But pain was good;
pain meant he still existed.
Pain stopped him from thinking.
He stepped over bodies.
Avoided glass.
Climbed a narrow stairway marked with black soot.
Burn marks ran along the walls—
the smell of electricity and salt,
the residue of a system that had failed catastrophically.
For a brief instant, his mind flashed back to the Twelve.
Their voices.
Their verdict.
Correction, they had said.
Not punishment.
He shivered.
What if the correction had already started with them?
No.
He shook the thought away.
Not yet.
He couldn't believe that yet.
He passed a classroom turned into a refuge.
Twenty people huddled there under blankets,
sharing bottles of water.
Someone called out, told him to rest,
to stay where there was light.
He shook his head and kept going.
Rest was for people with answers.
He had none.
The broken clock tower lay crashed on the grass below,
its hands still fixed at 4:52—
the exact moment the sky had split open.
Far ahead, he saw the dormitory building.
The front door hung wide,
and for the first time since leaving the infirmary,
Michael hesitated.
Fear, real fear, rushed up through his spine.
He was afraid to enter and not find her.
Afraid to find her.
Both were the same terror.
He inhaled slowly.
Tightened the strap of his backpack.
And stepped forward.
The air past the doorway was colder,
as if the building breathed differently from the rest of the campus.
Inside, the dark felt alive;
voices whispered;
breaths and sobs vibrated in the air.
And somewhere,
steady, unavoidable—
the sound of water dripping.
Michael swallowed hard,
and the only thought left in him was singular and absolute:
Find her.
Because standing still now
would mean accepting that the world he knew
was already gone.
And he wasn't ready to do that.
Episode 13 — MICHAEL: THE BREAK
Michael kept walking.
He wasn't running anymore.
His body hurt too much for that.
Thirty minutes moving through the same scene over and over again: wounded people sitting on the ground with empty eyes, bodies covered with jackets, voices asking for help he could no longer give, hands reaching out that he had learned not to look at.
Before, he helped.
Now he just walked.
Each step took him a little farther from the boy he had been that morning.
Each step was a quiet goodbye to a version of himself that no longer fit in this world.
The campus looked like a single huge corpse, still warm.
The melted hail carried blood into the drains, fallen trees creaked in the wind, and the emergency lights flickered as if they couldn't decide whether to stay alive or finally give up.
The air smelled like crushed grass, wet concrete, and old fear.
Michael didn't look to the sides.
He couldn't take in any more images.
He had only one point in his mind.
Her.
When he finally saw her, the world stopped.
She was sitting on the grass, wrapped in a gray blanket, face pale, eyes red from so much crying, hands gripping the fabric as if it were the only solid thing left in reality.
Alive.
Whole.
The relief was so strong it almost drove him to his knees.
He felt air slam back into his body, like he'd been breathing underwater all this time.
He smiled.
For the first time in hours.
He took a step toward her.
Then another.
And then he stopped.
From the other side of the lawn, John appeared.
Michael recognized him immediately.
The way he walked.
The dark hoodie.
The bottle of water in his hand.
That little shoulder movement, like nothing in the world could really touch him.
John walked over without hurrying, knelt in front of her, said something Michael couldn't hear, and handed her the bottle.
She lifted her eyes.
And she smiled.
Not a polite smile.
Not a thankful smile.
A real smile.
Michael felt something cold slide down his spine, as if someone had opened a window inside his back.
John leaned in a little more.
Too close.
The kiss was direct.
Long.
Unmistakable.
She kissed him back.
There was no resistance.
No surprise.
Her hands moved on their own, like they already knew that gesture, like they'd done it more than once when Michael wasn't there.
They hugged.
Drank from the same bottle.
Pressed their foreheads together, breathing the same air, as if they shared something that didn't need words.
Michael didn't breathe.
Not because he couldn't.
But because something inside him decided to stop.
He didn't shout.
Didn't move.
Didn't blink.
The noise of the world shut off.
Sirens, screams, wind—everything moved far away, very far, like someone had closed a thick door between him and the rest of the planet.
Something in his chest broke without a sound, like a piece of glass that never hits the floor but will never be whole again.
In his head, one idea died and another one was born in silence:
nothing he thought was safe really was.
That was the exact moment he stopped being who he had been.
There was no instant rage.
No tears.
Only a new kind of clarity.
Cold.
Precise.
Uncomfortable at first, but strangely clean.
His smile faded slowly.
He shifted a little to the side, just enough so they wouldn't see him.
He watched them.
For minutes.
Not with jealousy.
With study.
With the attention of someone who has just understood an uncomfortable truth about the world:
that love breaks too, even when the sky has already broken first.
He noticed the details.
The way she rested her hand on John's arm.
The way he fixed the blanket around her shoulders.
The way their bodies leaned naturally toward each other, like it was the most normal thing in the world.
He didn't think, "Why?"
He thought, "Of course."
Then he stepped forward and put his mask on.
He called her name with an almost cheerful, exaggerated tone.
"Patty!"
She jerked her head up.
John did too.
For a second they both looked like kids caught doing something they weren't supposed to do.
The kind of image that would've crushed him before.
Now he just registered it.
Michael walked over to them with his smile back in place, perfectly adjusted.
He hugged Patty.
Tight.
Too tight.
He felt her bones against his chest, her shaky breathing, the smell of sweat, tears and cheap shampoo.
"Thank God you're okay," he said, in a voice that sounded sincere even to him.
She hugged him back.
Kissed him.
Not like she'd kissed John a second ago, but enough.
She told him she was scared, that she'd thought she would never see him again, that it had been horrible, that the sky, the hail, the screaming—
Words, so many words.
John stepped closer too.
A pat on the back.
An uncomfortable smile.
"I thought you were still stuck in the other building," John said.
Michael nodded.
"It was chaos," he answered, "but hey, look—we're alive."
The sentence sounded right.
Appropriate.
Empty.
The three of them stayed there a few seconds longer.
The sky still looked sick.
The world was still broken.
Michael let go first.
He felt the fraction of a second that Patty's body took to pull away from his.
Felt the way her eyes slid, just for an instant, toward John.
He registered everything.
Filed it away.
"I'm gonna go see if I can find more water," he said. "I'll be right back."
No one suspected a thing.
Neither of them asked if he needed help.
Neither of them said, "I'll go with you."
As he walked away, his face relaxed completely.
It was like shrugging off a weight, but not the sadness—just the mask.
There was no real hatred yet.
No detailed plans.
Only a new certainty.
The apocalypse wasn't the thing that hurt the most.
It wasn't the angels.
It wasn't the torn sky or the trumpets or the voice that had declared the end of the experiment.
It was this.
This small, ridiculous, intimate scene, hidden inside the global disaster.
He stopped a few meters ahead, behind a split tree where no one could see him.
Listened to his own breathing.
Slow.
Controlled.
He thought—not out loud, but with brutal clarity:
Maybe the apocalypse isn't as scary as not being with her.
He tasted the idea.
Flipped it in his mind like a coin.
Found the other side.
But I'll get used to it.
And he knew why.