A dry wind moved the ash.
It swept across his face like snow that had forgotten warmth — weightless, endless, and wrong. When Leo opened his eyes, the sky above was the color of rust. Not dawn. Not dusk. Just a horizon smeared with smoke and red dust, as if the world itself were bleeding out.
For a moment, he didn't know if he was alive.
Pain came first — a dull pressure behind his ribs, a ringing that cut through everything. Then the cold edge of metal against his side. When he turned his head, a bent piece of rebar jutted from cracked concrete, gleaming faintly in the sick light.
He lay there for a long time, breathing shallowly.
The air was heavy, full of the taste of burnt plastic and iron. When he finally moved, it was like dragging himself out of someone else's body.
The world tilted.
He pushed himself upright, every muscle trembling.
Rubble stretched in every direction — gray, infinite. Entire buildings had folded in on themselves, slabs of glass and steel crumpled like paper. Cars were husks, hollowed and black. The ground crunched beneath him, brittle as glass, leaving his footprints only long enough for the wind to erase them.
And silence.
Not quiet. Silence.
It pressed against his ears until he could almost hear his own pulse — slow, uncertain, too loud.
He whispered, "Hello?"
The word felt strange, too fragile to exist here.
It echoed once, then vanished into the ash.
He tried again, voice cracking.
"Betty?"
No answer.
"Liam! Mom! Yuki!"
Only the sound of wind shifting through the ruins.
The ache in his chest deepened. He began to walk — not toward anything, just away from stillness. Every step released a faint cloud of dust that drifted up, hung suspended, and fell again.
He passed what might have been a shop once, its front caved inward. The shelves were collapsed into heaps of gray rubble. A sign lay face-down in the street, edges melted smooth. He lifted it out of habit, but the letters dissolved at his touch.
Everywhere, the same absence.
No bodies. No birds. No color.
He looked down at his wrist.
The Bracelet was still there — fused to his skin, blackened around the edges. Beneath it, a faint pulse of light throbbed, irregular, like a dying heart.
"Why…" His voice broke. "Why am I still alive?"
The question went nowhere. The wind took it the way it took everything else.
He sank to his knees.
Ash rose around him in slow spirals, catching in his hair, his lashes. He pressed his palms to the ground. The concrete was warm — faintly vibrating, as if something beneath still breathed.
The lab came back in flashes. Felix's face behind the glare. The white storm. The scream that wasn't entirely his own.
He remembered light swallowing sound. Then nothing.
Now there was only aftermath.
He stared at the earth, whispering, "No. No, no—" as if repetition could undo it.
But the vibration continued, a pulse in the ground that echoed the one beneath his skin.
He wanted to stop feeling.
He wanted to sleep and never wake again.
Instead, he forced himself to stand. The wind picked up, stirring layers of ash into the air. For a moment, the world blurred, and he thought he saw them — silhouettes in the haze: Betty laughing, Liam waving from a distance, his mother turning toward him.
Then the shapes broke apart, only smoke.
His chest tightened. He started walking again.
The horizon never changed. Just ruin stretched into ruin. The city had no edges, no name — only memory clinging like dust.
A half-collapsed sign jutted from a mound of debris. The metal was warped but the words were still faintly visible.
WELCOME TO CULPA CITY
Home.
Or what was left of it.
He stared until the wind buried the letters in ash. The last thing that proved a city had ever stood here disappeared.
He didn't cry.
He couldn't.
He just kept walking because standing still felt like drowning.
By evening, the sky dimmed to a pale gray that might have been dusk. The sun was a smudge behind the smoke, its light weak and without direction. The air cooled, carrying a metallic tang that stuck to the back of his throat.
He followed what remained of a road. It led nowhere, but roads were meant to be followed. Halfway down, he found what might have been a park once. The ground was scorched black. The frame of a swing still stood — chains twisted, seats melted into black puddles.
He stopped beside it, remembering a lunch once shared there — Betty, Liam, sunlight, noise.
He could almost hear it before the memory broke under its own weight.
He shook his head and kept walking.
The streets narrowed into canyons of wreckage. His shoes caught on wires and beams. He climbed, stumbled, climbed again. Every muscle burned, but the pain was easier to bear than the silence.
When he reached the place where his house had been, he stopped.
The foundations were gone. Just a crater, walls collapsed inward, a staircase that led nowhere.
He dropped to his knees and began to dig. The ash was fine and cold. His hands bled without him noticing. He found shards of glass, a warped hinge, what might have been part of the front door.
Then — a corner of color beneath the soot.
A photograph. Burned nearly to white, but a trace still visible: his mother's shoulder, maybe. The edge of a smile.
His breath hitched. He brushed the dust away gently, but the paper disintegrated in his hands, turning to gray that the wind carried off.
He watched it scatter — pieces of her face vanishing into sky.
A noise broke the silence: a faint metallic creak.
He froze, heart pounding.
"Hello?"
Only the echo returned.
