Ethan Keller's mornings were always the same.
That was how he liked them. Predictable, structured, efficient.
He woke at 5:45 to the sound of his alarm — a tone carefully chosen to be irritating enough to get him moving but not enough to start the day angry. The apartment was quiet except for the low hum of the heater and the soft rush of Manhattan traffic far below. He lived thirty-three stories up, high enough that the noise turned into a kind of oceanic background, steady and calming.
Coffee first. Always coffee. Then the shower — hot, quick, and followed by the same ritual: dark suit, silk tie, black shoes polished to a faint mirror sheen. He wasn't vain, not exactly. But in his line of work, presentation mattered almost as much as numbers.
By the time the sun began its slow crawl over the skyline, Ethan was already out the door, briefcase in hand, earbuds in place, mind tuned to the day's forecasts and trends. The voice on his podcast was droning about the Euro's instability, about shifting trade balances in Asia. He barely listened. He'd already read the overnight reports. The market would open with nerves, then rebound by mid-morning. It usually did.
The doorman greeted him by name. "Morning, Mr. Keller."
"Morning, Sam," Ethan replied, stepping into the chill of early March. The city smelled faintly of wet asphalt and roasted coffee — a combination that somehow always felt like money. Yellow cabs honked. Steam rose from manholes. Screens above delis flashed stock tickers and weather updates: Dow futures up thirty-four points, light rain possible later.
He smiled faintly to himself. Everything normal.
The ride downtown took twenty minutes. The driver, an older man with a Yankees cap, had the radio on low — some morning talk show bouncing between politics and celebrity gossip. Ethan stared out the window as the towers of Midtown gave way to the narrower canyons of the Financial District. The sky was a hard, flawless blue, and the sunlight bounced between the glass facades in blinding shards.
When the cab stopped in front of the firm's building, Ethan handed over a twenty, nodded, and stepped onto the sidewalk. The tower rose seventy floors, a steel and glass needle stabbing straight into the sky. A handful of brokers in similar suits were already filing through the revolving doors, coffee cups in hand, talking too loudly into headsets.
Inside, the lobby gleamed. Marble floors, metal detectors, security guards in crisp uniforms. He flashed his badge, nodded to the receptionist, and took the elevator. Forty-second floor.
The trading floor hit him like it always did: a living organism of noise, light, and motion. Screens lined the walls, showing every major index in real time. Rows of desks stretched across the room, each occupied by brokers shouting into phones, typing furiously, scribbling on notepads. The air smelled faintly of coffee, paper, and ozone from overworked electronics.
"Morning, Keller!" someone shouted from across the floor.
"Morning," he called back, setting his briefcase down. He loosened his tie just enough to breathe, then pulled up the morning data.
The numbers were a kind of comfort. Cold, impersonal, exact.
Oil up by 0.3%.
Gold steady.
S&P likely to open strong.
No surprises.
He leaned back in his chair, sipping his coffee, watching the market dance on the edge of volatility. To an outsider, the trading floor might have looked chaotic — a swarm of shouting, gesturing, caffeinated madness. But to Ethan, it was music. Every movement, every voice, part of a larger rhythm.
And he was good at reading rhythms.
A woman from the next desk leaned over. "You see that satellite glitch last night?"
He blinked. "What glitch?"
"Some science page said a few of them blinked off for a minute. Solar flare or something. My boyfriend's into astronomy — said there was a weird aurora over the Atlantic." She shrugged, already turning back to her screen. "Probably nothing."
"Probably," he said absently.
But for some reason, the word aurora lingered in his head. A faint itch of curiosity.
He dismissed it with a sip of coffee. The bell was seconds from ringing. The pre-market numbers flickered, and the tension across the room thickened like static before a storm. Someone was already muttering about a sell-off in tech. Another joked about the Fed's next move.
Then the opening bell rang.
