The Cold Locker

An unnamed recovery crew found a small pre-Continuance medical locker behind a collapsed loading wall and brought it inside. Its seal had failed years earlier. Frost had grown across its interior in thick flat sheets, preserving some contents and splitting others beyond use.

There were vaccines whose labels no longer matched any disease index, handwritten care instructions, and a stack of family photographs fused together by ice. No person had left a claim on the locker.

MOTHER authorized material recovery. The Frostbound pair catalogued everything except one sealed photograph packet.

Their testimony states that preservation is not the same as custody. The packet remains in the locker, where its owners might still be somewhere outside the archive's ability to name.