It started with a star in the sky.
One. Then another. Then hundreds, arching across the atmosphere like miracles on fire. The meteors streaked across the sky in bands of fire and orange and white, too beautiful to be real… until the first one exploded with a clap of thunder and turned the entire thing into a symphony of death.
Julyah didn't stick around to see it.
She'd already packed the last of her things, stored neatly in the glowing flower tattoo on her wrist, a library of blood and memory and magic. The bracelet, a family heirloom she'd received and re-received and re-received over countless generations, had melded into her skin days ago, blooming open into a third dimension suspended in her skin. Everything she might need was here: maps, food, medicine, tools, weapons, notebooks. She could access them with a thought. Or hide them with a thought.
The tattoo reacted to her alone. As if it had been waiting.
The city was already coming apart: traffic lights were out. Emergency sirens wailed. Distinct voices rose from the streets like a rising tide she refused to let swallow her.
By the time the first meteor struck out in the outer boroughs, Julyah was weaving her motorcycle through a clogged highway shoulder, boots scraping asphalt as she turned sharply and veered left toward an abandoned service road they no longer used for deliveries.
Behind her, the skyline shuddered.
The towers, her city, folded inward like paper.
She didn't look back. When she arrived at the villa, the world had already shifted.
The air was thicker. The light was wrong, grey and dim like the sun had decided to just turn off.Fires blackened distant valleys. Cell signals were already dead. The road signs were half-melted or missing. Far, far behind her, people were screaming. Running. Dying.
But the villa?
It didn't move.
Tucked high up in the mountains and masked by waist-high pines and thick fog, the house looked less like a building and more like a ghost, like a secret shared and whispered through the generations and waiting, finally, for the right one to come back home.
The long drive was silent, save for gravel crunching under tires and the occasional fizz of falling ash. The gates swung open on their own, solar-powered and motion-sensitive and utterly intact.
Not a single window was broken.
Not a single shingle was out of place.
Julyah parked her motorcycle beside the RV and truck already tarped over in the garage and the air fogged in her lungs.
It was summer. The sun was already up.
But the wind bit like winter.
The inside of the villa was quiet. Velvet.
The greenhouse lights blinked like distant stars as they bathed the entire east wing in a soft, green luminescence, a haze that fogged up the massive glass dome stretched over the top of the east wing. Buried discreetly, almost imperceptibly, below that and into the mountain slope itself: the bunker. Shelves of military-grade rations, vacuum-sealed packets of heirloom seeds, portable water purifiers, radiation blockers, and enough medical supplies to staff a clinic.
But she didn't need them yet.
Everything she needed best—her personal journals and hidden tools and carefully rationed food—was stored within her skin, tucked into that glowing, otherworldly space between pages and paper and prayer.
She walked the property slowly, twice, as if searching for cracks and fissures that she already knew weren't there. The solar array embedded into the ground beneath her boots hummed to life beneath her feet. The heat sensors pinged. The air filtration systems came online with a subtle whir.
Every shelf was full.
Every bolt locked tight.
Every measure. Every precaution. Had been anticipated.
It wasn't just a house.
It was a bunker.
A message left unsaid.
A question disguised in luxury and paranoia: Who knew this was coming?
Julyah sat by the fire that night, cross-legged on the wooden floor, the storm flashing across the panoramic windows behind her like some cosmic warning sign. In her lap, she held a notebook. Hand-bound. Leather-wrapped. Waterproofed to the max. The kind of thing built to survive floods and fire and anything else that might happen next.
She opened it.
On the first page, she wrote:
DISASTERS TO EXPECT:
*Meteor impacts (Phase I: confirmed)
*Extreme Heat
*Snowstorms in high summer
*Earthquakes
*Tsunamis
*Volcanic eruptions
*Sudden desertification
*Storms with unnatural wind speeds
She paused.
Then added, beneath it:
"Not random. This is a sequence. Someone—or something—is setting the world on fire one piece at a time."
She underlined it twice.
Outside, the sky cracked with lightning, not fire.
And Julyah, alone but unafraid, watched it from the one place on Earth that was, for now, still safe.