to the tip of my neck as muscles in my back gradually relaxed.

“What happened to your hand?”

I opened an eye just a sliver to see FortyOne, fiddling with his rectangular glasses, stood at the foot of my bed. Forty had put away his book, and was sitting off the side of his bunk. Slowly he looked back and forth between me and FortyOne.

I peered down to where the backs of my fingers where leaving tiny snail trails, bloody imprints, on the sheets, from a cut somewhere I couldn't quite identify. That probably wouldn't wash out easily.

My voice felt croaky when I finally spoke, if everyone could just wait and get back to me come morning, it'd be much appreciated.

“I think we ran into your riot suppressors.”

FortyOne raised his eyebrows, but otherwise remained stoic. So I cleared my throat continuing. “Tall, blonde, the biggest power kick you ever did see?”

“Mm.” FortyOne frowned, and readjusted his glasses again.

I closed my eyes again against the splitting headache wailing away at my skull, and listened to the blood, throb, behind my ears.

“Goodnight One.”

I didn't hear him walk away. I didn't hear Forty clambering back under the covers either, though I'm sure they did both of those things.

I swirled through, dreamless, fitful sleep, before the lights where even out.

---

My back had really started to ache from my fall the next day. And had really started to ache the day after that.

I stretched my arms up and something popped in both of my shoulders, gingerly, I stretched further, palms flat to the ceiling some forty feet over my head.

If it could just work. If we could get the stupid. Bloody. Gun not gun to work.

The dull ache in my spine, just below my shoulder blades returned the moment I let my arms drop back to my sides. The Eighth would leave us alone, Santa would leave us alone, random elves who I'd never even spoken to would stop giving us evils every night.

We probably wouldn't be as likely to die when the 'January raids' came a knocking.

“Ready Three?”

I sighed.

“Yeah.”

If it could just. Work.

I felt my way back through the mechanical guts, pushing over a particularly large gear, my entire arm disappeared, gradually, up to the shoulder through the maintenance hatch in the side of the ‘gun-not-gun’s podium.

I should ask FortyNine, when she wasn’t off tracking down spirit pressure issues, if it had a proper name.

My hand patted up against something cold and flat, big, like a wall. Sharp little cog teeth prickled at my fingertips round it’s circumference. No way I was getting around that, I’d rip my arms to shreds, besides, I didn’t have the angle for it.

“High to low pressure link’s all I can see, I think we’re on track.” FortyOne called from his spot a few feet away, followed by rustling papers and a bark from his radio. “Nine says she an’ Six are gonna do another check, but flow looks good down there.” There was a pause where he probably polished his glasses for umpteenth time, followed by papers shuffling. “I can’t see anything else that’d stop it from doing anything, like we’re seeing.”

“We’ve got pressure at the um, base bit.” FortyEight tapped begrudgingly at a heavyset analogue gauge, punched, into the concrete. “I’m pretty sure.”

“Could always be the reading’s wrong.” I could tell by the idle tone of his voice that the ginger elf, hadn’t looked up from his diagrams.

“I think. Oof.” I pushed my cheek flat against the cold concrete of the podium, straining my eyes to the edge of their sockets to peer down my arm through the gap, threatening a headache. “Give us a light, Eight?”

Boots scratched and scrabbled against the metal, like the worlds most ungraceful cat, as FortyEight scrambled atop the massive podium. He crouched down above me, metal panels plinking concave beneath his weight. Torch to the little slits in the metal where the cogs suspending the enormous steel barrel disappeared into the concrete.

“Where’s yer’ hand at?” A spiders dance of spindly shadows exploded inside the podium, as he swung his old fashioned torch by the handle, lapping over thousands of interconnected gears and cams.

I relaxed, turning my head away, angling my body to reach further. At some point the sad Christmas tree that stood in the corner, dwarfed by the enormity of the room, had fallen on it’s side.

The concrete was kind. Cool, against my throbbing head. 

I slapped my fingers slowly against the giant gear I'd found. A faint, muffled, thum, thum, thum, rang against the metal.

“Gotchu!”

