The rhythm of boots against the metal stairs rumbled through the complex louder than the sirens. Jake 257 covered his ears and ducked under the cafeteria table.
Demir 338 peeked down with a smirk. “That’s not the take-cover alarm.”
Lila 411 leaned next to him, pressing her headset to her ear. “Yeah, the emergency’s
Boom!
Christopher jumped up, knocking their board game off the kitchen table. He turned toward his sister, Paisley. “What was that?”
She shrugged. “Sounded like it came from outside.”
Rushing to the window, Christopher tore back the curtain of their third-story apartment and stepped onto the balcony. The view made him gasp.
An entire universe lies between us now. And I just want to touch him, one last time.
I sit in the window of my berth. We’ve been drifting through space for six months; the panorama of stars beyond is the same as it’s been for most of that time. We survived because we fled.
We have been in the shelter for an hour, but it feels like a lifetime.
My tongue is thick, cotton-dry from disuse. Though my eyes have adjusted, the light is too dim to see my family’s expressions––just the faint outline of Mum’s slender nose, Finn’s trembling lips. My hair has unraveled from its braid,
“Y’know, it’s still pretty cool to look at,” Gil said, as another solar flare flickered out across the night sky. “You can see splendid patterns, roiling changes that resemble wind direction, and a fantastic purple-orange hue to the sky. It’s a bit like the Northern Lights, I think.”
He turned and pointed upwards
When the meteorite hits the earth my laptop battery is at ninety-four percent charge. Three hours, four minutes.
Now I’ll never finish my novel.
Obviously, radical seclusion has its pros and cons. No Internet, TV, or people are ideal conditions to focus, write, and conclude a magnum opus novel. Unless the world ends,
I reached for my kitten Cleo instead of my phone. Social media wasn’t a happy place right now, not with everything going on.
Balancing Cleo on my shoulder, I shuffled to the kitchen. There by the door lay a carefully folded piece of paper. Probably my Star-Trek-enthusiast neighbors.
Aedus hated it when his hourglass talked. The majority of its speech was apocalyptic prophecy, and he would have given anything for it to be wrong. Just once.
Preferably now.
Stones cut through the soles of Aedus’ shoes as he sprinted down the hill, dragging a stretcher behind him.
The walls crumble more every day. It’s not just something you can fix with workers and stone, either. If it were that easy, we would’ve saved the city long ago.
But these magic-imbued walls are held together by our relationships—by love—and that love is fading.
Haruo Settlement of the Last Survivors of Japan, 2094
Translated from Japanese
It was only a matter of time. I am fortunate I have been spared from it this long.
But it is necessary.
No one believed me when I said the moon disappeared. They said it went behind a cloud. That it would be back. It always came back.
“Not this time.” But insisting didn’t work.
Evelyn Hall had long been numb to the weight of a planet on her shoulders. The everyday stresses that accompanied ruling the nations of the world had destroyed her health and strained her mind past its limits. But now that its end drew near, the decision to stop fighting the inevitable felt less like a burden and more like a release.
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