The transition was violent. There was no twilight. The blue of the sky didn't darken into black; it was infected.
From the east, a wave of color swept across the horizon at an impossible speed. A sickly purple—viscous, deep as an internal bruise. It swallowed the sun, erased the clouds, and replaced the roof of the world with a pulsing dome of dark neon.
It wasn't night.
It was something worse.
Artur saw the wave pass over him. The instant the color changed, technology screamed its death.
The streetlights, just beginning to flicker on, burst in unison. Sparks rained down on the stalled cars, but they weren't yellow; they were white, cold, and vanished before touching the ground.
Storefront windows flickered once and died. Neon signs, traffic lights, the giant LED screens selling soda and dreams—everything turned into black, inert glass.
The absolute silence shattered, but not with the sounds of the city.
It shattered with the sound of human panic.
The first scream came from somewhere to Artur's left. High-pitched. Hysterical. The spell of silence broke, and chaos rushed in to fill the void.
"My phone! It's dead! Everything's dead!"
"What is that? Look at the sky!"
"It's burning my eyes!"
The crowd, once a mass of indifferent individuals, fused into a single terrified entity: the herd.
Like ants whose nest had been kicked apart by a giant boot, they began to run. No direction. No logic. Just the reptilian urge to do something. Bodies collided. Someone fell and was trampled. Cars that still had inertia slammed into one another in crumpled metal, now useless coffins of steel and plastic.
Artur did not run.
He planted his feet on the asphalt, becoming a rock in the middle of the human current. He gripped the axe handle so hard his knuckles went white. His eyes swept the surroundings, not searching for explanations, but for threats.
Observe, said the voice of his training.
Look before you bleed.
This wasn't a terrorist attack. It wasn't a blackout. The very geometry of the street felt… wrong. The shadows cast by the purple light were too long, too sharp. They stretched at angles that defied the position of that new, diffuse source of light.
He saw a man pound the steering wheel of a dead car, crying in frustration. He saw a teenage girl staring at the black screen of her phone with the expression of someone who had lost a limb.
They were blind. Dependent on tools that no longer worked.
Artur looked at the axe in his hand. Wood. Steel. Gravity.
My tools still work.
A shiver ran up his spine. It wasn't fear of the purple sky. It was the sensation of being watched. The air was thickening, heavy with a sweet, rotten smell, like flowers left too long atop an open grave.
Something was coming.
Or perhaps something was being released.
"Get off the street," Artur whispered to himself. His own voice sounded strange, muffled by the density of the air. "Now."
He didn't follow the crowd rushing toward the main avenue. The avenue was an open trap. He turned instead toward the side shadows. His eyes found a slit between a dark laundromat and an electronics store visually looted by the absence of light. An alley. Narrow. Filthy. Protected.
Artur slipped into the alley's darkness with a predator's fluid grace, leaving the collective panic behind. He pressed his back to the cold brick wall, the axe crossed in front of his chest. His heart hammered, but it was a controlled rhythm. A hunting rhythm.
From his hiding place, he watched 26th Street beneath the impossible sky. People ran, screamed, and cried. But Artur knew, with a cold certainty that settled deep in his gut, that the storm the city feared was no longer on its way.
It was already here.
And by the smell of ozone and blood rising from the sewer grates, they were not the only guests.