I craned my head back, eyeballs burnings at the edge of their sockets. Just barely visible through the sliver of space above my arm. A beam of white spindly light singled out my fingers, wiggling, among the stark sharp teeth of various gears, backlit against a giant flat cog with four large circular holes, spaced out like a huge, oversized, button. I couldn’t really see anything else of note though, the hoses I could see seemed fine, no cracks, or breaks, or-.

“Hey, hey, Three, there!” FortyEight jiggled the torch.

“Oof. There, where?” I asked, cheek going numb, squashed up against the concrete.

“Just on other side of that big cog your up against, on the left, the hose has come off.” I wrenched myself free, working my fingers slowly in their new explosion of space.

I put an eye to the panel, through one of the holes in the immense gear blocking my path was a ribbed rubber hose. Split, roughly down the middle. Flesh, fraying. Crushed and ground, clenched tight in the jaws of an intricate array of little cogs. ‘Just.’ ‘Other side.’

“Uhmmm. Yeah.”

Gingerly I blindly felt forwards again, my face once more pressed hard, side on, to the concrete for extra reach.

I wriggled my hand, narrowing my fingers into a cone shape, squeezing through one of the four holes in the cog, which felt a little like wearing a ludicrously heavy watch.

I finally reached as far as I could go. My finger tips danced, blind, unsure where to go, tip-tapping against a little puddle of sharp pointy teeth.

“Now just over a bit there.”

“Over where?”

“There.”

“Eight.” My voice was slightly muffled, cheek mushed into the side of the podium, up on my tip-toes. “I’m completely blind here.”

“Oh. Go Right n’ down a bit.”

I craned my hand down, walking on my fingernails, like a spider, over the spiky web of little gears, as far as my wrist would allow.

“No, my right.”

I huffed, and walked my hand left until I felt the soft spongy texture of a flap of tattered rubber. “That's it, that's it!” FortyEight clamoured excitedly above me.

Gripping the section between my finger and thumb, I tugged. The broken hose was slippery under my fingers. Sweat pooled, slimy, up my back where my t-shirt bunched awkwardly underneath the jumpsuit. I clenched the broken hose as tight as I could, braced against the concrete with my other hand.

The giant cog bit a circle slowly into my wrist as I pushed against it, twisting my arm for leverage. 

“Gnuh.” I grunted, involuntarily. A jolt of startled unease skittered wild in the space beneath my ribs.

I… I didn’t think I could make noises so…  Deep, anymore. It was…  Eerie, hearing it leave my new throat. Disconcerting.

“Don't stop! Up. Pull up more, Three.”

“I can’t bend my forearm, FortyEight.” I snapped, with an immediate pang of guilt. The back of my sore head pushed, painfully, into the podium. “Besides,” I continued gentler as I pulled my arm out and looked up at him, hands on my hips, “it's all stuck, tangled up in the cogs.” I gestured towards the open maintenance panel. “I need a better grip, or angle or.”

I shrugged, and let my arms fall limply to my sides.

“Hang on.” FortyOne, sat up, cross legged on his spot of floor, a scattering of yellowed papers, diagrams and blueprints spread about him in a circle, where he'd set up shop next to the toppled Christmas tree.

He held up a sheet, with a picture of a cog on it, four holes stamped near the edges. “This it?” I stepped towards him and squinted down at the paper.

I nodded slowly.

“That's what I'm reaching through.” I tapped the bottom left hole through the cog, fluttering the paper. “The hose is tangled just past it.”

FortyOne drummed against the concrete floor, leaning, to the side on one hand. He chewed his lip as he studied more papers, moving sheets around, one over the other.

I started to feel lost among the sea of hand scratched annotations. FortyOne pointed to various labels scrawled around the drawings, and muttered something to himself as he followed arrows from section to section, notes from page to page. Eventually, he pushed up his rectangular glasses with a forefinger.

“It’s basically like a lynchpin, leverages the barrel on the x axis.” He held his forearm vertically before tilting it.

I looked up at the giant steel barrel, stretching forty feet to the ceiling.

“So?”

“So, if we can tilt the barrel, your cog,” he pressed his fingertips lightly against the paper with the giant holed cog, “will turn.” He twisted the diagram, spinning it slowly on the floor with a rasp against the concrete. “And so will everything else, it might even let go of it for you.”

