The world had stopped mid-breath. Buildings leaned in jagged silhouettes, windows gaped like empty eyes, and streets lay deserted beneath a sky the color of ash. Liam, Kade, Serena, and Dorian wandered apart through the ruins, each carrying their own questions into the quiet.
Serena spent two days alone with the silence chewing at her edges. She searched stairwells and hollow apartments until her voice turned hoarse.
"Mom? Dad?"
No one answered.
A half-collapsed supermarket kept her alive. Canned food still lined a few dusty shelves. She slept on cardboard, waking in fits, heart hammering at sounds that weren't there.
On the third day, footsteps scraped across broken tile. She shot upright. A figure stood in the aisle's gray light, wary, tired, gentle-eyed.
"You okay?" Liam asked, voice low.
Relief broke across her face so fast it stung. "I've been looking for my parents. There's no one. What is this place?"
"I don't know," he said, kneeling to her level. "But we'll figure it out. We need to stick with each other."
They sat among dented cans and toppled displays. Liam told a small story, nothing important, to help her relax.
"Thank you," she whispered. "I didn't think I'd meet anyone."
"We're in it together now," he said. "We'll start looking for answers."
Across the city, Kade prowled the ribs of an old apartment block, muttering at dead screens. Phones lay everywhere like fossils. None would light.
"No signal. No power," he said to the empty rooms, mocking himself in the tone he used online. The bravado wore thin. Families he'd mocked once flickered through his head, photos of birthdays, shared jokes, warmth. The jealousy returned like an ache.
"Why did they get that life? While i am stuck in here." His voice was small in the dust.
At the city's edge Dorian walked until the ruins narrowed to scrub and broken fences. Memory trailed him like a shadow, the courtroom, the lawyer's practiced sigh, a smirk on the courthouse steps, rain washing red from his hands. Here there were no sirens and no cells. Just a place where the law had never arrived.
It should have felt like freedom. It didn't.
He found Kade in a dim restaurant that had survived by habit more than structure. Air heavy. Booths slumped. A plate of something edible enough sat half-eaten on a table. Kade glanced up, surprised in the same moment Dorian froze.
"Guess I'm not the last man alive," Kade said, forcing a crooked smile. "Been a while since I saw a face."
"I thought I was losing it," Dorian admitted, scanning the corners out of reflex before sitting. "Name's Dorian."
"Kade." He gestured to the seat. "You look as confused as I feel."
They compared theories because theories kept panic at bay. Kade's eyes lit with the comfort of a story. "Ninety-nine percent aliens. Look around, none of this fits. Different rules. No people. It's like we got scooped into some experiment."
"Or a simulation," Dorian said. "Or nothing at all. Dead men don't feel hungry, though."
Kade huffed. "Government project? Secret city? I'm taking bets."
"Maybe it's simpler," Dorian said, folding his arms. "We woke somewhere we desperately wanted to go to."
They ate. The food tasted like something almost food. The quiet made them talk, and talking made them human again, until Kade chuckled at a statue split neatly in two by time.
"Whoever broke that had taste," he joked. "Left only the good half."
Dorian went still. The joke fell between them like glass. "Don't."
Kade blinked. "Relax. I didn't mean.."
"You don't know what you're saying." The heat in Dorian's voice surprised even him. He breathed, unclenched his fists. "People carry things you can't see."
Kade's grin collapsed into something contrite. "You're right. I'm sorry. Sometimes I talk before I think."
"I'm sorry," Kade said, and meant it. "I'll be more careful."
They let the moment pass. Not forgiven, exactly, understood.
Days became a rhythm of searching. Two pairs, then one group moving without knowing they were converging, reading road signs in five languages, finding hospitals with equipment that looked familiar until it didn't, discovering photographs of uncanny figures in clothing that fit too well to be costumes. No birds. No insects. No stray dog trotting down an alley. The absence was louder than any noise.
A word began appearing on walls and doors in sprayed letters, sometimes neat, sometimes frantic: ALIZAXA. None of them knew what it meant.
One afternoon the air buckled.
Not a sound, exactly, a pressure wave inside their skulls, as if the world had coughed. Kade and Dorian staggered to the doorway of the restaurant. In the street, where there had been nothing, a house sat listing in the dust, peeling paint, slumped porch, the weight of years on a foundation that hadn't existed a heartbeat ago.
They circled it warily. The place radiated wrongness, like a memory wearing a mask. Inside, five minutes of dust and emptiness and creaking floorboards. No furniture. No footprints. Only the feeling of being watched by something that wasn't in the room.
They left, not sure what they'd failed to see.
Serena, still learning the shapes of this world, turned at the sound of a sharp breath. Two men stood at the end of the street, the younger with wary eyes and a defensive posture, the older moving like a coiled spring. Surprise ricocheted between them.