When Shane opens her eyes, the world is blue.Not the calm kind, not sky blue, not the digital hue of her tablet screen.This blue is heavy. Breathing blue. Dark and cold.
The first thing she feels is her heartbeat.The second is the weight.
She's upside down.
The desk from her dorm room has pinned her against the wall, one leg caught between the frame and a collapsed ceiling tile. The air tastes of silt and rust. She can barely see, the emergency lights flicker weakly through the water's haze, shimmering across suspended paper and hair and dust.
Her lungs burn.She kicks free, pushing upward, or what she thinks is upward. Her mind screams at her to move, but her body moves slower, heavier. Her hand brushes a floating notebook. Her own handwriting bleeds across the page in black ink: "Tomorrow: Graduation."
Tomorrow never came.
She breaks the surface in a pocket of trapped air near the ceiling, gasping, coughing water into her palm. The sound echoes off the walls, too loud, too alone.
"Hello?"Her voice echoing into the dark.
No answer. Only the slow creak of the building shifting around her, settling into its new shape, half its body submerged in water, buried.
She shivers, hugging her arms to her chest. Her mind's still in the past: the alarm sirens, the screaming outside, Aaroon shouting her name, the wave hitting faster than sound. She remembers reaching for him, the crush of bodies at the gates, then nothing.
Her head throbs. Her left ear rings.
Through the fractured dorm window, the outside world is a drowned mirage: the upper towers of the campus glint beneath the surface, the reflection of the moon stretching and bending across rippling water. Furniture floats past like ghosts of a life too normal to believe in anymore.
"Okay," she whispers to herself, voice trembling. "Move. Think. Move."
She pulls herself onto a floating cabinet, scanning the room. The emergency beacon on the wall blinks faintly, one pulse every few seconds. She's lucky it still has power. Luckier still that this room's air pocket hasn't collapsed.
Her phone's dead. Her wristband too. No comms, no AR signal. She's completely cut off.
He's alive.The thought comes unbidden, sharp as breath.He has to be. Aaroon wouldn't die this easily.
She forces herself to believe it, because if she doesn't, she doesn't know what she would do.
Her training from the university's emergency drills kicks in, slow breathing, steady heart rate, minimal panic response. She finds an emergency kit half wedged under the bed and checks the contents: flares, a waterproof torch, ration bars, painkillers, and a sealed canister labeled O₂ reserve: 20 min.
Her reflection catches on the glass of the window, pale face, wet hair clinging to her neck, dark circles under her eyes. The reflection blurs, ripples, moves.
She freezes.
Something's out there.
A shadow, faint and slow, passes beyond the window, enormous, silent, distorted by the water. Not fish. Not debris. Too smooth. Too deliberate.
Her breath fogs the air pocket. The building hums faintly again, that same subsonic vibration, more felt than heard. It reverberates through her bones, through the metal frame of the dorm, through the water beyond the glass.
Then it stops.
Silence returns, so complete it feels wrong.
Shane presses her palm to the window, heart pounding.Nothing.No movement.Just the eerie stillness of a world that shouldn't be underwater.
She swallows hard. "Nope! I'm out!."
She ties her hair back with a trembling hand, straps the O₂ canister to her chest, and tightens her waterproof jacket. One last look at the drowned room, the posters, the bed, the scattered notebooks, then she takes a deep breath and dives through the broken doorway into the corridor beyond.
The water closes around her again, cold and endless.Her flashlight cuts a thin white path through the dark.Every beam reveals something new: floating textbooks, drifting shoes, a classroom door cracked open with light leaking through, faint, pulsing light, like a heartbeat.
Her pulse quickens.
She swims toward it.