The sky cracked open with a sound that wasn't thunder.
Gray had heard thunder before. He knew the deep roll of it, the way it shook the air and rattled windows, the pregnant pause between lightning flash and sonic boom. This was different. This was a long, droning note that vibrated in his teeth and set his nerves on edge, a sound that had no business coming from clouds.
He and the girl had been descending the tower when it started. The first note made them both freeze, their eyes turning upward to a sky that had gone the color of fresh bruises. No rain fell. No lightning forked down from the clouds. But the sound continued, rising and falling in patterns that seemed almost deliberate, as if the atmosphere itself were trying to speak.
"Get inside," he said, and his voice came out sharper than he intended. "Now."
They found shelter in an abandoned office on the fourth floor, its walls lined with certificates and family photos now spotted with mold. The carpet squelched under their feet, water damage from burst pipes having turned the space into something swamp-like and wrong. But the walls were intact, and the door still closed, and the windows were small enough that nothing large could fit through them.
The girl - he still didn't know her name, had been too afraid to ask - settled into a corner with her back against the wall. Her eyes were on the windows, watching the sky through the grimy glass. The sound outside had intensified, multiple notes layering over each other in a discordant symphony that made Gray's skull ache.
"What is that?" she asked, and her voice was barely above a whisper.
He shook his head. He didn't know. He could see something through his strange sight - threads of light flickering between the clouds, patterns that moved in ways that defied the physics he'd grown up with. But he had no words for what he was seeing, no framework to make sense of it. The world had broken eleven days ago, and it was still breaking in ways he couldn't predict.
"Stay away from the windows," he said instead. "Just in case."
She nodded and shifted deeper into the room, her movements careful and quiet. He noticed that she was still trembling slightly, the aftereffects of her healing work not yet faded. He should have made her rest longer at the top of the tower. He should have found a safer place to sleep. But the world didn't offer safe places anymore, and survival meant moving when you could, resting when you had to.
The office around them was a tomb of ordinary life. A desk with a computer that would never turn on again. A filing cabinet with drawers hanging open, papers spilled across the floor like dead leaves. A corkboard with a calendar still showing last month, the days crossed off with red ink, appointments that would never be kept. Gray looked at it and felt the weight of all those small plans, all those ordinary futures that had been erased.
The girl was searching through the desk drawers now, her movements methodical despite her exhaustion. He watched her for a moment, cataloging the way she worked - thorough, patient, not leaving any space unexamined. She was looking for something specific.
"Here," she said, and held up a bag. Trail mix, the kind that came in vacuum-sealed pouches that could survive anything. It was stale, probably, but it was food.
She split it with him without being asked.
They ate in silence while the dry lightning screamed outside. The sound had taken on a new quality now, something that made Gray think of voices calling to each other across impossible distances. He could feel it in his bones, in the cold-water sensation that lived at the base of his skull. The patterns in the sky were resonating with something inside him, and he didn't know if that was good or terrifying.
"The clouds," the girl said, and her voice was strange. "Do you see them?"
He looked at her sharply. "See what?"
"The way they move. Like they're alive." She was staring out the window now, her hazel eyes fixed on the sky. "I've been seeing things since it happened. Things that shouldn't be there. Light where there shouldn't be light."
His heart rate spiked. She could see it too. Not the same way he could, maybe, but something. She had the sight, or something like it. The realization settled into him like a stone dropping into water.
"What else do you see?" he asked, and his voice was careful, measured.
She turned to look at him, and something in her expression shifted. She was deciding whether to trust him, he realized. Whether to share something she'd probably been hiding since the world ended.
"Sometimes I see threads," she said quietly. "Silver ones. In people. In plants. In the air, sometimes, when the light is right." She held up her hands, and he could see the faint tremor in her fingers. "I thought I was going crazy. I thought maybe the stress was making me hallucinate."
"You're not crazy." The words came out before he could stop them. "I see them too."
The silence that followed was different from the ones before. It was the silence of two people recognizing each other, of a wall coming down that neither had known was there.
"You do?" Her voice was small, hopeful in a way that made his chest ache.
"Since the beginning. I don't know what they are. I don't know what any of this means." He gestured at the window, at the sky that was still screaming with that impossible sound. "But you're not alone in seeing it."
She nodded slowly, and something in her posture relaxed. The tension that had been holding her together seemed to ease, just a fraction. She was still exhausted, still running on empty, but she wasn't carrying the weight of her strangeness alone anymore.
Outside, the dry lightning continued its symphony. The clouds moved in patterns that looked almost deliberate, threads of light flickering between them like messages in a language neither of them could read. Gray watched it through his strange sight and felt something shift in his chest.
For the first time since the world ended, he felt something that might be hope.
It was small and fragile as a paper crane, easily crushed by the weight of everything that had happened. But it was there, a tiny flame in the darkness of his mind. He wasn't alone. She could see the threads too. And maybe, just maybe, that meant they could figure out what was happening together.
"We should sleep," he said, though he didn't know if he could. "The sound might stop by morning."
She nodded and settled deeper into her corner, her eyes closing. Within minutes, her breathing had slowed into the rhythm of sleep. He watched her for a moment, cataloging the peace on her face, the way her hands had finally stopped trembling.
Then he turned his attention to the window and the screaming sky beyond it, and he kept watch.
Some things were too strange to face with closed eyes.