The sky killed someone tonight.
Kai watched from across the street—the silver light came straight down, no sound, no warning, and the man simply stopped existing. No scream. No body. Just—gone.
His Signal device buzzed.
PULSE DAYS REMAINING: 2
He had been in The Hollow for exactly nineteen hours.
He still didn't know what The Hollow was. The thought tried to form, but he crushed it down, focusing instead on the cold weight of the glass device in his hand. Forty-eight hours. That was a number. Numbers he could work with.
The air where the man had been standing tasted like battery acid and old dust. Kai didn't cross the asphalt right away. He stood in the shadow of a rusted vending machine and waited, counting the seconds in his head. One. Two. Three. He was looking for a secondary mechanism, a cleanup crew, a hidden camera, anything.
Nothing came.
Tokyo remained completely, suffocatingly dead.
Kai stepped off the curb. His boots hit the pavement. The sound cracked down the empty street, bouncing off the glass of ten thousand dead windows. He stopped moving until the echo died.
He reached the spot where the silver light had struck.
A pile of clothes. A jacket bunched up on the asphalt, one sleeve turned inside out. A single ¥500 coin had rolled into the gutter. Sitting perfectly centered on the crumpled fabric, glowing with a faint, cold blue light, was a black glass rectangle. A Signal.
Kai didn't touch it. He already had one. He shoved his hand into the pocket of his dark grey cargo pants, feeling the matte finish of his own device. It was warm. It was always slightly warm, even when the wind coming off the dead buildings carried a chill.
His mind ran the timeline backward. Nineteen hours. Before that—rain on glass. A sudden, violent compression of metal. He forced his eyes open, staring hard at the black glass in his hand. Nineteen hours. He stuck to the numbers.
Nineteen hours ago, he was lying on the cold, grimy tiles of the Shinjuku Station underground concourse.
There had been a flash of white. Absolute, blinding white that wiped out the rain, the road, the steering wheel under his hands, the silence from the passenger seat. When his vision had cleared, he was on his back, staring up at emergency fluorescent lights that were flickering with a dying, yellowish hum.
He had stood up slowly. Checked his limbs. No blood. No broken bones.
He had walked up the stairs toward the east exit, waiting for the wall of heat and shouting commuters to hit him. Waiting for the smell of yakitori from the corner stalls.
He found none of it.
The ticket gates were frozen open. Dust coated the turnstiles in thick, grey sheets. And slumped against the far wall, sitting in a pool of shadow, was a man in a business suit.
Kai approached him. He kept his mouth shut.
The man was dead. No visible trauma, no blood pooling on the tiles. His eyes were open, staring at the fluorescent tubes. A small speck of gray dust had settled on his left pupil. He didn't blink. Kai had checked his pulse anyway. Cold skin. Rigor mortis hadn't set in completely. Dead for a few hours, maybe less.
Sticking out of the man's breast pocket was a black glass rectangle.
Kai had pulled it out.
The moment his fingers gripped the edges, the screen flared to life. It didn't ask for a passcode. A grid of green light snapped across his vision, blinding him for a fraction of a second. It traced the ridge of his jaw, lingering on the thin vertical scar cutting through his right eyebrow.
BIOMETRICS REGISTERED.
The text was stark white against the black glass.
PULSE COUNT: 3 DAYS.
He hadn't understood the metric. But countdowns only ever meant one thing.
He had walked out of the station into the daylight, and the wrongness of the world had hit him all at once.
The buildings were intact, but vines the thickness of a human wrist were tearing through the concrete sidewalks. Abandoned cars sat in intersections, their tires rotted flat. But the worst part was the sky. It was too blue. The saturation was dialed up so high it hurt to look at, like a photograph edited by someone who didn't understand how natural light worked.
For eighteen hours, he kept moving. Panic was a luxury. Geography was survival.
He walked through the silent wards. He tested the doors of convenience stores—most were unlocked, the shelves stripped of anything perishable but still holding bottled water and protein bars. He ate mechanically, logging the caloric intake. He found a high vantage point on the roof of a low-rise office building in Kabukicho and watched the city as the unnatural day bled into an equally unnatural night.
That was when the city started breathing.
As the sun vanished, the stars appeared. Too many of them. Constellations that didn't match any astronomical chart he knew. And below them, scattered across the dense urban sprawl of the entertainment district, specific buildings began to glow from the inside.
A tower to the east pulsed with a low, arterial red. Blocks away, blue light bled up from subway grates, freezing and sterile. He traced a green glow to a warehouse near the tracks, and far to the west, a high-rise burned in stark, radiating white.
He hadn't approached them. Going into unknown, illuminated structures in a dead city was bad math. He had stayed on the roof, watching.
He had watched three other people die.
The first was two blocks away. A silver beam of light punched down from the wrong stars, completely silent, and erased a figure running down an alleyway.
The second was an hour later.
The third was just before he climbed down to the street.
And now, the fourth. Right in front of him.
Kai looked down at the clothes on the asphalt. The dead man's Signal device was dark now. The screen was completely black.
Pulse Count: 3 Days.Midnight drop.
The architecture of the threat locked into place. Not a score. A visa. You arrived with three days. Every night, the clock ticked down. When you hit zero, the sky deleted you.
The man whose clothes lay on the street hadn't found a way to add days to his clock.
Kai pulled his own Signal from his pocket. The screen woke up immediately.
PULSE DAYS REMAINING: 2
The vibration motor inside the glass kicked hard against his palm. A new notification overwrote the countdown. A map of the Shinjuku ward appeared, rendered in sharp, minimalist wireframe. A single gold dot blinked a mile to the north.
Text floated above the dot.
THE SHORE.
Kai stared at the screen. A destination meant other people.
People were variables.
The image of a wet road flashed behind his eyes. The sudden jerk of a steering wheel. The sickening crunch of metal.
His breath hitched, just once.
He forced his jaw shut. He bit down on the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper, letting the sharp, present pain overwrite the memory.
He looked around the empty street. He looked at the red and blue glows pulsing faintly from the Arena district behind him. He didn't know what those buildings were yet, but he knew they were part of the same machine that fired the silver lasers. The machine wanted him to run out of time.
If there was a place called The Shore, it meant others had survived longer than nineteen hours. It meant they had data. Data was the only currency that mattered right now.
Kai turned north.
He kept his weight on the balls of his feet, taking steps that made no sound against the pavement. He didn't stick to the center of the road. He hugged the shadows of the storefronts, keeping a wall to his back whenever possible. His pale eyes scanned every alley, every broken window, every rusted car.
The air was getting colder. The silence pressed against his eardrums, a physical weight.
Forty minutes of walking.
The Prince Hotel loomed out of the dark. It was a massive, forty-story structure of red brick and dark glass, but unlike the rest of the dead city, the ground floor was alive.
Warm, flickering yellow light spilled out onto the pavement from the lobby. Not the harsh, unnatural glow of the Arenas. This was the uneven, organic light of camping lanterns and battery-powered floodlights.
Kai stopped behind a concrete pillar across the street.
He watched the entrance.
Shadows moved behind the glass doors. Human shapes. He saw a man with broad shoulders pacing near the front desk. He saw someone else sitting against a window.
They were alive. They had a system.
Kai's thumb traced the thin vertical scar in his right eyebrow. The skin there was slightly numb.
He wanted to stay in the dark. The math out here was clean. One body, one set of risks.
But the cold was setting in, and out here, there was no data. Data was inside.
With the variables.
His Signal buzzed faintly in his pocket. A reminder.
Two days.
Kai dropped his hand. He stepped out from the concrete pillar and crossed the street. He didn't look at the sky again.