Mara didn't sleep that night.
Eli's words kept circling in her head like ghosts — talk of light, of truth, of something worth saving. She wanted to believe him. She really did. But belief was a luxury she'd buried a long time ago.
The world hadn't killed her hope overnight. It had starved it, slowly, piece by piece, until nothing was left.
She grew up in a narrow apartment that always smelled of damp concrete and cheap detergent. Her parents worked two jobs each — long hours for low pay, smiling when they came home because that's what the screens told them to do. Work is purpose. The system provides. The future is bright.
She remembered the posters in the hallway, the announcements on every channel, the lessons at school:
"The government protects you."
"The markets keep you safe."
"If you follow the rules, you'll never fall."
Her parents believed it. They repeated the slogans like prayers. When her father lost his job at the factory, the government promised retraining. It never came. When her mother fell sick from the water, the state clinic said the tests were "inconclusive." The medicine was rationed. The shelves were empty.
They waited. They trusted.
And in the end, the lies outlasted them.
Her father died first — worn down by debt and exhaustion, working shifts that broke his body for wages that barely kept the lights on. Her mother followed a year later, coughing blood in a hospital hallway under a banner that read CARE FOR ALL.
Mara was sixteen.
And she learned what the world really was.
It wasn't war or plague or fire that destroyed them. It was belief — the quiet poison of trusting a system that only took. Her parents died thinking it was their fault. That if they'd worked harder, smiled more, followed the rules better, they might have been saved.
That was the lesson she carried:
Hope wasn't light.
Hope was the bait.
After that, Mara stopped wishing. She finished school, took the first job that paid, learned to blend in. Don't ask questions. Don't dream. Don't trust the slogans.
Survival was enough.
She saw others fall for it — the neighbors who bought into "citizen programs," the families who joined new "resettlement zones" promising clean air and better jobs, only to vanish behind sealed gates. No one asked what happened to them. Asking was dangerous.
So Mara built walls. Not out of fear, but out of clarity.
The world was broken.
And nothing could fix it.
Eli's voice came back to her in the dark:
"Every truth you hold on to is a spark."
"Light always finds a way through."
But what if the world had already burned out?
What if there was nothing left to light?
She closed her eyes, and for a moment, she saw her mother's face — tired, kind, believing until the end.
Belief hadn't saved her.
It had killed her.
Mara turned on her side, staring at the flickering glow of the streetlight through her window.
She wasn't angry anymore. Just tired.
Tired of lies.
Tired of pretending.
Tired of people who still thought the world could be mended.
Let Eli chase his light.
She knew better.
Some tunnels don't have an end.