I kept myself busy the only way I knew how, by watching people.
The window glass was cracked and dust-coated, but if I leaned close enough, I could still make out the street below. From this height, the world felt distant, muted; the shapes moving beneath the flickering streetlights were little more than silhouettes drifting through a city that had long forgotten how to glow. Government patrols. Scavengers. Workers heading nowhere. Ghosts wearing human shapes, I thought.
It wasn't much of a world anymore, but somehow, it still moved, dragged forward by momentum alone, like a dying creature too stubborn to collapse. The world was dying, gasping through its own decay, and every breath tasted like dust and something faintly metallic. The air hung heavy, thick enough to coat your lungs if you weren't careful. Even inside, you could feel the grit settling on your tongue, clinging to the back of your throat.
A gust of wind rattled the window frame, shaking loose a soft drift of dust that floated lazily to the floor. My breath fogged the glass, fading almost immediately. Winter would come early again. It always did now. The cold arrived like an unwelcome memory, a reminder of everything we'd lost, settling into the walls, into the floorboards, into my lungs.
I used to tell people I loved autumn.
But that was bullshit.
What I loved weren't the actual months, it was the promise of them. The stories of golden light in windows, warm leaves beneath your hands, the gentleness before the dark thickened.
Not the cold itself. Never the cold.
Reality had stripped those illusions quickly enough.
The door creaked behind me, its hinges complaining the way they always did. Eli stepped in, dripping rainwater, cheeks flushed red from the wind. His hair clung to his forehead in messy strands. For a heartbeat, the tightness in my chest eased, like I could finally exhale.
"I was worried," I murmured, my voice smaller than I meant it to be.
He grinned, that same lopsided grin that chipped years off his face. "It's fucking freezing. You're lucky your big brother's a saint."
He shook his head like a wet dog, scattering droplets everywhere.
"Stop!" I yelped, dodging.
When I asked if he'd found anything to eat, he dropped his bag with an exaggerated flourish, bowing like a street magician about to reveal his grand finale. Two bruised apples. A half-loaf of day-old bread that had gone stiff around the edges. And one gleaming gold wrapper.
Chocolate.
My heart stuttered. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen a color that bright.
"I found it in the trash," he said proudly, as if he'd discovered treasure buried beneath rubble instead of fishing it out of some metal bin.
"That's disgusting," I told him, even as my hand was already reaching for it.
He smirked, triumphant. "You're welcome."
It melted on my tongue slowly, rich and sweet, almost painful in its unfamiliarity. It tasted like childhood. Like a life that was long forgotten.
For a few minutes, the world softened around us.
We joked about fireplaces with real wood, matching blankets, hot chocolate with marshmallows — things we'd never had, yet fantasized about like longing alone could manifest them.
Dreamers, our parents would've said.
And maybe they were right.
But it made the world seem softer, even if the warmth was only in our heads.
That was our rebellion, to laugh, even though life had dealt us a shitty hand.
The laughter faded into the sound of the rain and for a while, we didn't speak. As the candlelight waned, Eli wrapped a threadbare blanket around his shoulders. He looked exhausted, shadows carved under his eyes, fingers trembling from cold or hunger or both.
"You should sleep," I said.
"Not tired."
He always said that.
And I'd woken too many nights to see him sitting by the window, eyes searching the darkness like he expected it to swallow us whole.
I crawled into our narrow bed, blanket stiff with cold. Sleep dragged me under almost instantly.
The dream found me before the darkness settled, like it always did.
A sunlit house.
My mother singing.
My father's laugh, warm and familiar.
Then the light flickered.
Warmth drained from the air, replaced by a thin, unnatural hum that slithered beneath my skin. The sunlight was warped, colors bending wrong, gold bleeding into red, red into blue. The kitchen stretched around me, distorted.
"Mom?" My voice sounded small. Fragile.
No answer.
The walls shuddered. Picture frames trembled. Smoke crept under the hallway door. Sirens rose, faint, then choking.
The doorknob seared my palm as I touched it.
Red, blue, red... merging with a deeper vibration beneath my ribs, like a second heartbeat ready to tear me apart.
I woke with a gasp.
My heart hammering too fast. Sweat slicked my skin despite the freezing air. The echo of that pulsing red light throbbed behind my eyes.
My thoughts circled familiar wounds, the ones that never quite healed no matter how many years I tried to pretend they had.
The fire.
The night our parents died.
The so-called electrical surge the officials insisted on.
The swarm of social workers arriving before the ashes had even stopped smoking.
I had been eleven.
Eli had just turned eighteen.
They said he was too young to be my guardian. Too unstable. Too irresponsible. They said it with clipped voices and tired eyes, already writing their reports in their heads. They looked at him like he was a problem they had been forced to deal with, not a brother who had just lost everything he had ever known.
They did not know him. None of them did.
They did not know that the moment they tried to pull us apart, he grabbed my hand so tightly it hurt. They did not know that he ran without hesitation, without money, without a destination, guided only by the fierce, stubborn belief that I was safer with him than with any system that claimed to care.
For seven years we became shadows sliding through the bones of the city. We slept in abandoned buildings that creaked like old ships. We lived off scraps and luck and the kind of desperation that teaches you how to survive even when you should not. Eli knew every alley that disappeared into darkness, every fire escape that led to a roof no one bothered to watch, every corner of the city where you could breathe without being seen.
Sometimes I blamed him for the life we lived.