He looked up at me, and scratched behind his ear, holding up a fist with the other. Gently, his fingers uncurled, releasing the imaginary hose. I blinked. My own gears turning slowly in my head.

“You.” I pointed at him. “Want to move that.” I gestured up and down at the goliath of concrete and steel behind me. “With my bloody arm inside?”

“Well, you think I'll fit?” He held up an, admittedly, bulky hand, wiggling his fingers. “Eight could-”

“FortyEight’s basically a child.”

“Hey!” FortyEight called indignantly, still crouched atop the podium. “I’m eighteen!” FortyOne looked up at the lanky elf over my shoulder, then back to me.

I raised an eyebrow with a short tilt of the head.

“Okay, yeah.” He took off his glasses, looking down at them sheepishly. “But it's either this or we go dismantle the entire thing this time. The way people talk I don’t know we have that time.”

I stared up at the giant steel barrel, disappearing through it's canvas shroud into the ceiling.“FortyTwo could probably reach, you could ask her.”

I balked and shook my head. Hi FortyTwo, you seem like a nice person. Hey, how’d you feel about shoving your arm inside this dangerous contraption because I’m a coward? It felt low.

I bit my lip and looked down at my hands. For sucks sake I’m not even supposed to have skinny wrists.

“If I do it, we lever it over slow.” I turned back to face him. “Really slow.”

“One tooth at a time.” FortyOne smiled, putting his glasses back on.

“And.” I raised up a single finger. “I want Forty to help lever it.” 

FortyOne twitched his nose with a smirk.

“I was just about to suggest the same thing. Hey, Eight!” The tall, lanky elf froze, clutching the torch to his chest, like a child caught red-handed misbehaving, long elven ears jutting nervously off either side of his head. “Go grab Forty off the sleighs would you?”

“Oh!” FortyEight dropped off the podium with a little hop, not quite sticking the landing. “Sure!” He smiled, and took off towards the steel door. Far too enthusiastic for my liking.

FortyOne watched him go, before he sat back down in his little circle of papers, with two sharp cracks from his knees. Softly drumming his fingers against the concrete while I stood awkwardly to the side.

Silence between us stretched, long and uncomfortable, like a perished rubber band, you weren’t entirely sure would snap. I stifled a yawn, gritting my teeth against the unwarranted blurry watering of my eyes.

Just over FortyOne's shoulder I followed the lonely blue strip of tinsel adorning the depressing Christmas tree. Even if it had been upright, the pale blue tinsel wrapped about it's trunk was far too buried amongst the branches to properly decorate it.

I'd yet to see an elf tend to one of the many stubby trees, dotted about the pole, someone must at least be watering them though.

It was hard to see why anyone would bother.

“You don't talk much, Three.” I realised FortyOne had been staring me dead straight in the eye.

I chewed the inside of my cheek as I looked away, painfully aware of how loud my breathing sounded. Pretty rich, coming from him, FortySeven dragged him into every casual conversation I'd seen him have.

“I talk. Hell I’ve talked to Forty and FortyNine quite a bit.” I shrugged. “You’re the one who only whispers to FortySeven.”

He regarded me studiously. As if trying to gauge how I might react to something, the corner of his mouth twitched, the ghost of a smile not there.

“It can be, hard, to figure out who to trust.”

I shrugged again, and frowned.

“What does that even mean? We’re basically all in the same boat.” Even as I said it, EightyEight, or even ThirtySix and FortyNine to an extent, came to mind, disproving my point.

He opened his mouth as if to speak, before closing it again as his face fell. A single bead of sweat slowly formed, in real time, at his temple.

He looked like he might be sick. Hairs prickled up the back of my neck, stabbing like alarm bells. “Are you alright?”

He didn’t answer, but his eyes eyes flicked, slightly, back to meet mine. It wasn’t me he’d been looking at.

I swallowed, slowly.

“Well. Well.” A deep unmistakable voice rolled through me from behind, leaving my ribs trembling, like the branches on a tree, brushed by a passing predator.

I turned apprehensively on my heel, cringing against the noise of my boot, squealing against the floor.

Santa smiled down at the two of us with his icy blue gaze, made all the colder by the warmth of his ruddy cheeks. Green motes of light, still flittered silently about his boots, disappearing gradually into nothingness, like snowflakes melting against wet ground.

