ELARA POV:
The bell over the bakery door had stopped chiming hours ago; the street outside was still, wrapped in the pale wash of a late morning. I had been sitting on the stoop for three hours, waiting for the world to decide whether it wanted to be loud or die quietly. It was almost ten when I finally pushed myself up. The shop was still closed. Elvin was late again.
I leaned my back against the warm brick and watched the road. It felt empty—fewer people with each week, the Pureborn population shrinking like a candle in wind. The war took numbers in neat columns and called it progress. Sometimes I imagined it all ending tomorrow and us vanishing like a bad dream: no history, no bakery, no me.
A familiar, breathless voice pulled me back.
"Hey, Elara… I'm sorry. I took long again."
Elvin came barreling toward me, hair a mess, his white shirt hanging loose and damp at the collar, cap skewed on his head. He slung a hand over my shoulder, panting. I crossed my arms and tried to sound annoyed.
*"The heck—why are you so late? Open the shop. Next time I'll have the keys."*
He gave me an apologetic grin and went straight to the lock. I set the open sign in the window and the bakery filled with the little miracle of warmth and yeast and sugar. The smell wrapped around us like something holy and ordinary.
*"Did you wake up late again?"* I asked as I wiped the counter.
"Yeah." He hesitated, voice small. "Since my mom… since the accident, nothing's really—" He trailed off.
I regretted my next words before they left my mouth. It had been two months since his mother died in the massacre—the Hollow raid that'd taken so many. I'd been an orphan once, sleeping in institutional gray for years. When Elvin lost his mother he came to me, and we'd run the bakery together ever since. He was the only family I had who remembered how to laugh.
*"Sorry,"* I said softly. *"I should've—"*
"It's fine." He waved it away and began to knead dough like it could fix everything. He was a chill kind of human—steady, warm, the sort of man who could hold a smile even when his world had been hollowed out.
The TV in the corner, small and dusty, hummed on. A woman with exact hair and too-bright lipstick announced the day's news with a practiced calm.
"—breaking report: Hollow forces struck the Northern district last night. Preliminary counts place thirty dead, with several missing. Special Forces are currently in the area. Captain Zephyr is overseeing defense operations—"
Elvin clicked the remote off. He rolled his eyes and muttered, "I'm tired of listening to it."
I didn't blame him. The numbers scrolled like a litany: death, death, death. We finished our pastries, boxed the first order, and watched the bell tinkle for our single customer of the morning. He paid in coins that clinked like nervous birds and left without a word.
Time passed in the small rhythms of bread and sugar until the bell announced another entrance. A man stepped in, all covered in black: coat collar up, hat low, hands in his pockets. No face to read, no laugh to ease the air. He was a shadow that breathed.
*"Welcome, sir. What will you have?"* I asked, smiling on autopilot.
He didn't speak. He only pointed at the cupcakes in the case. Elvin and I exchanged a glance—something about him made my skin prickle—but I packed his order quickly. He left a few coins and vanished into the street. It felt like the oxygen had finally come back into the room.
"Who was that?" Elvin said when the door shut.
I watched the place where he'd stood until the knot in my throat loosened. *"Strange,"*I said. That was all. Strange in a way words could not chase down.
Evening came sooner than it should have. After we locked up and I took the keys from Elvin, he offered to walk me home, but I refused. The streets were almost empty—no cars, only the occasional figure moving like a shadow. I preferred to go by myself, feet padding along the cracked pavement, the wind slicing colder with each step.
My apartment building squatted up the path like an old thing that had learned to be alone. Halfway up the stairs I heard it—a child's cry, thin and raw.
I ran.*"Jennz?"*I called, more breath than sound. My neighbor's boy sat on the floor of the landing, shirt too big, knees scabbed, tears cutting tracks down his face.
*"Jennz, what happened?"* I crouched beside him. He hiccupped and pointed tremulously toward his apartment door.
My heart jerked. Jenna's door stood open like a missing tooth. Inside, the apartment was too quiet. The boxes from our bakery—cupcakes cooling in their cardboard prisons—were piled on the table. My stomach turned cold.
I shouldn't have moved so fast, but I did. I stepped into the hallway and heard that thud—a dull, final sound from the back room. My world narrowed to a thin, bright wire of dread.
When I pushed the door open, the man from the bakery was there. Up close, his face split the truth in half: one side smooth and human, the other a lattice of rusted metal and exposed gears. One eye glinted blue, the other was a hollow ring of iron.
He looked at me. For a heartbeat I couldn't breathe. He moved with something that made my bones ache—not the quick violence of a thief, but the stillness of something that had already decided the world did not include me. Then, without another word, he leapt toward the window and vanished into the night.
Behind him, Jenna lay motionless on the floor, the life bled out of the room like paint washed away. My knees gave before my brain did. The cupcakes—our simple, small miracles—sat forgotten on the table, and the only sound in the apartment was Jennz's sobbing, the sound of someone too small to carry what the world had done.
I stared at the man-shaped hole in the air where the Hollow had been and thought, absurdly, that everything had been waiting for this moment to prove it was all true: the war, the empty streets, the way people vanished as if they were never real at all.
Somehow, I found my voice. *"No,"*I said to the room, to the dead light, to the stranger gone.* "No—this can't be—"*
Jennz merely pointed at me and wailed. I felt hollow in a way that had nothing to do with the Hollows. For the first time that day, my hands shook.
Outside, the city kept breathing. Inside, a life had stopped.