"Water—the elixir of life…a mysterious substance…colourless…shapeless…unproducible…and more…enigmatic."
The phrase is a persistent, spectral hum in the back of Audiam's mind, a remnant of a classroom lecture from a world that had the luxury of treating chemistry as poetry. In the desiccated reality of the city, water is no longer a chemical compound; it is a sentient god that has abandoned its worshippers. It is a liquid paradox: soft enough to yield to a child's cupped palm, yet heavy enough to grind granite into silt. It is the only substance that humanity, in all its hubris, could never truly manufacture. We could only borrow it, filter it, and eventually, lose it. To the thirsty, H2O is the only true currency, and right now, Audiam is bankrupt.
The heat is a physical weight, a suffocating mantle of static and caloric-pressure that sits on her shoulders. She moves through the skeletal remains of the commercial district, her boots navigating a graveyard of pulverized concrete and oxidized iron. She does not hear the groan of the leaning skyscrapers or the whistle of the wind through the hollowed-out window frames, but she feels the subsonic vibration of the city's slow tectonic collapse in the marrow of her shins. Every footfall is a calculated risk. She avoids the loose sheets of corrugated tin that would rattle like a drum, sending ripples of kinetic energy through the ground that could alert predators she cannot hear.
Her mouth is a landscape of drought. Her tongue is a piece of dry driftwood, scraping against the roof of her mouth with every shallow, desperate breath. She keeps her lips pressed into a tight line to preserve the last microscopic traces of moisture, but the air is a thief, leaching hydration through the very pores of her skin.
She stops at a fractured intersection where the asphalt has buckled into jagged obsidian waves. To her right, a rusted fire hydrant stands like a red tombstone. She approaches it with a low, predatory grace, her movements a study in energy conservation. She reaches out, her grime-streaked fingers—calloused and steady—tracing the pitted iron. The metal is blistering, nearing the point of thermal-injury, but she holds the contact. She leans down, pressing her palm flat against the base of the hydrant, then her cheek.
She is listening with her nervous system.
A pipe with a pressurized flow has a specific frequency—a smooth, rhythmic hum that travels through the iron like a subterranean heartbeat. She closes her eyes, filtering out the blinding glare of the sun, focusing entirely on the tactile telegraphy of the metal. She feels the static of the dry earth and the hollow ring of empty space.
Nothing. The hydrant is a dry bone.
Audiam pulls back, her expression a mask of stoic neutrality, though her eyes—wide, amber, and constantly scanning—betray the fraying edges of her endurance. She turns to her companions. Buddy is at her hip; his golden fur matted with grey ash and burrs. He is a study in canine survival, his chest heaving in rapid, shallow cycles to shed heat. He does not waste energy on vocalization; he has learned that sound is the dinner bell of the apocalypse. He watches her hands with the intensity of a zealot.
She lifts her right hand. Her fingers are long, stained with the soot of the ruin. She catches Buddy's eye and signs with a sharp, downward stroke of her palm, followed by a tight clenching of her fist.
Stay. Close.
Buddy sinks into the shadow of a rusted-out bus, his belly fur brushing the hot grit of the road. Beside him, Paw-paw, the older spaniel-mix, moves with the stiff, careful gait of a dog whose joints are failing under the weight of the new world. Audiam reaches out, her fingers grazing the coarse hair of his neck. She feels the slight tremor in his legs—a sign of advanced dehydration and caloric-debt.
She signs slowly into Paw-paw's line of sight, her hand forming a flat horizon that she pulls back toward her chest in a gentle, rhythmic hook.
Wait for me.
The old dog huffs, a small puff of dust rising from his nostrils. He settles into the shade, his milky, cataract-veiled eyes never leaving her.
Audiam stands and scans the horizon. Three blocks down, the shadows are wrong. In the deep recesses of a collapsed department store, faint-grey silhouettes rest. They are the "Watchers." These entities are not biological in any sense the old world understood. They are silicate-based horrors, their molecular structure subject to UV-stasis. In the direct glare of the sun, they vitrify—locking into motionless, glass-like statues. They are ash-coloured ghosts, blurred at the edges as if they are not entirely anchored to this plane of reality. But as the sun dips and the UV-index drops, the vitrification reverses. The statues melt back into lethal, fluid motion.
She turns her head, her sharp eyes catching a dark stain on the concrete near the base of a crumbling brick wall. It is a tiny, glistening patch of dampness—a bruise on the dry face of the city.
She moves toward it, her heart thumping a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She does not look for the path of least resistance; she looks for the path of least vibration. She navigates the ruins by the visual geometry of the debris, avoiding the "clink" of glass or the "thud" of loose brick. She moves like a shadow, her body low, her eyes never leaving the grey silhouettes three blocks away.
As she nears the wall, she sees the source. A rusted lead pipe, hidden behind a flap of peeling insulation, is weeping. A slow, agonizingly rhythmic drop of water forms at the tip of the pipe, hangs for a heartbeat, and then falls into a small puddle in the cracked concrete.
Audiam falls to her knees. She doesn't reach for her canteen yet. She watches the drop fall. It is perfectly clear. It is the elixir.
She cups her hands beneath the pipe, the cool sensation of the first drop hitting her palm feeling like a kinetic shock. She collects a small pool and lifts it to her parched lips. It tastes of iron, old earth, and salvation. It coats her dry throat, soothing the raw edges of her thirst.
She looks back at the dogs, signalling them forward with a wide, beckoning sweep of her arm that transitions into a flat palm facing her chest.
Come. Water.
Buddy is there in an instant, but he waits, his training overriding his thirst. He watches her face. She allows him to lap from her cupped palms first, the rough texture of his tongue a familiar, grounding sensation. Then she helps Paw-paw, supporting his heavy head as he drinks. The water is cold, a miracle in this baking graveyard, and for a moment, the desperate pressure of the day recedes.