Sometimes I resented the hunger and the cold and the constant running.
But even then, even in the worst moments, something deeper whispered the truth I never wanted to admit out loud.
He saved me.
He saved me the night of the fire, and he kept saving me every day after.
Evening settled heavy and unnaturally still.
Fog drifted between the buildings like smoke, swallowing the street in slow, curling waves. The candle behind me flickered, its flame stretching thin, as if bending toward something I couldn't see.
That's when I saw the car.
Dark and unmarked.
Parked beneath the last working streetlight at the end of the street, a place no one ever lingered.
I leaned closer, breath fogging the glass.
Three figures sat inside. A faint red light pulsed across the dashboard. For some reason, they instantly made me feel uneasy. My stomach twisted.
"Eli..." I whispered, forgetting for a moment that he had gone out to check the traps, muttering something about rats.
The figures in the car moved. One lifted a silver device. Another leaned forward, speaking into a radio.
I stepped back, pulse climbing.
"Eli," I said louder, voice cracking slightly.
A soft click sounded from the front door.
Someone testing the handle.
"Eli Daven! Serra Daven!"
A voice roared through the storm.
"This is the police! Step outside with your hands where we can see them!"
My blood froze.
Boots hammered against the pavement outside. Shadows crossed the cracks in the boarded windows.
The side door burst open.
Eli stumbled through it, soaked, panting, eyes wild with panic.
"Seri! Pack your shit. Now."
"What? What's—"
"They fucking found us!" His voice broke. "We have to go!"
The pounding on the front door intensified, shaking the whole frame.
"Open up! Final warning!"
My hands fumbled over my bag. The straps slipped. The contents spilled.
"Eli—"
He grabbed my arm, pulling me toward the back room, breath sharp and frantic.
"Seri."
His voice cracked.
"When I tell you to run, you run. Don't stop. Don't look back. Do you hear me?"
I swallowed hard. "Eli—"
The front door exploded inward.
Boots stormed across the floorboards, heavy and merciless.
Eli shoved me toward the window with everything he had.
"Go!"
My legs moved before my mind caught up. I tore through the narrow hallway, bare feet slipping on warped boards slick with dust. The walls shuddered around me, plaster cracking, the ceiling shedding flakes like snow.
I couldn't tell what I was hearing anymore, thunder? Footsteps? My heartbeat? It felt like something inside me was trying to claw its way out.
"Eli! The window!" I shouted, my voice breaking on the last syllable.
Our escape plan.
The one we'd practised a thousand times, whispered plans in the dark, rehearsed footsteps and promises made with shaking hands.
Reaching the end of the hall, I saw the window looming like an exit carved from the dark. Cold night air seeped through the cracks, brushing my skin with a whisper of freedom.
I turned back
No Eli.
Where the hell was he?
The hallway behind me stretched empty, swallowing sound. A hollow, echoing quiet that didn't make sense.
For a moment, everything in me stopped, breath, thought, heartbeat. A cold, numbing pressure spread through my chest, squeezing so tightly it made the world tilt.
The plan had always been together.
Always.
I hovered by the window, frozen, staring down the hall as if the force of my fear alone could drag him through that doorway.
"Come on," I whispered, voice trembling. "Eli, come on, please—"
I waited.
First a heartbeat.
Then two.
Then too many.
My fingers curled against the wall, nails scraping the peeling paint as panic bloomed hot and fast beneath my ribs. The silence felt wrong.
BANG!
The sound of a gunshot broke the air in half. It felt physical, like a whipcrack through bone.
"Eli?" My voice trembled.
Did they just shoot him?
"No, no, no—Eli!"
What the fuck is happening.
Footsteps continued to spread throughout the house.
Everything in me had stopped. I couldn't react. I couldn't move.
My knees hit the floor, my hands slipping in the dust. The ringing in my ears wouldn't stop, a shrill, endless tone that filled the space where his voice should've been. I couldn't breathe.
The walls around me flickered, light and shadow overlapping, reality bending at the edges. The air grew heavier, pressing in against my skin. Something inside me was freezing or burning, and I couldn't tell which.
The air shimmered, actually shimmered, bending like heat rippling off metal. Dust lifted from the floor in slow spirals, rising higher and higher until it hovered weightless in the center of the hallway.
"Wh–what's happening?" I gasped, pressing a shaking hand to my chest.
My heart wasn't just pounding.
It was vibrating, each thud echoing through the walls.
The light changed. Red. Blue. White.
Not flashing, but bleeding, colours running together like they'd been torn from some other world and forced into this one.
My skin burned hot and cold and my vision blurred. The air made a sound that wasn't a sound at all, more like a layered scream of wind and static and something like... voices, overlapping and spiraling, ancient and panicked and furious.
And then... it broke.
A blinding pulse of white erupted from my chest, ripping through the walls, the air, the dark.
The force hit me like a tidal wave.
I didn't feel my feet leave the ground. I didn't even feel the glass explode behind me.
Before I knew it, I was falling, or flying, or maybe both, weightless, spinning through light so bright it drowned the world.
My body was there and not there, stretched thin between every heartbeat, every breath, and every scream I hadn't finished.
For a heartbeat, I swore I saw Eli's hand reaching for me.
A shape inside the white. But it vanished before I could touch it.
And then, very suddenly and almost painfully:
The white light thinned.
Darkness folded in.
And when I opened my eyes...
the world was no longer the world I knew.