I looked at FortyOne, his pale skin had become ashen, with a clammy sheen. We nearly stumbled over eachother, jumping away, as Santa walked straight though the space we’d stood, mere moments before. Looking up at the massive contraption. “It is, so good, to finally see a job well done.”

Santa gently patted the giant steel barrel, with a hollow metallic echo. “Show me.”

I exchanged a panicked glance with FortyOne who coughed, clearing his throat, and continuously readjusted his glasses.

“It, ah, we haven't. Got it working. Yet.” He stared a hole, deep, deep, into the floor. “Sir.”

The concrete vibrated, sending tiny tremors up my legs growing stronger with every one of Santa's footsteps, as I fought the deep animal urge to back-pedal.

“Nonsense.” He said the word, long, and slow. Leaning down, with his giant hands on his knees, level with FortyOne’s face. “No good little elves, of mine. Would loll about chatting.” He grinned with his eyes, twinkling. His mouth wholly obscured behind his bushy white beard. “Hoh!” I flinched, the burst of sound, the laugh splitting me straight down the middle, like an axe through a log.

He focused me with, uncomfortable, unbreakable, eye contact, over FortyOne’s shoulder.

Before he tilted his head back. Regarding the ginger elf again, inches from his face. “Not while there’s, work, to be done.” Almost lovingly, he reached out one of his giant hands, and placed it on FortyOne’s shoulder, slowly his giant thumb slivered up FortyOne’s collarbones and, gently coiled round his neck like a snake. “Surely, not.” With his index, Santa tenderly wiped away the single bead of sweat from FortyOne’s temple.

“It’ll work.” Santa snapped his piercing blue gaze to me. “It-It…”

I squeezed every muscle in my stomach.

Unable to breathe.

Tendrils of frost slowly slipped their way between my ribs. All words I might have had collapsed into shapeless thoughts, unable to be translated into sound, running, like ice, melting through my fingers.

“W-we just need some muscle. T-to um.” FortyOne pointed at the enormous steel pipe. “Lever it over.”

Slowly Santa rose to his full height. Blotting the taller elf and me with his shadow.

“Y-yeah. Then I c-can. Um-” I wrung my hands together.

Santa exploded with noise.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” I had to resist the urge to clap my hands over my ears. My breath hitched as if my throat had swelled, growing thick, like expanding foam was coursing, clogging, multiplying, inside my airways under his breath, a hot, sugary sweet waft with a subtle undertone of slightly soured milk. His great red belly roiled beneath his coat as he laughed. Great thumping vibrations thundered out through the concrete floor with every rise and fall.

He slapped a hand on FortyOne’s shoulder, sending the elf, scarcely half his height, tottering. “You're very astute little one.”He caught FortyOne, nearly in the process of losing his glasses, by the back of his collar, righting him roughly by pulling the coarse fabric, tight, against his neck. “Why don't you whip up a part for your friend here to fit?”

“Uh. S-sorry I-I don’t-”

“Ohhh, a link from the low pressure side to the high.” The colour visibly drained from FortyOne's face, as if through a leak. “That, is, what you said earlier. No?”

Santa’s eyes twinkled below the fluffy white rim of his hat. FortyOne looked like he might puke, before giving the giant man the tiniest of nods. “Do you have such a link?”

“Uh, I…”

Santa gently placed the toe of his boot on the diagram of the giant cog, with it's four holes, still laying on the floor. Gently, he twisted. Spinning the paper on the floor, with the gentle rasp of paper on concrete.

“Ol' Saint Nick can give you a hand.” He winked, tapping a portly finger to his nose.

“I-I’ll go make one up.”

Santa unceremoniously released FortyOne’s collar, and wandered casually over to the ginormous gun-not-gun dominating the centre of the room as the rattled elf scurried away.

With the ease of a child plucking a flower, he grabbed the giant barrel with one hand. The entire room rumbled as he leant against it. The giant black gears protruding from the podium ratcheting slowly. Sprinklings of dust pattered down from the ceiling as the canvas section of ceiling creaked, and flexed.

The entire massive barrel moved in place. As if it weighed nothing at all.

