Atlas was completely confused. He had never heard of this kind of technology. Sure, technology was widespread across the world, especially on the Continent of Knowledge, where everyone was involved in a scientific profession in one way or another, and thus had access to the most advanced tech, including artificial intelligence. But a device like this, one that could access his biological data and actively draw his blood... He had never seen anything like it.
Qualia? I have a vague feeling of recognizing it, as if it's something deep inside me.
Emma was looking at him with concern: "Are you okay, Atlas? You suddenly stopped talking. What's wrong with that watch?"
Atlas instantly realized that Emma probably hadn't heard the watch's robotic voice. He hesitated to tell her the truth. He didn't know who she was, and you'd have to be crazy to trust the first stranger you meet, even if she was beautiful. Especially in such catastrophic circumstances: you never truly know people's real faces.
"It's nothing, it just reminds me of my dad," he lied.
Truth be told, Atlas hadn't seen his parents in a few years since they weren't on the same continent. The thought gave his heart a painful squeeze, not knowing what had become of his family.
"Right. It's high time we get out of here. I have a bad feeling about this."
Stepping outside, they emerged at the back of the building, in what must have once been the West Wing of Bircson University, if his memory served him right. But the radiant summer he had known was gone, swallowed whole, as if it had never existed at all. In its place, the world had turned to glass and ash. A pale blue snow fell in slow, deliberate spirals, drifting down with none of the chaos real snow should have. Each flake seemed to choose its own path through the air, unhurried, almost reverent, like the sky itself was in mourning and had all the time in the world to grieve. The ground stretched out before them in a pristine, thick blanket of that same impossible hue, an endless field of frozen light reminiscent of the great ice floes of the Northern Continents. It wasn't the gentle dusting of a first winter snowfall. It was old. Undisturbed. Settled into every crack and crevice with the patience of something that had been falling for years, maybe longer, layer upon layer building a silence so absolute it felt like a physical weight pressing down on the ruins.
Above them, the sky had abandoned color altogether. Though it was, by all logic, the middle of the day, it hung low and dark, a vast slab of churning gray, less like weather and more like a lid. The oppressive ceiling of some unfathomable prison, sealing the world beneath it.
"This seems inconceivable!" Atlas exclaimed.
Even though he had been far more composed than Emma from the start, he couldn't stop marveling at the spectacle. Where others might have seen only horror, he was surprisingly captivated. Despite his frail body and long, unkempt hair, his azure-blue eyes shone brilliantly, reflecting the blueish glimmers falling from the gray sky!
Emma approached as well, much calmer than before, her own breath fogging faintly in the cold as she stood beside him, equally mesmerized by the spectacle. "So, to summarize," she said, her voice carrying a brittle, almost theatrical lightness, the kind people use when reality has become too heavy to hold without flinching, "an indefinite coma, paralysis in my case, eyeless corpses, all of it devoured by a creature I don't even want to remember, and now... this. It's quite the contrast."
When she fell silent, the silence that answered her was absolute.
It wasn't simply the absence of sound. It was something heavier, something that pressed against the eardrums like the moment just before a held breath gives out. No birds, no wind through broken windows, no distant murmur of a city that should have been teeming with life. Only the snow, falling without a whisper, each flake settling against the ruined stone in perfect, soundless silence. It should have terrified them. Instead, standing there in the blue hush of a dying afternoon, it felt almost like peace, the kind of peace that only exists at the very edge of the world.
"But where did all the students go?" Atlas finally said, breaking the spell, his gaze lost somewhere past the curtain of falling snow. "It's impossible that we're the only ones this happened to."
Already moving as he spoke, he started toward the other end of the street, his footsteps the first sound to disturb the white in what felt like a very long time, driven by the faint, irrational hope that somewhere out there, someone else had survived to answer him.
There are two possibilities, Atlas reasoned, his mind already laying the two scenarios side by side with the same cold precision it now seemed to apply to everything. Either we are indeed the only students left, which is highly unlikely given the presence of the soldiers. Or I woke up later than the others, which is far more plausible, considering Emma woke up earlier.
He turned the thought over and over, testing it for cracks the way he once might have checked a math proof, searching for the flaw that would make the whole thing collapse. Behind him, Emma followed in silence, her arms wrapped around herself against the cold, lost somewhere deep inside her own private storm of thoughts.
Neither of them noticed the eyes watching from the far end of the amphitheater alley. Whatever it was that watched them, it did not blink. It did not move. It simply waited, patient as the snow itself, content for now to remain a secret folded into the gray.
Atlas pressed on toward the next lecture hall, a few dozen meters ahead, fighting for every step through the thick, unyielding snow. The cold had teeth. It bit straight through his thin summer clothes, the navy t-shirt hanging loose on a frame that had clearly lost more weight than he wanted to think about, the black jeans at least still long enough to reach his ankles, for whatever small mercy that was worth.
Phew. I'm really going to have to get back into shape if I want any of this back, he thought, almost amused by his own vanity in the middle of an apocalypse. Still annoying, though. Losing a physique I actually worked for.
He was only a few strides from the door when a scream tore through the silence, raw and absolute.
"ATLAS, LOOK O...!"
Before she could even finish her sentence, something slammed into Atlas with the force of a falling beam. The impact caught him square in the ribs, and the world went white for half a second, all sound swallowed by the roar of his own pulse.
The wind was torn from his lungs in one violent gasp, and for one suspended instant, his mind simply stopped working altogether, no thought, no fear, nothing but the raw animal shock of a body that had just been hit far harder than it was built to survive. Then came the ground. He struck it hard, the snow cushioning the worst of it but not nearly enough, a dull, ringing pain blooming through his shoulder and the back of his skull.
For a moment he simply lay there, stunned, the gray sky and the falling snow spinning lazily above him as though none of this concerned them in the slightest.
"What the..." Atlas fought to claw his way back from the shock, every nerve screaming at once. A heavy mass was pressing down on him, pinning his legs, his chest, his ability to breathe. His vision swam, blurred at the edges, refusing to cooperate, but somewhere underneath the haze his brain had already wrenched itself into something colder, sharper. Survive. Figure out what's on top of you. Survive.
A low, wet growl rumbled just above his face. "Grrrr..."
When his eyes finally managed to focus, still pinned beneath whatever had tackled him out of nowhere, the sight that greeted him made his blood run cold. It wore the shape of a man, or what was left of one. The skin was a sickly, deathly pale, stretched too tight over limbs that had withered down to nothing but bone and sinew, as if every ounce of fat had simply been burned away by something far hungrier than starvation. Its jaw hung loose, slack with drool, more animal than human in the way it twitched and worked at nothing.
And despite that ruined, atrophied body, its arms held him down with a strength that made no sense, an iron grip wrapped around something that should have snapped like a dry branch.
But it was the eyes, or rather, the absence of them, that struck Atlas hardest. Two raw, empty sockets stared back at him, hollow and black, as though they had been carved out with surgical precision and left to rot. There was nothing there. No white, no iris, no flicker of whatever passed for a soul in a thing like this. Just two voids, staring at him from a face that no longer remembered how to be afraid.
It was a mutant.