The air above ground felt different now.
Colder, sharper—like the city had noticed them crawling out of its belly and wasn't pleased about it. Momo emerged from the subway entrance with dust on his knees and a tightness in his chest that wouldn't fade. The girl followed seconds later, brushing grime from her jeans with mechanical efficiency.
Neither of them spoke.
The streets stretched empty in both directions. Newspapers tumbled past in lazy spirals, caught by wind that sounded almost alive. A streetlight flickered overhead—on, off, on—casting jittery shadows across cracked pavement. Somewhere distant, a dog barked once and went silent.
Momo started walking. His mind was already elsewhere, sifting through the images on his phone, cataloging symbols, arranging patterns into theories that might mean everything or nothing. The girl's footsteps echoed behind him, a half-beat off from his own rhythm.
He didn't turn around.
He didn't like that she was following him. Didn't like the way her presence pressed against the edges of his awareness, familiar in all the wrong ways. There was history there—unspoken, unresolved, the kind that left scars you couldn't see. He'd spent years learning how to ignore it, how to exist in the same dying world without having to acknowledge the weight of what had happened between them.
Still. She was here. And she was the only familiar face left in a city full of ghosts.
So he walked, and she followed, and the silence stretched between them like a taut wire.
---
His house crouched at the end of a narrow street lined with abandoned cars and overgrown weeds pushing through sidewalk cracks. A house, sagging roof, windows covered in grime that turned daylight gray. It had been his parents' place once. Now it was just his—a hollow shell filled with evidence of obsession.
Momo pushed the door open. The hinges creaked.
The girl slipped past him without asking permission and dropped onto the couch in what passed for a living room. Springs groaned under her weight. She let her head fall back against the cushions, eyes closing, body going slack like a marionette with cut strings.
Momo watched her for a moment, then turned away.
His room waited deeper in the house.
---
She lay there in the dim light, breathing slow and shallow, listening to the sound of Momo moving in the other room—footsteps, the rustle of papers, muttered words too quiet to parse.
The couch smelled like mildew and old fabric. She didn't care.
Her thoughts circled, sharp and venomous, the same loop she'd been caught in for years. The unfairness of it all. The cruel randomness. Murderers got their marks and vanished into light while good people rotted in the streets. Thieves. Rapists. The kind of human refuse that should've been left to burn when the world ended.
But no. They got saved. Including that one person she can never forgive.
People like her—people who'd suffered so much even before the migration—got left behind to watch the countdown tick toward zero.
She thought about the chamber beneath the city.
Maybe it meant something. Maybe it was just another dead end, another false hope engineered by desperate minds looking for patterns in chaos.
Either way, she'd cling to it. Because what else was there?
Her fingers curled against the couch cushion, nails digging into the fabric.
If I ever get out, she thought, her jaw tightening, I'll make sure to find him no matter what.
The bitterness tasted metallic. She let herself sink into it, let it wrap around her like a blanket, and drifted toward something that might've been sleep.
---
Momo sat cross-legged, phone in hand, comparing the images from the subway chamber to notes he'd taken years ago. His eyes burned. He ignored it.
The symbols matched. Not perfectly—nothing about the Migration was perfect—but close enough to confirm what he'd suspected.
Whoever had been in that chamber wasn't working blind. They knew what they were doing.
He stood abruptly, stepping over papers, and moved into the adjacent room.
This space was smaller, windowless, lit only by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Bookshelves lined every wall, sagging under the weight of old texts—some published, others hand-copied, a few that looked like they'd been stolen from libraries that no longer existed.
He scanned the spines, fingers trailing along worn covers, until he found it.
Symbolic Pathways of the Migration.
Published August 2019. Seven years ago, back when people still thought understanding the Migration might help them control it. The cover was water-stained, pages yellowed at the edges. He pulled it free and flipped it open.
Inside: diagrams. Geometric patterns. Annotations in the margins written by someone who'd owned the book before him—observations, theories, questions with no answers.
He compared the pages to his phone screen. The similarities made his pulse quicken.
They were following this, he thought. Whoever they are, they're using this as a guide.
Time blurred after that. He sat on the floor, book in his lap, phone beside him, cross-referencing symbols and scribbling notes on scraps of paper he'd never read again. Hunger faded. Exhaustion became background noise. There was only the work, the endless sifting through information, the desperate hope that somewhere in the chaos was a pattern he could follow.
The light outside the small room's doorway dimmed as afternoon bled into evening.
When he finally blinked back to awareness, the clock on the wall read 6:31 PM.
His back ached. His throat was dry. He stood slowly, joints protesting, and realized he couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten.
The girl was probably gone by now. No reason for her to stay.
And then someone knocked on the door.
---
The sound cut through the silence like a blade.
Momo froze, book still in hand, his mind sluggish from hours of focus. Another knock—slower this time, deliberate—and something in his chest went cold.
The girl had left. Right?
They weren't close. They barely tolerated each other because they had no other choice.
He moved toward his door, footsteps careful on the creaking floorboards.
The door swung open before he reached it.
The girl stepped inside, fast and silent, and shut the door behind her with a careful click. She turned the deadbolt. Then the chain. Her movements were precise, controlled, but Momo saw the tension in her shoulders, the way her jaw was set.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
She didn't answer. She crossed to the window, her mismatched eyes fixed on the gap between the blinds.
"What are you—"
"I've locked all the doors," she said quietly.
Her voice was flat, stripped of inflection, but underneath it ran a current of something else. Fear.
Momo felt his stomach tighten.
---
She stood at the window, one hand resting on the frame, staring through the narrow crack where moonlight leaked into the room. Momo approached slowly, his pulse starting to quicken without knowing why.
"What's going on?" he whispered.
The girl reached up and tilted the blinds, just slightly, widening the gap.
"Look," she said.
He looked.
Outside, the street was washed in pale moonlight—full and bright, turning everything silver and gray. The abandoned cars. The cracked pavement. The weeds.
And in the middle of it all, a man stood perfectly still.
He faced their house. Not moving. Not swaying. Just standing there like a statue carved from shadow, his silhouette sharp against the lunar glow.
Momo's breath caught.
"He's been there for five minutes," the girl whispered. "Maybe longer."
Momo stared. The man didn't move. Didn't shift his weight or adjust his stance. He simply stood, hands at his sides, facing the house with inhuman patience.
And then, slowly—so slowly Momo almost convinced himself he was imagining it—the man's head began to turn.
It rotated with mechanical precision, degree by degree, until his face pointed directly toward the window where they stood hidden behind the blinds.
The moonlight caught his glasses and it gleamed under the moonlight.
Momo felt the air press against his lungs.
Neither of them moved. Neither breathed.
The man stared at the window, his glowing eyes fixed on the exact spot where they stood, and the silence in the room grew so heavy it felt like drowning.
End of Chapter 3