Sound flooded the room — shouts, phones, the chorus of keyboards clacking like gunfire. Ethan dove in, barking orders, scanning graphs, switching windows faster than thought. His pulse rose. For these few hours, nothing existed outside the room. No wars, no politics, no family drama. Only the market — pure, unrelenting motion.
He'd spent ten years chasing that motion. It was addictive: the adrenaline, the razor's edge between fortune and ruin. He loved the noise, the danger, the fact that one well-timed decision could shift millions.
Sometime around 10:30, he leaned back again, rubbing his eyes. The chaos had steadied into rhythm. Trades flowing smoothly. Profits up. The hum of conversation now lighter, almost cheerful. Someone had brought bagels. Someone else was laughing about last night's Knicks game.
The world, as far as Ethan could tell, was functioning exactly as it should.
He turned to glance at the window wall — floor-to-ceiling glass looking out over the Hudson. The sky was an endless blue. A faint haze blurred the horizon, where sunlight shimmered on the water. Somewhere down below, sirens wailed distantly, but that was just New York being New York.
He took another sip of his coffee, scrolled through his news feed. More of the same: politics, markets, a new smartphone launch. A small note near the bottom of one article caught his eye — Global satellite monitoring systems report minor irregularities in orbital telemetry.
He frowned, almost laughed. Telemetry irregularities. Whatever that meant. The world had a way of overreacting to trivial things.
A voice cut through his thoughts. "Hey, Keller! You coming to lunch or married to that screen again?"
He grinned at that. "Maybe both."
"Suit yourself. We're going to Deluca's. Don't say I didn't invite you."
He waved them off, eyes flicking back to the numbers. Another small tremor ran through the desk — so faint he thought he'd imagined it. He looked around. No one else seemed to notice. The floor vibrated sometimes from the subway below, especially during heavy freight.
He rubbed his thumb against the edge of his cup, the unease already fading.
Outside, the sunlight dimmed briefly — as if a cloud had passed before the sun. But there were no clouds in the sky.
He didn't see it, not yet, but the shadows on the far horizon had begun to move.
The first sign was the hum.
It was faint, almost electrical, the kind of background noise you don't really notice until it's gone — except this time it arrived. It came up from the floor and into the walls, into their teeth, their bones. A deep vibration, not loud but total, filling everything.
Ethan looked up from his monitor, frowning. The screens still glowed. The ticker still rolled. Everything looked normal, but the sound…
"Do you feel that?" someone said nearby.
Before he could answer, the entire building jolted. Not a tremor, not the sharp jolt of an earthquake — this was slower, heavier, like the ground itself had turned liquid and the whole island was sinking through it.
Coffee spilled. People shouted. Desks shuddered. A few screens flickered and went black. The floor rolled once, then again, harder.
"What the hell was that?!"
"Earthquake— get under—!"
The words were swallowed by noise. The ceiling groaned. The glass walls flexed visibly, bending in and out like lungs. Ethan dove behind his desk as lights shattered above him, showering sparks and dust. The air turned thick and choking with concrete powder.
He pressed himself flat against the carpet, heart slamming against his ribs, ears ringing from the roar — a deep, continuous rumble that didn't sound like anything natural. It was as if the entire planet were one massive engine grinding into motion.
Then, just as suddenly, it stopped.
The silence afterward was absolute.
Ethan didn't move for several seconds. He could hear the blood in his ears, his own breathing loud and ragged. All around him, people were coughing, groaning, calling out names. Somewhere close, an alarm was shrieking — a harsh, repetitive note that felt too small for what had just happened.
He pushed himself up slowly.
The trading floor looked like it had been bombed. Ceiling panels down. Monitors smashed. Coffee pooling everywhere. Someone was bleeding from a cut across his forehead.
"Is everyone alright?" Ethan called out. His voice cracked halfway through.
No one answered.
The emergency lights flickered on, painting everything in alternating flashes of red and white. Somewhere, the PA system crackled weakly:
"—attention— building— evacuate— use— stair—"
Static swallowed the rest.
