Jordan pulls himself up to sit in a cross-legged position, with Scorched ‘El still manifesting its legs in place of his.

Jordan’s breath is ragged, and the dark liquid staining his teeth and chin is so hot he can’t tell whether it’s his own blood or Scorcho Sauce.

“That voice couldn’t have been anything– nothing but a hallucination.” he says in his mind.

“And that thing, just now–”

Jordan whips back to where he’d seen the gargantuan tail and pink specter. Now, he can’t seem to find it, the storm having intensified further.

“That couldn’t have been real, either. Zain’d be fine, even if it had been, with that crystal shit on him.”

Minecraft’s diamond armor crossed his mind, a thought he shoved quickly away for fear of realising the life he’d likely all but lost.

“Can cold do that? Make me hallucinate junk?” Jordan thinks to himself, staring at his own reddened hands.

Meanwhile, inside the mountaintop building, we see that Angosin had been watching Wenji and Jordan’s exchange through a window. 

Standing on the edge of Biskawaagan’s container so as to rest his arms on the high window’s sill, Angosin sighs audibly.

Behind him, the crows have begun to work at Biskawaagan’s tongue, the other birds continuing to feast on the insects remaining from Ookomisan’s avatar.

“So resilient, youth are.” Angosin thinks to himself. “So irrationally motivated– to the point of surviving fatal wounds and frostbite.”

“Why, then, is it that catastrophe strikes them the most?”

Through Angosin’s mind, we see from the perspective of a Pakistani man reaching for his child; both of them being held at gunpoint before a roiling crowd by two masked men.

At the same time, we see two Venezuelan children shivering in their father’s arms, with barely enough clothing to cover themselves. Just before Angosin shakes his head, rubbing his eyes and ending the vision, we hear their father cough.

“Will it come for me?” Angosin thinks to himself, looking down at his hands. They are larger than would be those of a child his age. “When it does, will I still have the strength of youth left in me?”

Nearby, in Zain’s cell, just behind Angosin: the alien’s eyes grow brighter and brighter as it stares down at the arrow. As the light begins to obscure the room’s own features, the thing begins to rattle from its metal to its feathers.

Angosin looks out to Jordan, who is also looking down at his own hands.

“It matters not.” he says to himself. “God has shown me the path, and in following it I will save the world.”

In that very moment, the arrow shoots away from the alien, piercing the door and pink crystal as it rockets towards Angosin.

Passing straight through his chest and continuing through the window before him, the arrow leaves a golden tail behind it not unlike that of a shooting star.

Angosin’s blood paints the wall before him as he loses his steadiness on Biskawaagan’s crate, falling backwards.

The arrow’s trail is bright enough to be seen through the blizzard, and it catches Jordan’s eye.

“Wait,” Jordan thinks to himself as he considers the U-F-O. “I don’t feel cold at all.”

Jordan drops his eyes from the golden tail as it dissipates, the arrow doubtless flying somewhere far from view or reach. He looks down at himself again.

The redness in his hands was not from frostbite, instead being from some sort of rising, searing heat in his bones! Much of the white obscuring his vision was not from the snow-storm at all, but from a vapor rising from his own exposed skin!

Jordan wasn’t freezing, he realised. He was heating up. The blood dripping from his forehead was bubbling like his own Scorcho Sauce, and it hurt!

Meanwhile, back in the hallway, we see Site Director Schrute enter from some other corridor into the site of the special equipment team’s massacre. 

He swears under his breath as he bends down towards Ronnie’s body. He snatches up her silenced pistol and speaks into his lab-coat’s collar, tugging it up to his mouth.

“All four were dispatched, and no, not any one of them is just out cold.”

Schrute continues down the hallway, towards where Biskawaagan’s casket lays, pistol readied in hand.

“I’m nearing where Damian reported that disturbance with the boy. I’m going to keep my distance from all three possible apexes of anomaly.”

Schrute skirts quickly through the mingling congregation of birds, taking care to avoid them, the mass of crystal fusing a cell to his left shut, and Biskawaagan’s casket, in which he sees that Angosin is now splayed out as well.

There is a sizable red spot formed in his shirt just above his solar plexus.

Schrute slows his pace once he clears these sites of abnormality, pulling his collar to his mouth again.

“I’m not seeing Charleen or Terry yet, I’m going to continue to the level of Shearer’s cell.” he says.

A creaking sound, louder than the fluttering or cooing of the birds behind him stops him in his tracks.

He turns around, watching as Angosin rises, slowly, from the casket, propping himself up off of Biskawaagan’s chest.

We see from Angosin’s POV as he looks at his hand, the red on it complimenting its further matured features.

Schrute has his pistol levelled at Angosin, now, lowering his mouth to his collar as he backs, slowly, away from him.

“I may have to go silent, soon.” He whispers. “One of the kids have ‘woken up’.”

We return to Angosin’s POV, where, through shaky vision he sees an abnormally-shaped, spectral hand manifesting beneath his own.

Schrute’s expression hardens as Angosin snaps his head towards him. His knuckles whiten as he grips the gun’s handle harder, the rest of his body being kept just as tense.

For about a minute after Angosin disappears, his flesh vaporizing into a quickly-dissipating mist, Schrute stays like that.

We see, at the tail end of Angosin’s disappearing form, that one of his hands had slipped into Biskawaagan’s jacket. Vaporizing with it as it goes is a golden shard of arrow. Spots of long-dried blood still stain it.

Schrute, finally lowering his shaking arms, again speaks, falteringly, into his collar.

“I’m– uh–”

Noticing that he is still whispering, he clears his throat.

“Nix that, the kid just disappeared. I’ll file a full report later, get to amnesting that mountain-side town, there’s too great a risk they caught a glimpse of SCP-2301’s manifestation.”

Behind him, from the end of the hallway, Schrute hears the tramping of booted feet up stairs.

“C’mon, did that little fall cut your leg open?” Charleen’s voice echoes from the stairway.

“Not in your dreams! It’s just this shitty riot gear weighing me down!”, Terry’s voice calls in response, a tad further away.

Schrute sighs in relief. “I’ve found the recruits.”, he says into his collar. “Now, given we’ve confirmed that the larger one, Naqvi, was eliminated by 2301, you should have no remaining hangups on the matter. 

“All there’s left to do is re-contain or eliminate the Shearer entity.”

We see Goggles and the men he’d left with skirting the side of the building, sidling along small outcroppings and climbing past iced-over crags with Goggles in the lead.

“Stop.”, he says just loud enough to be heard above the storm.

“I just got back word that Terry and Charleen are all right. Now, focus. The skip’s just ahead.”

Indeed, we see that Goggles’ namesake vision cuts straight through the storm to highlight the form of Jordan, just beginning to look off the mountain’s edge.