Dust.
That was the first thing.
Not light. Not sound. Not the smell of smoke or the distant echo of something that used to be a city.
Just dust — settling slowly, patiently, over a world that had finally run out of things to say.
She found him near what remained of the eastern relay tower.
The structure had collapsed inward on itself, concrete ribs cracked open like something had pushed through them from the inside. Cables hung from the edges like dead nerves. The ground beneath was uneven — broken stone, ash-grey dirt, the occasional piece of metal that caught no light because there was no light left worth catching.
Masha moved through it without hesitation.
She had stopped hesitating a long time ago.
He was half-buried near the base. One arm visible, the rest covered under debris she cleared with both hands — methodical, unhurried. No panic in her movements. No trembling. Just the quiet efficiency of someone who had learned that emotion spent in the wrong moment was energy wasted.
She pressed two fingers to his neck.
Pulse.
Weak. Unsteady. But present.
She exhaled once — not relief exactly. Something smaller than that. The acknowledgment of a fact.
He's alive.
"Wake up, Jerry."
Nothing.
The wind moved through the ruins around them. Somewhere far off, something structural groaned and settled. The sky above was the color of old iron — no sun visible, no clouds distinct, just a flat oppressive grey that had been sitting over this part of the world for longer than she could remember.
"Jerry."
His eyes moved beneath closed lids.
She watched it — that slow, struggling return. Like a system trying to reboot after everything had been wiped. She had seen that look before. Not on him. On people who had gone too far into something and weren't sure if coming back was worth the effort.
Then his lips moved.
"...So we win?"
Masha sat back on her heels.
She looked at him — really looked — and for a moment she didn't answer. Around them the city that had once held two million people stood silent. No traffic. No voices. No mechanical hum of infrastructure doing what infrastructure was built to do. The towers that remained were hollow. The streets were empty in a way that streets were never meant to be empty.
Seventy-five percent.
That was the number.
Not a war. Not a bomb. Not one clean catastrophic moment that history could point to and name.
Just systems failing. Supply chains collapsing. Governments fracturing. People making the thousand small desperate decisions that people make when the structures they depended on stop working — and those decisions compounding, cascading, becoming something no single person had planned but one person had made possible.
One person.
Sitting in the rubble in front of her.
Asking if they won.
"After eliminating seventy-five percent of human civilization," she said quietly, "you're asking me that."
He didn't respond. His eyes were still closed. His breathing was shallow and uneven.
"That is what you wanted." Her voice didn't waver. It never wavered. "It happened. The world reset. The corrupt structures collapsed. The systems that protected the powerful are gone." She paused. "So yes, Jerry. By your definition — we won."
The word tasted like ash.
"...That's good." Barely audible. "Let me rest. My eyes... couldn't open..."
"No."
She grabbed his shoulder.
"No. Jerry, open your eyes. Stay awake."
His hand moved — just the fingers, a small involuntary curl, like a reflex that hadn't gotten the message yet that the body was done.
"Open your eyes."
The dust kept settling.
The world kept being silent.
And Masha — who had crossed three continents for this person, who had executed orders she couldn't always justify, who had watched him become something she didn't have a clean word for anymore — kept saying his name into the ruins of everything they had built together.
Not because she believed it would fix anything.
But because silence, right now, felt too much like agreement.
And she had promised herself — a long time ago, in a small office in a city that no longer existed — that she would never be silent again.
— End of Prologue —
Chapter 1: After the Beating →