Ethan's brain went into procedural mode. Fire drills. Evacuation protocols. Keep calm. Move people. He grabbed a colleague by the shoulder — a young guy, maybe twenty-five, pale as paper — and said, "Come on, we're getting out. Grab your phone."
They stumbled toward the emergency exit. The stairwell door was jammed until someone kicked it open.
The descent was a blur of noise and motion. Footsteps slamming. People shouting. One woman crying quietly, repeating "it's okay, it's okay" like a charm. The stairwell lights flickered but held. Dust hung in the air, a soft gray haze that turned the world into flashes of motion and noise.
Halfway down, someone vomited from fear or motion sickness. Ethan didn't stop. He just kept moving, hand locked on the railing, counting floors under his breath.
When they reached the ground, the lobby was a ruin. Cracked marble, glass everywhere, the security desk overturned. A mural had fallen from the wall and lay in pieces. Sprinklers were still running, dripping rather than spraying.
They pushed through the shattered doors and into the street.
Sunlight hit him hard.
It was an ordinary New York afternoon — or looked like one. The sky was clear blue. The air smelled of dust and ozone. People were everywhere, crowding the street, staring at the skyline. A siren wailed in the distance, joined by another, and another.
He turned, scanning upward. The towers still stood — some scarred, windows missing, but upright. Steam was venting from a ruptured pipe near the corner. A line of cars sat abandoned mid-intersection, their doors open, alarms blaring.
No clouds. No smoke columns. No fireballs. Just a city in shock.
He looked down at his phone.
No signal. No Wi-Fi. No GPS.
The icons spun and blinked as if searching for a network that no longer existed.
"Anyone got service?" he shouted.
Heads turned. A few people lifted their own phones. Shook them. Nothing.
A woman nearby tried a radio from her car — static. She hit it a few times, stared at it like she could force it back to life.
Someone else muttered, "Power grid must've gone down."
"No," another said. "Look."
Across the river, lights still glowed faintly in New Jersey. Not many, but enough. Power existed. The grid was there.
It just wasn't talking.
He stared up at the sky again. Clear. Empty. No planes, no contrails. Not a single distant hum of a jet. That was wrong. The city was always under flight paths; even during lockdowns, there were planes.
Now — nothing.
A strange quiet settled over the street, the kind that only exists when thousands of people stop talking at once. Everyone seemed to realize it at the same moment:
The world looked the same. It felt the same.
But something, something fundamental, wasn't.
Ethan couldn't have said what it was. The light looked right. The air felt right. The temperature, the shadows, the smells — all normal. But beneath it, there was a low unease, a silence between silences.
A police cruiser pulled up at the corner, lights flashing. Two officers got out, waving people back. One of them was trying his radio — it hissed static.
"Sir," one of them shouted, pointing toward the tower. "That building safe?"
Ethan blinked. "I don't know." His voice sounded flat, unreal.
"Alright, everyone stay clear of structures! There might be more tremors coming!"
He looked down at his phone again, still dead, and suddenly felt a chill that had nothing to do with the March air.
Tremors. That's what they'd call it.
Because what else could it be?
He turned back toward the skyline. The city was standing. The world was standing.
But somehow, impossibly, it wasn't where it used to be.
For a long time, no one moved.
The city had frozen in that peculiar post-disaster stillness — engines idling, alarms looping, every face turned upward as if the sky might offer an explanation.
Then motion returned all at once. Sirens rose, sharp and discordant. Somewhere down the block a voice with a bullhorn barked instructions, half-swallowed by echo. The noise came back in layers — footsteps, shouted names, the metallic crash of something falling from a ledge ten stories above.
Ethan found himself walking without deciding to. The crowd shifted instinctively toward open space, spilling into the intersection where fragments of glass sparkled in the sunlight.
Across the street a city bus sat cross-angled across both lanes, its windshield starred and its driver slumped over the wheel, blood bright on his temple. A pair of strangers were trying to pull the door open.
"Careful," someone warned. "Gas leak."
