The next morning felt heavier than usual.
The air hung thick with the smell of burnt plastic drifting in from the outskirts — another fire, another "contained incident" the news wouldn't talk about. The trains were late again, power flickered in the station, and yet everyone stood still in their lines, eyes blank, pretending not to notice.
Mara was one of them, until she realized she couldn't do it anymore.
Something inside her had shifted — not loudly, not dramatically, but enough.
Eli's words echoed in her mind as she boarded the bus:
"Surviving isn't living."
"They built a world that eats itself."
At work, the same fluorescent lights hummed above her head, the same script glowed on her screen. She answered call after call, voice steady, words empty.
But by midday, the script began to taste like poison.
A message popped up on her monitor: Mandatory Overtime Confirmed. Productivity Bonus Pending.
She felt her chest tighten. It wasn't a request. It never was.
The room was silent except for the chorus of keystrokes — no one objected. No one ever did.
But this time, she stood. Slowly. Quietly.
Her supervisor glanced up, frowning. "Is there an issue, Mara?"
She met his gaze. "I'm leaving."
His brow creased. "Your shift isn't over."
"I know."
"You'll lose your bonus."
"I don't care."
The room froze. Dozens of faces turned toward her — gray eyes, tired and afraid. No one spoke. No one breathed.
Then, without another word, Mara shut down her terminal and walked out.
Her heart pounded as she stepped into the hallway. She half-expected alarms to sound, guards to block her path — but nothing happened. The world didn't collapse. The building didn't shake. She simply walked out into the sunlight, and for the first time in years, the air tasted different.
She didn't know where she was going. She just walked.
She passed shuttered storefronts painted over with propaganda, long lines outside food depots, and faces worn thin from pretending. The city's mask was slipping now — cracks spreading faster than anyone wanted to admit.
A billboard above her head flickered between two messages:
"THE FUTURE IS SAFE"
and
"CONSERVE WATER – RATION PHASE 3 STARTS TOMORROW."
Safe.
Right.
Mara ended up near the river — or what was left of it. The water was low, brown, sluggish. Children tossed pebbles into the mud, laughing like they didn't know better. Maybe they didn't.
Eli was there, sitting on a rusted bench, sketchbook in hand.
When he saw her, he smiled. "You look different."
"I walked out," she said.
He raised an eyebrow. "Out of what?"
"The job. The routine. The script."
A slow, approving nod. "How does it feel?"
"Strange," she admitted. "Like I broke something I wasn't supposed to."
"You did," he said. "But that's how it starts."
They sat in silence, watching the gray water drag itself downstream. The city skyline loomed ahead — towers of glass and steel, glowing with artificial light, standing like monuments to a promise that never came true.
Mara felt a flicker of guilt. Everyone else was still inside, still following the rules. But another part of her — a buried, trembling part — felt alive for the first time in years.
"Does it ever get better?" she asked.
Eli closed his sketchbook. "No," he said. "Not on its own. The system doesn't collapse because it's wrong. It collapses when enough people stop feeding it."
She thought of the office, the blank faces, the silence. The city pretending to thrive while it crumbled beneath its own weight.
"Maybe," she said softly, "it's already collapsing."
Eli smiled faintly. "Then maybe we should be ready for what comes next."
They sat there as the sun dipped behind the smog, painting the sky a dull orange.
Sirens wailed in the distance — another riot, another shortage, another lie coming undone.
And for the first time, Mara didn't look away.
She watched the world break, and she didn't flinch.
Because now she understood:
the end wasn't coming.
It was already here.