“After all, isn't this just, so, much, quicker than waiting for your squad mates to make it, all, the way, here?” He mused, a deep rumble, to himself. “FortyThree.”

A jolt of lightning slammed into my already battered chest, shattering my soul.

“Ah, uh. Yes?”

“Dear.” His ice blue eyes seemed to twinkle with warmth. They may have literally twinkled too, like elven eyes seemed to, but I was far too interested in the floor, and controlling my breathing to double check.

The access panel, level with his belt, opened like a dark maw into the concrete.

Santa patted the podium casually. The entire barrel leant to and fro, like the prow of an old fashioned galleon as he moved.

I swallowed rising bile, bubbling, in the back of my throat.

With each apprehensive step I took, Santa towered ever, and ever higher over me.

His presence overwhelming.

Overpowering.

I looked up into his face, nearly a 90 degree angle from the floor, his eyes squinted into a smile and my stomach flipped. I turned hastily to the access panel, gingerly feeling my way back through the, now quivering, mechanical guts of machinery.

Gears chittered like a cat stalking a bird, as Santa held them on the precipice of, not quite, properly engaging another revolution.

Santa's soft fuzzy coat covering his belly gently pressed into the back of my ponytail with his every breath, the fluffy white trim gently rising to tickle the back of my neck, before falling away again.

Hot breath rolled over my back in monotonous waves, warm and sickly, behind my ears.

Something moved in the hole, tugging gently at my baggy jumpsuit sleeve. I pulled on the fabric with my other hand, tugging myself free.

God I should have rolled my sleeves up. I screwed my eyes tight shut, fighting light convulsions in my diaphragm. I really should have rolled them up.

I blew, slow, steadying breaths as I felt the cold flat surface of the giant button like cog with my fingertips.

Gently, I wormed my hand through, twisting left to right at the wrist, wriggling, until I was once more through the hole, wearing the giant hunk of metal like a bracelet.

There was a deep grating noise. Vibrations bled from the metal into my skin, slithering down my arm.

Ti-clunk.

Ti-clunk.

Ti-clunk.

My arm was pulled slowly down, and around, by the cog. Wind from the gnashing, whirring gears, chewing the hose, tickled my fingers. Centimetres from my hand.

“W-Wait, stop, stop!” Scuttling creatures in the back of my head screamed for me to get away, the skin of my wrist bunching, trapping my arm more the harder I pulled away.

“Ho! Ho!” I trembled, my cheek felt hot, clammy, pressed up against the cool concrete as Santa behind me shook. My arm vibrated place, gripped by the giant, suddenly still, cog.

The sharp gears with the hose jittered excitedly, my hand, just beyond their reach.

I froze, blood running cold as ice as I felt his hand, hot, on my face, his giant knuckles, almost completely blotting out sight in one eye. “Not to worry, dear.” He cooed, softly stroking my cheek with a single, giant, finger. “I've got, everything, under control.” He gently tapped the finger, twice, to my cheekbone. “Everything.”

I almost threw myself into the machine, pressed so deep into the concrete. I felt flat, clutching at the tattered fragments of frayed hose. Something sharp bit into the back of my arm, little gears nipped at my fingers, but I didn't care. I pressed myself as far away from him as I could.

“Got it.” I panted, into the concrete.

In my periphery, FortyOne, hovered blurrily, just beyond Santa's reach.

I gripped the rubber scrap of hose even tighter, like a lifeline. “I've got it.”

Santa's hand lingered against my skin, sliding down my cheek, before finally falling away at the base of my jaw. The quiet, shhf, of skin against skin.

I felt the giant man straighten behind me, and my arm was pulled about with groan of unhappy metal. I clung as hard as I could to the hose, rubber stretching, ribbed metal bands, popping, mangled and free, one by one. Cog teeth scratched as I tore myself away from the machine, and threw the tattered hose at the floor with a bounce.

It looked smaller. Innocuous and sad, under the light. One metal fitting had rusted into crumbling flakes. It's belly torn savagely open where it had drooped into the gears.

FortyOne gingerly handed me the replacement line he'd made, almost identical to the old one. His eyes stony, and unreadable.