They stay there for a long time, tucked behind the brick wall, hidden from the grey silhouettes. For a few minutes, the apocalypse is held at bay by a leaky pipe. Audiam leans her head back against the cool bricks and closes her eyes. She can feel the vibration of the water still dripping—drip, drip, drip—a steady, liquid clock marking the time they have left before the sun fails them.
In the silence of her world, she realizes that the water isn't just life. It's a bridge.
But her moment of peace is shattered by a sudden, jagged disruption in the air pressure. A vibration travels through the wall against her back—not the rhythmic drip of water, but the heavy, crunching impact of something solid hitting the ground nearby.
She snaps her eyes open. She doesn't hear the intruder, but she feels the weight of their movement through the soles of her feet. Someone—or something—is approaching from the other side of the wall.
She looks at Buddy. His hackles are raised, a silent ridge of fur standing up along his spine. He doesn't growl; he just bares his teeth, a flash of white in the shadows.
Audiam moves with the speed of a startled bird. She grabs her canteen, filling it as quickly as the weeping pipe allows, then she signs to the dogs, her hands moving in a frantic, sharp blur of command.
Up. Run. Hidden.
She doesn't wait to see what is coming. She knows that in the ruins, the only thing more dangerous than the Watchers are the survivors who haven't had a drink in three days. As she slips away into the alleyway, the sun begins to dip, turning the sky the colour of a fresh bruise. The "Watchers" in the distance begin to stir, their grey edges sharpening as the light fades and the UV-stasis breaks.
She reaches the end of the alley and pauses, pressing her back against the cold stone. She looks back at the water pipe. A figure emerges from the dust—a man, gaunt and hollowed out, clutching a jagged piece of rebar. He doesn't see her. He falls to the puddle she left behind, his body wracked with silent, convulsive sobs as he tries to lick the moisture from the concrete.
Audiam turns away. She cannot help him. She can only survive.
The shadows are growing longer. The Watchers are waking up. She looks at her dogs, signs Together, and begins to move toward the looming fire escape of a nearby tenement.
As she reaches the second-story landing, she sinks into the corner, pulling the dogs into the small, dark space behind a pile of discarded crates. The adrenaline begins to recede, leaving her hollow and cold. She closes her eyes, trying to regulate her breathing.
The smell of the stagnant alley water—metallic, sharp, and old—begins to shift in her mind. It softens. It deepens. It begins to smell like rain. Not the acidic, dusty rain of the ruins, but a clean, heavy downpour hitting a hot asphalt driveway.
The vibration of the wind against the tenement wall shifts, too. It becomes the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of a ceiling fan in a room with yellow wallpaper.
Ten years ago.
The kitchen is bright—dangerously bright. The morning sun streams through the window, catching the steam rising from a porcelain mug of coffee. Audiam is sixteen. She is sitting at the heavy oak table, the wood smooth and polished under her fingertips, a far cry from the grit and glass of the future.
She is watching her mother's hands.
In this world, the "Normal World," signing is not a survival tactic; it is a conversation. Her mother's hands move with a lyrical, hurried grace. She is signing about the grocery list, about the car needing oil, about the rain that is supposed to come this afternoon. There is an "accent" to her mother's signs—fast, slightly sloppy, punctuated by the occasional flash of a wedding ring.
"Don't forget your hearing aids," her mother signs, a teasing tilt to her head.
Audiam rolls her eyes and signs back, her movements sharp and rebellious, the typical friction of a teenager. "They don't help. It's just noise. I like the quiet."
Her mother sighs, a vibration Audiam feels in the air across the table. She reaches out and taps Audiam's hand—a tactile "I love you" that carries the weight of a thousand spoken words.
In the corner of the kitchen, a younger, sleeker Buddy is sprawled across a sunbeam, his tail thumping a steady, happy rhythm against the linoleum. Paw-paw, still a puppy with ears too big for his head, is chewing on a rubber toy, his small body full of a frantic, joyous energy that the future will eventually steal.
The television in the living room is on. Audiam can't hear the news anchor's voice, but she sees the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen.
...STRANGE ATMOSPHERIC PHENOMENA REPORTED OVER NORTH ATLANTIC... SCIENTISTS BAFFLED BY 'STATIC CLOUDS'... NOBILITY OF LIGHT DISTORTIONS...
Her father enters the room. He is carrying a newspaper, his face set in a mask of mild confusion. He looks at the television, then at the window. He signs to Audiam, his movements slower and more deliberate than her mother's.
"Did you feel that?" he asks.
Audiam frowns. "Feel what?"
"The floor," he signs. "It felt like... static. Like the house was humming."
Audiam places her hands flat on the oak table. She closes her eyes, reaching out with her senses. For a moment, she feels nothing but the warmth of the wood. Then, it comes.
A vibration.
It isn't a truck on the road or the rumble of the refrigerator. it is something deeper. It feels like a high-frequency shiver in the bones of the earth, a soundless scream that travels through the marrow of her teeth.
She opens her eyes. Outside the window, the blue sky is perfectly clear. But as she watches, a thin, shimmering line of grey appears, like a scratch on a camera lens. It hangs there, suspended above the treeline, a fracture in the blue.
It is the first crack. The first hint that the "Other Side" is starting to push through.
Her father signs something else, his hands shaking slightly, but Audiam isn't looking at him anymore. She is looking at the sky, at the beautiful, terrifying distortion that is about to swallow her world whole.
The rain begins to fall then—warm, heavy drops that hit the driveway with a sound she will never hear, but a rhythm she will never forget.