Dmitri felt the river’s thoughts through the soles of his boots. It was more than the groans of the ice floes jostling for position, more than the deep, percussive shudder as his crew sawed another great block free from the Neva’s winter skin. This was something else. A whisper, coiled inside the cold.
At first, he’d paid it no mind. A man’s mind plays tricks in the white glare of a Petersburg winter. But the whispers grew, becoming clearer with every slab of ice he hauled. They weren’t in Russian, not exactly. They were coded, wrapped in the language of fractured light and groaning pressure. A language of pure information.
His work suffered. The foreman, a man with a face like a frozen beet, barked at him for his vacant stares. “Is this your new method, Prokov?” he’d sneered that morning. “To bore the ice into submission?” Dmitri had just nodded, his mind still snagged on a phrase the ice had given him: *the quiet quitting of the sun*. He didn’t know what it meant, but it filled him with a profound and nameless dread. This was more than his usual winter melancholy. It felt like a premonition.
His wife, Anna, noticed too. “You are a ghost in our rooms,” she said, her hands kneading dough with a frantic energy. “You do not hear me. You stare at the frost on the windowpane as if it is writing you a letter.” He tried to explain, to tell her that the ice spoke of the end of an era, that the gilded age of Tsars and Fabergé eggs was a brittle shell.
“An era? What do you know of eras?” she’d scoffed, her fear sharpening her words into weapons. “You know ice. You know the ache in your back. This is the cold making you mad, Dima. You’re letting it poison your thoughts.” It was a gentle kind of gaslighting, born of love, but it chipped away at him all the same. Was he going mad? Were the whispers just the ringing of a mind frozen to the edge of sense?
But then he’d be back on the river, and a fresh cut in the ice would release another burst of knowledge. It wasn’t a voice, but a feeling, a sudden and total understanding that settled in his bones. A jolt of terrible joy, a pure dopamine hit of prophecy. He learned of a future where this trade, this yearly harvest of cold, wouldn’t be sustainable, where the winters themselves would grow weak and unreliable. He learned of a terrible father, a man of science who would one day give birth to an unholy, man-made star, a new and awful sun that would devour cities in a blink. The name was impossible, a crackle of static he interpreted as *Oppenheimer*. It meant nothing. It meant everything.
Listening became his secret work, his true purpose. Hauling the ice was the cover for his real job: deciphering the planet’s frozen memories. It was a strange side hustle for the soul. The other men sang to fight the cold. Dmitri listened.
Today, prying a great green-blue sheet loose, he heard the clearest message yet. It wasn’t a whisper of the distant future, of weak winters or fathers of fire. It was about now. The ice showed him a girl, no older than the Grand Duchess Anastasia, her face pale and her belly empty, stitching a red banner in a freezing tenement not a mile from the Winter Palace. It showed him a dozen, then a hundred, then a thousand such banners. It spoke of a coming fever, a red tide that would wash the crowns and the glistening jewels into the mud.
He dropped his pry bar. It clanged against the ice, the sound shockingly loud in the sudden silence of his mind. The foreman yelled his name, but Dmitri didn’t hear him. He was looking west, across the featureless white plain of the river toward the golden dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the opulent sprawl of the Palace.
He was not a revolutionary. He was an ice-hauler. A man who earned his bread by the sweat of his brow and the ache of his muscles. But the ice had given him a terrible gift. He knew the song that was coming to drown out all others. He was a man standing at the very end of a long, glittering party he had never been invited to, and he was the only one who could hear the carriages of the brutal new dawn rattling just over the horizon. He bent, picked up his bar, and knew he would never again feel the cold in the same way. He was no longer just hauling ice from the Neva. He was hauling its chilling, immutable truths.
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