Santa took a deep breath behind me. His exhale flitted loose hairs, fallen from my ponytail, across my face.

I looked back at the open hatch.

Sharp pieces of indiscernible metal, glinted, in the dark square hole. Like so many teeth.

Fuck it.

I took a deep breath, and plunged my arm back inside.

Gears scratched at my arm, mostly protected by the jumpsuit, as I shoved roughly past them, wriggling with the new hose clenched tight between my middle finger and thumb. Feeling around for one of the holes in the giant cog with my index. I poked the new part through, bit, by bit. Until I onto pinched it by one end, dangling on the other side, and wiggled my hand through after it.

FortyOne scrabbled atop the podium, scooping up FortyEight's discarded torch. Despite the height advantage, he was still not quite eye level with Santa Claus.

“Okay, Three. High pressure side first.” He crouched down by one of the giant gears, squinting down through it's slit.

I slowly walked the hose through my hand until I had it by the other one of the ends. “On your right.”FortyOne called from above. Higher.

Behind me Santa shifted, each colossal black boot landing in quick succession with a heavy Thwump-Thwump. The shiny round toe of each shoe, dominated, a low corner in my periphery.

The cogs began to turn. Slowly pulling me to the right, until I blindly scraped the replacement hose against something hard, and flat. “You’re close, it should just slot in, back a bit, towards me.” I felt the hose settle into a shallow groove. “There! And twist. Other way, it’s left hand thread.” Eventually the hose grew tight, and I couldn't turn it any further. “Okay, there's a little lever.”

I walked over the flat metal surface with my index and forefinger, padding blindly, until I hooked a finger round a little metal stick. “That’s it! Pull towards you, that should lock it in.”

A dull ache had steadily set into my upper arm, and my breathing had grown ragged. Twisting in towards the concrete, other hand spread across its surface, I braced myself against the podium and accidentally crushed a tit into the solid wall. 

I blinked blankly. Somehow I'd completely forgotten they where there, a simple, unremarkable, fact of life until accidentally becoming aware of them again. When on earth had that happened? 

How on earth had that happened? “Alright there, Three?” FortyOne's voice carried taut in the air. Too level.

A forced calm to his inflection.

“Yeah.” I blinked twice and wrenched the little lever towards me, sinking down like a spongy brake pedal, until it finally clicked into place.

The other end of the line was easier. I had much more reach, and my hand no longer bent backwards at the wrist, working in front of myself for once, the threatening cramp scuttling at the base of my thumb slowly faded away.

“I've been very patient.” Santa murmured softly, just as I was pressing down the second little lever with my fingers, sending goosebumps prickling up the back of my neck.

Suddenly the entire machine lurched, whisking my hand away, up and down again. The cuff of my sleeve was swiftly sucked down by the gnashing mouths of the sea of cogs, just as the old hose had been. Two cogs clamped down, hard, snatching the back of my hand like the jaws of a dog.

“Ah! F-fuck!” I squared myself against the podium, boot up against the concrete, desperately wrenching my arm back. “Ah! W-we did what, we did what you wanted!”

The gears chattered, slowly closing over the back of my wrist, I hissed through my teeth as skin stretched along with the fabric, gradually pulling taut.

“Really. Would anyone else be, so, patient?” Santa mused above me, slowly stroking his bushy beard between a finger and thumb.

The giant steel barrel leant further beneath his other hand, showering us with smatterings of ceiling dust.

My eyes blurred with water and I slammed them shut tight. Tens of sharp little cog teeth tore into the skin of the back of my hand, little bones in my palm popped as they where crushed together by the cogs, rolling, grinding, over one another. “For such. Little. Gain.”

My forearm felt unnaturally slick and warm.

“It'll work! It's fixed now! Right now!” FortyOne pleaded frantic somewhere above me.

I cried out incomprehensibly, forehead flat against the cold concrete as the machine lurched again, unrelenting metal, crushing my hand. My fingers felt numb, stabbing jolts of pain shot up my forearm along my tendons with every involuntary twitch.

“Oh, FortyOne.” Santa's voice rumbled down my trembling spine. “You've no idea how, happy, I am to hear you say that.”

A heavy weight fell, enveloping my shoulder. Pushing me down, pulling me away from the machine. Stretching. Pulling my arm longer than it wanted to go.

