The city smelled of smoke and decay for days.
Rubble lined every street, windows gaping like empty eyes, and the air was thick with dust that clung to Mara's skin. She moved through the ruins slowly, her boots crunching over shards of glass and concrete, each step a reminder of how fragile everything had been.
The fires had mostly died, but the echoes remained — the screams, the gunfire, the panic. People walked the streets with hollow eyes, carrying what they could salvage. Some cried openly; others simply stared ahead, pretending not to notice the bodies lying where they had fallen.
And Eli was nowhere.
Mara paused at the steps of the shattered monument where she'd last seen him. The scorch marks had blackened the stone. Rubble blocked what had once been a gathering square. She searched desperately, scanning the twisted metal and burning debris.
"Eli?" she called, her voice cracking. The wind carried it, but there was no answer. Just the distant hum of smoke and the faint clatter of a city trying to remember how to function.
Days passed. Mara scavenged what she could — food, water, scraps of clothing. The streets remained dangerous. Rogue militias, remnants of the government, and desperate citizens clashed over every small resource. The screens were back on in some areas, spouting the same propaganda:
"ORDER RESTORED. CIVIL STABILITY RETURNING."
"THE GOVERNMENT PROTECTS ALL."
But she knew better. She had seen what chaos could reveal.
The broadcasts were lies. The city had changed too much to be "restored." All that remained was survival, and even that was fleeting.
Every day, she asked herself the same question: Did he make it?
Eli had walked toward the fire willingly, toward the chaos, toward truth when most had chosen denial. Did his light survive, or had it been snuffed out like the rest?
She found signs he had passed through — a makeshift sketch of a city skyline pinned to a ruined wall, a trail of footprints in dust that led toward the northern districts. They were faint, but they existed.
Mara followed them, moving cautiously through the debris-strewn streets. She avoided groups of looters, navigating alleys where the fire hadn't touched, where the worst of the chaos hadn't reached. Sometimes, she thought she saw him in the distance — a figure moving against the smoke — but when she ran toward it, it disappeared.
At night, she slept in abandoned buildings, listening to the city groan. Soldiers patrolled cautiously now, reasserting control over neighborhoods, trying to restore the illusion that order still existed. But the people had changed. Fear lingered in every corner, but so did memory — of what had burned, what had died, what had been lost.
Mara began to see the cycle repeating. The government would take control again, stabilize enough to survive, and the screens would flicker with their promises. People would go back to work, obey the rules, scroll the feeds. Hunger, fear, chaos would recede — until the next spark, the next lie, the next collapse.
She realized then that surviving wasn't enough. Survival had become a cage, a loop that chained humanity to the same endless despair. And yet, in her chest, a tiny, stubborn ember refused to die — a question she couldn't silence:
Did Eli survive because he refuses to live in that cage?
Mara walked through the streets, past the rubble and the burned-out cars, past the soldiers patrolling with mechanical efficiency. Every face she passed was blank, every conversation mechanical, every smile hollow. The world was still broken, still corrupted. And yet, she clung to that thought of him — the boy who dared to carry light where everyone else carried darkness.
Even if he was gone, even if the cycle would repeat, she understood something she hadn't before: the fire wasn't just destruction. It was a reminder — that even in the ruins, the world had been seen for what it really was. Lies had been stripped bare, illusions burned away.
And Mara walked on, searching through the ashes, for a flicker that might still be there.
Because the world had fallen, yes.
But maybe, just maybe, there was someone left who hadn't given up.