Panic should have been the only sane response.
For most people, waking into a decaying, unrecognizable world would have meant collapsing right there and never getting up. For one full second, it very nearly did. A violent spell of vertigo dragged at him, a suffocating weight pressing down on his chest, threatening to buckle his knees. His frail body nearly gave out, palms scraping against wood gone soft and damp with rot, the only solid thing left in a world that no longer made sense.
But as he pushed himself up against the back of the bench, something violently snapped inside his mind, and the expected wave of terror hit a wall of thick, artificial ice instead of him. It didn't fade. It simply locked, muted behind a door he hadn't known was there.
Where is everyone else?
Atlas knew this campus. The largest in the country, usually a continuous current of bodies rushing between buildings, footsteps and voices overlapping into one constant roar. Now there wasn't a single soul.
Standing took everything he had. His body felt cast in lead, fused to the bench beneath him. Every muscle twitched under the strain, his bones cracking ominously in the freezing air, until he finally tore himself upright and turned toward the nearest building's entrance.
He didn't understand any of it. Beneath the calm, his body still trembled in faint, useless shivers, small mutinies his mind no longer bothered to answer.
The long corridors stretched dark and moldy ahead of him, the artificial lights long dead. If everyone had suffered the same fate as him, the floors should have been littered with unconscious bodies. But the tiles beneath his feet stayed bare, swept clean of anyone but him.
Atlas wasn't a genius, and he'd never needed to think this fast in his life. Survival meant logic, a single foothold in the chaos he could stand on. It was statistically impossible he was the only person to wake up here. Right?
Other questions gnawed at him harder. How could he even categorize this cataclysm? Who were these Tohotsi, these entities whose words kept looping through his skull, defying every scrap of rationality? What did they want from an entire planet dragged awake against its will? And worse, what exactly was buried inside that promise of "greatness"?
Before he could organize any of it, a faint noise echoed down the hall.
The crying of a woman.
It was so faint he startled at catching it at all, some new, unfamiliar keenness in his hearing picking sound out of silence that should have swallowed it whole. His first steps felt heavy, labored, but after a dozen meters his body adjusted on its own, settling into a grace that wasn't his.
He followed the weeping to an amphitheater, thin light the color of old bruises pouring through the tall windows.
And there, he saw her.
She was huddled in the back rows, hands pressed hard over her eyes, knees drawn up tight against her chest like she was trying to fold herself small enough to disappear. For a handful of seconds, caught on this single flicker of curly brown hair and a shaking pair of shoulders, Atlas saw nothing else in the room.
"Why..." she murmured between jagged sobs. "Why again... why me!?"
Atlas took a step forward to announce himself, but the words died in his throat when a wet, disturbing sound reached his ears.
A dull thud.
Then a second sight hit him, full force.
The wet, sickening sound of flesh hitting flesh. Down below, men in military uniforms he hadn't noticed at first were stacking corpses, faces blank, eyes lost in some distant void. None of them spoke, not even to each other, not even a breath exhaled too hard. They moved with the same practiced rhythm from body to body, not hesitating once.
One detail should have turned his stomach to ice. Instead, it only sharpened something colder in him, some curiosity he had no business feeling. Every one of these bodies, students in their torn clothes, was missing the exact same thing.
Their eyes were missing.
Dried blood stained their gaping, dark sockets, as if the sight of this new world had been forbidden to them by some higher decree.
The girl, meanwhile, alternated between crying into her hands and staring blankly at what unfolded below.
Atlas's stomach twisted, hard, the kind of nausea that should have doubled him over and sent him retching, but ... It didn't. The mental barrier that had locked into place the moment he woke up held firm, refusing him even that small release, and he watched the pile grow with the flat, removed attention of someone flipping through photographs of a war he hadn't fought in. It was the stillness inside himself, more than anything in the room, that finally made his skin crawl.
He looked away at last, the weight of it more than his scrawny shoulders could carry.
He moved toward the girl. Every step on the dusty floor seemed to echo far too loudly, though it vanished under her sobbing and the wet, rhythmic work of the soldiers below. Not one of them so much as glanced up, gray-dressed, bent entirely over their task.
When he was only a few meters away, something in the girl's despair finally broke, some animal sense catching him too late. She whipped around with a gasp, heels scraping backward across the floor, putting as much distance as she could between herself and this stranger.