“Nnnguh!” Something clicked in my wrist, the little bones of my palm rolling further, I swear I could hear something creaking.

Santa's heavy hand began to slowly massage my shoulder.

“What do you think, Three?” He lent in close, his voice a gravelly whisper, hot breath, sour milk, wet on my ear. 

His words. Agonisingly slow. “Should we test it?”

I tried to speak but couldn't. Opened my mouth but no sound came.

I nodded, eyes still shut, scraping my face into the podium, smearing the rough concrete with tears.

The pulling worsened, and I felt distinctly sick. Then I stretched, no longer taut, like my entire body had become jelly.

I opened my eyes to feedback from all of the room at once, like a panorama video, wind whooshing, I couldn’t turn my head. I couldn’t close my eyes. I didn’t have eyes. FortyOne, distorted, in pieces. A green glowing light, then thousands of beautiful green flittering motes, magical butterflies. Pouring from my mouth.

I stumbled forward, suddenly solid again, tripping on FortyOne's leg, and tumbled to the floor on top of him, smacking my forehead on the steel back of the control room chair in the process.

The floor span slowly as I swayed on all fours, two deep gashes either side of a sickening flap of loose skin spanned from my middle two knuckles to just below my wrist, blood seeping onto the floor.

FortyOne hacked beside me, coughing up more of the magical butterflies.

I sat up, exhausted and dizzy. Hand tucked under my arm, right up into the armpit, squeezing hard against the pain.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” I was too tired to flinch, as Santa's laugh blasted my eardrums, my limbs shuddering from adrenaline. The pain from my hand kind of helped, forcing me sober. “Laying about again?” Santa loomed, crouched as small as he feasibly could, occupying over half of the little control room, arms to the walls, slumped forward with the back of his head to the ceiling.

FortyOne staggered to his feet, leaving me looking up at the pair of them.

Santa opened his hand in a gesture, icy blue stare, burrowing, into me through my eyes. “Shall we see, FortyThree?” I felt the chair at my back. FortyOne at my left. Santa in front, the tiny sliver of light, the hatch, barely visible between his feet. Nowhere to go. “Naughty?”

I felt that instinctive jerk again. Muscle memory that wasn't mine. “… Or, simply, disappointingly, behind, schedule?”

FortyOne looked grey. My heart thundered in my ears. A ticking clock in rushing blood, counting down the seconds.

Without breaking eye contact, I reached up with my uninjured hand, clutching the other across my chest, slowly, as if I where staring down a bear.

I felt for the lever. The same one I'd found, lurking in the dark, the first time I'd climbed the ladder to the surface defence control room just over a week ago, and wrenched it down with all my weight.

My head, lolled, back against the chair, and I saw the glass domed ceiling. I’d taken it for black. Covered by snow again, but it wasn’t.

It was a beautifully deep, inky blue, peppered with swirling white stars, twinkling against the night sky.

The room began to shake. Pulsing. Rhythmically. A deep, even,

Wud…

Wud…

Wud…

Shook my eardrums like a motorbike exhaust would shake single paned glass.

The tip of the barrel, protruding beside our little glass dome, spat a flash of bright green light. Before once more sitting dark against the sky.

Then it spat again. Then again. Brighter.

For several seconds nothing happened.

Santa's breath, rolled over me in hot waves.

Before an almighty pillar of light, exploded from the barrel.

Murky, green iridescence, rising up and up, into the heavens. Smaller, accompanying, beams of light swirled around it in blues and reds, their colours bleeding together wherever they touched. Whatever clouds there where, fizzed into smoke, parting for the light, the night sky itself seemed to shimmer, hazy, as the beam grew higher and higher, not quite disappearing into the distance.

Then, the light seemed to fan out, bending, rippling across the sky, like someone had kicked over a gallon of oil, caught in the light, just right.

And it was silent. The giant pillar making no more noise than a gentle, high pitched, tinkling in the air, quickly fading from my notice. 

Glimmering multicoloured majesty, more entrancing than all the stars combined.

“The northern lights.” FortyOne breathed, quietly.

I pressed my sleeve hard into my bloody hand.