The smell of diesel and dust hung thick in the air.
Ethan stopped beside a mail drop box that had tipped halfway onto its side. His hands were trembling. He pressed his palms flat against the cool metal until the shaking eased.
The first emergency vehicles began to arrive — fire engines, police cars, ambulances. Not many. Fewer than there should have been. They wove through the debris with lights flashing, sirens wailing a little too loud for the number of them that existed.
Firefighters jumped down, eyes scanning windows for signs of smoke. Paramedics moved through the street in pairs, carrying stretchers and shouting for the injured. The professionalism of it all felt surreal, like a movie continuing after the film reel had cracked.
"Everyone away from the buildings!" a firefighter called. "We'll set a triage area at the park!"
People obeyed. They always did when someone with a uniform gave direction.
Ethan followed the flow north, past storefronts with shattered windows and alarms that still blinked red. A convenience store owner had pulled the grate halfway down and was handing out water bottles to anyone who passed. No one tried to pay.
At one corner a man in a business suit was kneeling beside an injured courier, tying a makeshift bandage around his leg with a torn necktie. The courier was laughing, hysterically, saying, "Guess this means I'm not delivering those packages, huh?" and the man kept saying, "You're fine, you're fine," though neither of them looked convinced.
The closer they got to Battery Park, the more organized it became. Police had set up barriers from whatever they could find — construction fencing, traffic cones, lengths of caution tape. Within the cordon, rows of the wounded sat on the ground, jackets pressed to cuts and bruises. Volunteers moved among them with bottled water and gauze.
A middle-aged woman sat beside Ethan on the curb, cradling her phone like a relic.
"It's the satellites," she said suddenly. "Has to be. Maybe a flare knocked them out."
He didn't argue. "Maybe."
She nodded, though she clearly didn't believe it. "You'd think they'd tell us something."
They both looked toward the river. Ferries had stopped mid-stream, drifting with the current, their engines apparently dead. Yet the water itself was calm, almost too calm, reflecting the skyline like nothing had happened.
By late afternoon the first olive-drab trucks appeared. National Guard. The sight drew an audible ripple through the crowd — relief, fear, some mixture of both. The soldiers dismounted quickly, establishing perimeters, setting up temporary antennas that blinked once and then fell silent again. Radios crackled and hissed uselessly.
Orders filtered through the confusion: everyone would be relocated to secure areas uptown. Temporary camps were being prepared. Power stations were intact, but long-range communications were "intermittent."
Intermittent. Ethan repeated the word under his breath, rolling it around like a foreign currency.
As dusk crept in, the evacuation began. Columns of people moved along the avenues under escort, shoes crunching glass, the smell of ozone and dust still thick. The only real sound was the echo of their footsteps and the distant pulse of sirens.
At every intersection, soldiers directed them onward. "Keep moving! Madison Square staging area! Medical first, families next!"
Ethan ended up beside a man carrying a small dog in his arms. The man said quietly, "They say it's global. My brother's in Chicago. Same thing there."
Ethan looked at him. "You talked to him?"
The man shook his head. "No. Someone heard it on a police scanner before those went dead too."
They walked in silence after that.
By the time they reached Central Park, the first FEMA tents were already glowing under portable floodlights. Generators thrummed, cables snaked through the grass, and the air smelled faintly of diesel and sweat. Volunteers guided the newcomers to different zones, handing out blankets, masks, foil-wrapped rations.
Ethan sat near the edge of the encampment, on a bench half-buried in the trampled grass. Around him, people whispered, cried, stared at their phones as if willpower could resurrect a signal. The city skyline shimmered beyond the trees, whole and unbroken, every light still burning.
A little girl nearby asked her mother, "When will the TV come back?"
Her mother said, "Soon," without conviction.
The hum of generators and quiet voices blended into a strange, uneasy lullaby.
When Ethan finally looked up, the sky was deep indigo, clear and cold. Stars pricked through one by one — far more than New York usually allowed. No blinking aircraft, no silent satellites tracing their paths. Just stillness.
