The frosty Siberian air stung my face, and the crunch of snow under my feet made my temples ache. The task seemed simple: to catch the dropped camera, hand it over to the squad and return to warm tea. But fate, as always, has prepared its own scenario, cold and ruthless.

The camera lay on the ice, a shiny black box, beckoning with its fragility. You bent down, picking it up, and at that moment the world turned upside down. The ice seemed to bend under your weight, without warning, without a single sound, except for a sudden, chilling crunch. You failed.

The cold struck with all its might. The Siberian water, icy as shards of broken glass, pierced you to the bone. Panic–sharp, burning–squeezed his lungs, made his heart race. The dark, impenetrable water quickly filled the lungs, taking away the air, displacing life. Your hands, numb from the cold, convulsively clutched at something, at something that did not exist, in a futile attempt to stay on the surface.

Everything was plunging into gloomy blackness. Thoughts–fragmentary, disordered–raced through his head like fragments of ice rushing along a swift current. You were drowning, realizing that this was the end. Your strength was leaving you, and your resistance was getting weaker. It seemed like death was only a matter of time, the cold, ruthless end to my brief plunge into the icy Siberian abyss.

And suddenly, in this icy tomb, you felt a touch. Strong arms wrapped around you. You instinctively clung to them, desperately clinging to the hope that flared up in your chest, weak but stubborn. In the pitch darkness, you saw the outline of a face, dimly discernible in the icy gloom.

Cain.

The name popped up in your mind, as if it had emerged from the depths of your memory. Blond hair, sharp features, only his eyes glowed in the dark. He pressed his lips to your lips, passing me air, gentle, precious air, every molecule of which you greedily sucked in.

It was not a kiss in the usual sense of the word, but an act of salvation, an act of giving life.