The siren had been wailing for ten minutes, its monotonous cry long since devolved into the city's weary, familiar soundtrack. For Andrii's family, it wasn't a signal for panic, but for ritual. After three years of war, the "two-walls rule" had become a part of their routine—mandatory but irritating.
They stood on the fourth-floor landing, cloaked in whatever they'd grabbed first. His mother, wrapped in an old housecoat, leaned sleepily against the cold wall. Max, his thirteen-year-old brother, was already perched on a higher step, the dim light of his phone screen flickering in his eyes.
"New episode of your favorite slime isekai dropped," he announced lazily, not looking up.
"Timely," Andrii muttered. He was twenty-one, with a university lecture in the morning lines of code already taking shape in his head. Sleep was a luxury this night had, once again, stolen.
"Mom, I'm thirsty."
"Andrii, you're closest," his mother said softly, her voice heavy with fatigue.
He sighed and nodded, knowing that a thirsty mom was the highest family priority.
The familiar creak of the floorboards, the cool air of the kitchen, the low hum of the refrigerator. He opened the door, and its soft light cut through the gloom, illuminating rows of bottles.
"Sparkling or still?" he called out into the hallway.
"Still!" his mother's voice echoed back.
He grabbed a cold plastic bottle. Smooth, solid, a real object in this dreamlike haze. He started back toward the bright rectangle of the open doorway, seeing their silhouettes framed within it. He raised the bottle, catching his mother's eye.
She smiled.
And in that instant, the world fractured.
It wasn't like an explosion from the movies. There was no fireball. The first thing was the light—a silent, impossibly bright white light that slammed in from the side. Time stretched like hot plastic. Andrii saw an invisible, colossal force shear through the stairwell. He saw his brother's and mother's bodies thrown, dissolved into the incandescence.
Then came the sound. A dry, deafening crack of concrete and the shriek of metal. The force of it, a physical blow, flung him backward into the kitchen.
For a moment, he was blind. A high-pitched ringing screamed in his ears. The air became thick, unbreathable. It smelled of something awful and new: a mix of scorched concrete, hot steel, and the sharp, throat-searing tang of gunpowder.
When his vision started to return, he saw that the exit had become a black, ragged hole into the night sky. The staircase was simply gone.
The stupor was absolute. His mind, accustomed to finding patterns in everything, had just encountered a null value. Logic shattered like glass; all that remained in his head was white noise.
He didn't know how much time had passed—minutes or an eternity. His next clear memory was of voices from below.
"He's alive! Kid, can you hear me? Don't move!"
The rescuers. He followed their commands automatically, a robot receiving a new set of instructions. They made him an object: rope, cradle, descent. As they lowered him, he stared at the gushing wound in the side of his building. The fourth floor was a gaping maw. The smell of burning wafted up, now mingled with the sickeningly sweet scent of cooked flesh.
They placed him on a folding chair on the ground, the red and blue lights of the emergency vehicles silently washing over the scene. A paramedic draped a coarse, scratchy blanket over his shoulders. A psychologist knelt in front of him, her lips moving, forming soft, useless words that were swallowed by the ringing in his ears.
His gaze was empty. The word "Russia" surfaced in his mind, a tag without an algorithm—a name without a reason. Logic had failed. There was no equation for this.
He looked down at his hand. The bottle was still clutched in his fingers. Cold. Unbroken. He slowly uncurled his hand, and it fell to the wet asphalt with a dull thud.
A sudden, sharp cry cut through the monotonous din. "Incoming! Another one! Take cover!"
The chaos erupted anew. A rescuer grabbed him by the elbow. "Let's go, kid, move!"
His body obeyed, his feet shuffling forward mechanically as he was dragged along. His gaze was fixed on the wreckage in front of him, but some primal instinct made him glance up.
High in the night sky, illuminated by the searchlights, a dark star was moving.
It wasn't twinkling. It was growing.
His brain, even broken, processed the input instantly. Cruise missile. Supersonic. Inevitable.
There was no time to think. No time to run. No time even to fall. The rescuer's face, turning back towards him, was a mask of sheer terror.
The world was already dissolving into light.
And in that final fraction of a second, as reality itself was being deleted, one last thought surfaced—a memory of all his favorite stories, the ones about second chances that always began with an end.
A tired, ironic, almost grateful smile flashed across his face as the world folded in on itself.