“Ahhh, my sweet, Aurora.” Santa looked down, away from the glimmering sky, levelling his gaze at the pair of us. “Disappointingly slow.” His voice rolled, gravelly, in waves over my head. “But! Not, naughty,” he singsonged with a wag of his finger, “not, yet.”

He winked, tapping a finger to his nose.

Starting at the finger and spreading outwards, his entire body began to glow, green and shimmery. Almost identical to the, not so natural phenomenon, pouring from the barrel of the gun-not-gun outside. Before he was overtaken by green flittering specks of light, shimmering as if they where themselves, thousands of tiny wings, peeling free from under his skin, pouring from the arm and neck holes of his burgundy coat.

He seemed to shrink, distort, before bursting into a swarm, charging towards a us, between us. The flickering hurricane of little lights curved up over the dome, and back down through the little trapdoor, charging circles round the room, some thirty, forty, feet below.

Finally slamming the door behind itself with an almighty CLANG! 

Me, FortyOne, and my bloody hand where left alone. Our breath, collectively unsteady in the suddenly still air.

FortyOne trembled, and swallowed.

He looked at me with an inscrutable expression, and closed his eyes. Before calmly unclipping the radio from his belt, he pinched it daintily between two fingers, and dropped it over the open hatch.

I watched the radio tumble out of view. A twinge of vertigo stabbed at the walls of my abdomen as I heard it shatter into pieces, scattering all across the floor.

“Think that's how he knew what we where saying?” I tried moving my fingers experimentally and winced. They could all move though. That’s a good sign.

“I don't know.” FortyOne breathed quietly staring through the hole. He focused me with a stern stare. “I hope so.”

I nodded weakly, breathing heavily as he came and sank down beside me, with his back to the wall. I tilted my head back against the chair again, and watched the deep murky colours slowly ripple across the stars, like water, across the flat surface of a lake.

“We’ve got a plan.” FortyOne said quietly, his voice barely a whisper.

I looked at him, in a slight daze, not entirely comprehending what he’d said.

He looked back at me, and slowly drew in one leg, hooking his arm around his knee. “Me an' Seven. We’ve got a plan.”

He stared at me more intensely than even Santa's icy blue gaze. His face hard to read in the dark, eyes almost invisible, the tiny lights from his irises, reflecting in his glasses. Before he dipped a hand into his pocket, and dropped dozens of little scraps of paper on the floor, each with a single letter.

I frowned, watching him push the letters around on the floor, until a single word stood in a line, surrounded by extra letters.

‘e.s.c.a.p.e.’

I looked up to find him watching me intently.

“You mean…”

“Yes.” He said softly, tilting his head ever to subtly towards me.

He scrambled all the pieces back up again, stuffing them back into his pocket.

Escape! Anna! Babs! Chloe! To hell what she thought of me when I got there, I could leave this entire place behind and never look back. “Can we trust you?” He said softly.

I breathed out slowly, unsteady. I nodded.

He nodded back. “Five’s in. She’s gonna’ talk to Two.” He paused, swallowing. His breath shuddered.

My hand stung, throbbing, in the cold, still, air.

He slowly leant in close to my ear. “We need Nine.” He whispered, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear, despite how close he was. I blinked at him. “She knows the pole. Far more than we do, obviously.” He worked his mouth, as if piecing words together by hand. “She talks to you. She seems to like you… Can we trust her?”

I blinked and looked away. Staring at the square beam of light, filtering in through the hatch.

“I don’t know.” I said quietly with a shrug. Would she be on our side? Would ThirtySix? Or would both of them just turn us over the Father Christmas at the first chance they got.

I shuddered, boards in the Snowglobe flipping over in my minds eye.

‘Deceased.’

FortyOne stared deep into my eyes for a moment, before falling back against the wall. I looked away, wrestling the bundle of nerves in my stomach into a tangled ball.

“Please Three.” He sounded so tired. So emotionally drained. “We need to know.”

I lolled my head back against the chair.

The stars swirled in the deep otherworldly miasma of colour, far overhead, framed by the rim of the domed ceiling, like looking through a porthole in submarine. So many distant souls in a storm. A magical place, just out of reach.

“I can try.” I said eventually. Quietly. “I’ll try.”