He followed the sound anyway. Around the corner, a street sign swayed on a bent pole, groaning in the wind. He read the name, barely legible under soot.
MEMORIA AVENUE.
His throat closed. That was his street.
He turned left instinctively. His feet remembered the path home — the shortcut from school, the corner where Betty waited. But nothing was there. No houses, no fences, no color.
He stopped where her porch should have been. The space was empty. Just dust and broken air.
He whispered her name.
"Betty."
The wind took it before he heard it himself.
His knees buckled. He sat hard on the ground, elbows on his thighs, head bowed. His chest was a hollow drum. The silence pressed down, heavy, suffocating.
You did this.
The thought came quietly, not as guilt, but as fact.
He didn't fight it.
He stayed there until the sky began to fade into a darker rust. Then, faintly, the wind changed — carrying a new scent: burned wood, then something sour beneath it, like decay.
Smoke still rose in the distance. It drew him forward before he could think why.
He climbed over wreckage until he reached it — the remains of the old library. Half the building had caved in, the other half standing like a skeleton. Pages lay everywhere, blackened at the edges, curling into ash.
He stepped inside.
The floor groaned beneath him. Light from the fractured roof fell in shafts across the wreckage, illuminating fragments of words on half-burned paper. He knelt, picked one up. The ink had run, but a few letters still clung to the page:...remember...
He let it fall.
A mirror leaned against a broken wall, cracked into veins of silver. He caught his reflection and flinched.
The face staring back was hollow-eyed, streaked with soot. The whites of his eyes looked too bright, too sharp. His hair was gray with ash. His skin looked almost colorless — not living, not dead.
The mirror split further under the heat, his reflection fracturing into a dozen versions of himself. Each one stared back, unblinking.
He turned away before it shattered completely.
Outside, the wind lifted the pages from the floor and sent them swirling into the sky like pale birds. For a brief moment, they caught the fading light — fragile, luminous — before disintegrating midair.
The silence afterward was worse than before.
It was no longer emptiness; it was judgment.
The city seemed to hold its breath, waiting for him to admit what he already knew.
By nightfall, the air had cooled into something thin and brittle. The horizon blurred. The stars appeared one by one through the haze — faint, ashamed.
Leo sat on the broken steps of the library, dust caked in his palms. He had searched until his body refused to move. Every street had ended the same way: silence.
He had not found a single footprint, not even a shadow.
Only himself.
Only what remained of what he'd done.
The ringing in his ears hadn't faded. It was deeper now, humming inside his skull, a ghost of the resonance still alive somewhere in his bones.
He thought of Felix then — of the last moment, the flash of light swallowing everything. For an instant he saw it overlaid on the ruins — the lab's walls, the hum of machines, Felix's voice saying control means surrender.
Then the vision broke, leaving only smoke.
He forced himself to his feet. His balance swayed.
He walked until the ground changed beneath him — asphalt giving way to scorched earth. There should have been a river here. Instead there was a black trench, wide and cracked, steam rising from the fissures. The bridges had fallen into the hollow, their metal still glowing faintly red.
He crouched, touched the ground. It was warm. Alive with something that wasn't fire.
The same vibration pulsed beneath his hand — slow, steady, the heartbeat of a world trying to remember itself.
He pulled his hand back as though burned.
He didn't need Felix to explain.
He already knew.
The resonance hadn't ended. It had spread. It had become this.
His breath caught.
He whispered, "No."
Then louder: "No, no—"
He stumbled back, tripping over the edge of broken stone. His chest heaved. The Bracelet throbbed once, as if answering.
"You did this," he said aloud. "You did this."
The words were meant for himself, but the air threw them back, warped and hollow.
He fell to his knees. His lungs hurt. He pressed a hand against his chest, half expecting to find a wound there. But there was only skin — and beneath it, the ache of something still alive when it shouldn't be.
Tears came soundless. They cut through the ash, streaking his face in pale lines.
He looked toward the skyline — or what was left of it. Once, towers had shimmered there, bright with glass and light. Now they were teeth of stone gnawing at the sky. Fires still burned faintly between them, small and stubborn.
He tried to imagine how far the destruction went.
The thought hollowed him further.
The ground trembled softly beneath him, as if the earth itself remembered the blast.
He whispered, "Please."
But there was nothing left to answer.
He stayed like that until the night thickened. The stars blurred behind smoke. The cold crept in, numbing fingers, thoughts, breath.
Finally, he stood.
The city no longer looked like ruin. It looked like a scar. A wound refusing to heal.
He turned toward where his home had been.
Smoke still curled upward from the crater, faint and constant — the earth's quiet exhale.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
The words vanished before they reached the air.
He waited — for forgiveness, for an echo, for the world to take him with it. Nothing came.
So he started walking again.
Because movement was the only proof that he was still here.
Because silence had already claimed everything else.
The horizon waited, colorless and infinite.
Ash rose behind him, filling his footprints until even those were gone.