Everything since waking up on the cold, filthy tiles of the university bathroom had felt like drowning. The smell of stagnant water and mold still clung to her skin. Nothing made sense. All she had left was the memory of a dream, if it even was one. The pain of that "awakening" had been far too real for that.
She had forced herself up anyway, forced her legs to search for other survivors. But the long corridors, wallpaper peeling away like dead skin, held no one, only the sound of her own breathing bouncing back at her from every wall. The silence pressed in until she couldn't breathe around it, and she ran, blind, until she burst into this amphitheater.
And there, the horror hit her full force. The metallic stench of dried blood filled her nose before her mind even caught up with what she was looking at. All these dead. They were students. She thought she recognized the shape of a face, the color of someone's hair, people she had shared coffee with just the day before. But those eyes. Those gaping, wet holes where life should have shone. It was too much. She collapsed onto the bench, throat raw from crying, and stayed there, condemned to watch the soldiers work through body after body until this exact moment.
A shadow stretched across the floor in front of her.
Judging by his grime-covered clothes, the young man was a student too, rather scrawny, nothing physically threatening about him. His expression was the only threatening thing left in the room. Absolute placidity, frozen like a wax mask.
How can he stay so calm in front of this?
And yet there was something unsettling about the blue of his eyes, an almost supernatural stillness she couldn't put into words. Had he gone through the same thing as her, whatever that thing even was?
But the weight of everything she'd just witnessed pressed down harder than any strange calm could counter, and every muscle in her told her to run. She was in front of a stranger too calm to be normal, and her body took over, dragging her backward before her mind caught up.
Between two ragged gasps, she managed to whisper. "Who... who are all of you?"
She froze, disturbed by her own words. Her eyes saw only one young man, scrawny and alone. But that strange plural had slipped from her lips with a chilling naturalness, and the wrongness of it made her shiver harder than the cold ever could.
Atlas stopped, studying her. She had intense brown eyes, features that clashed violently with the apocalyptic backdrop around them, and for a half second he registered, distantly, that she was beautiful. It didn't matter. Nothing about that mattered anymore.
He kept his voice low, stripped of anything sharp, and answered anyway.
"My name is Atlas. I am... well, I guess I was a student here? Do you know what's going on? I woke up and... I can't seem to understand..."
He trailed off, unable to finish it.
For just a fraction of a second, his words seemed to calm her. His voice acted like a rope thrown into deep water, and she caught it without meaning to.
"I... I'm Emma," she murmured. "I don't know any more than you do. I woke up a few hours ago, but... I couldn't move. I was completely paralyzed. It was terrifying."
Atlas studied her, intrigued. A few hours ago? If everyone had woken at the exact same moment, none of this added up. Soldiers already organized, already deep into this grim, practiced task, days into a routine that shouldn't exist yet, uniforms fitted, orders given and followed without a single wasted word. Someone had woken up long before either of them.
"You said you were paralyzed? What do you mean?" he asked, pitching his voice as gently as he could fake.
He took one step forward, then another, each movement measured with the same caution he'd use approaching a wounded animal, hands kept loose and visible at his sides. He could read it in her trembling. The slightest wrong move would send her running.
Emma's gaze went distant, fixed on some invisible point past his shoulder. When she spoke again, her voice seemed to come from very far away, like she'd had to step outside her own body just to survive saying it.
"I couldn't move anymore," she whispered, her breath short. "But... it was like everything was mutating inside me. It started with a searing pain that crushed my skull, and I collapsed. I felt like... like something was reaching its hands directly into my head."
She swallowed hard.
"Invisible fingers, touching, probing, reshaping everything inside. I eventually lost consciousness, but I must have woken up too soon. I was lucid, but completely trapped inside my own body. Then, all at once, nothing. Not a single physical sensation. I really thought I was dying."
Atlas didn't push. But one detail kept gnawing at him. Whatever she'd lived through, it wasn't what had happened to him.
"Hmm, I see," Atlas said, and something colder slid under the reassurance in his voice despite himself. "Like you said, some kind of 'awakening.' But I'm struggling to pin down the trigger. As for me, I heard a voice, if you can even call it that, right as everything collapsed. It said..."
Emma cut him off, eyes suddenly wide.
"A voice? What do you mean, a voice?"
Panic flooded back into her eyes, her hands curling into fists at her sides, and for a moment she looked more lost than she had been from the very start.