He thought of the woman's words earlier. It's the satellites.
He wanted to believe that.
But deep down, in the part of him that had felt that impossible vibration in the bones of the earth, he knew this wasn't a network outage.
Something far larger had shifted — something that no emergency plan, no stock exchange, no government briefing could explain.
By the time night fell, the city had begun to move again — but not in any way it used to.
Ethan sat on a curb across from what used to be a deli, watching a group of volunteers in reflective vests hand out bottled water from a stack of cardboard boxes. Someone had rigged a portable generator that powered two floodlights, throwing long, skeletal shadows across the street. The air smelled faintly of smoke and ozone — and, underneath it all, of concrete dust and panic.
It had been maybe eight hours since the quake. Or whatever it was.
He'd lost track of time somewhere between the evacuation and the waiting. There had been an aftershock around four o'clock, smaller but enough to send half the street running again. After that, the emergency sirens stopped — not because they'd been silenced, but because they'd run out of batteries.
Now, only a few scattered lights blinked in the distance. Most of Manhattan was dark.
The skyline looked skeletal without its glow. He could see the outlines of towers like ghosts against a deep, starry sky. Too starry.
That, more than anything, unnerved him.
He hadn't seen the sky this clear since he was a kid in Vermont. No haze, no light pollution, no blinking aircraft lights. Just a dizzying sprawl of stars, stretching down to the horizon in numbers that made the heart stutter.
And yet — they looked wrong.
He couldn't have said how. The constellations were almost right. Orion, yes, but tilted strangely low; the Big Dipper with its handle too long, its curve too steep. It was like seeing a familiar face reflected in warped glass.
"Hey," someone said beside him.
Ethan turned. A woman — late thirties maybe, in a rumpled business suit, sitting with her knees pulled up, a foil blanket draped around her shoulders. Her name tag still read "Gina, VP— something." Her hair was streaked with dust.
"They're saying it was an earthquake," she said.
"Yeah," he muttered.
She nodded toward the skyline. "You ever seen an earthquake knock out everything like this? Power, comms, flights, everything at once?"
Ethan didn't answer.
A siren wailed faintly somewhere far south, maybe near Battery Park. The sound rose, faltered, then cut off abruptly — like someone had unplugged the city itself.
He looked back up at the sky.
"You think help's coming?" she asked quietly.
He didn't know what to say. FEMA trucks were already on the move — he'd seen a convoy earlier, rumbling down the avenue under National Guard escort. Soldiers in mismatched uniforms directing traffic with flashlights, yelling through megaphones, trying to turn Manhattan into something resembling order.
But there were no helicopters. No news broadcasts. No radio chatter except short-range analogs. And when someone had tried one of those old emergency satellite phones, it just blinked, searching, searching.
Ethan finally said, "They're doing what they can."
She gave a short, humorless laugh. "Yeah. Paper maps and clipboards. Like it's the '70s."
He wanted to say something comforting — something like, it'll be fine, the world's too connected to stay dark for long — but the words felt hollow. Because the truth was, everything had gone dark.
And it wasn't coming back on.
A soldier walked by, his rifle slung but hand on the grip, eyes darting between groups. His uniform looked too big for him, his face too young. He paused near the water table, spoke quietly to the volunteers, then moved on.
"National Guard?" Gina asked.
"Yeah," Ethan said. "They started coming in from Jersey around dusk."
"Must've taken forever without comms."
He nodded. It had — they'd come in on word of mouth, old radios, even handwritten notes passed between police departments. The bridges were damaged but still standing. Trains were down, subways flooded, airports closed.
He wondered if anyone, anywhere, had managed to get a message out.
By ten, the makeshift camp had grown. They'd set up tents — not many, but enough for medical triage and emergency rest areas. Portable lights on generators buzzed like mosquitoes. Somewhere nearby, someone was playing an acoustic guitar, softly, as if to prove the world hadn't ended.
Ethan wandered the perimeter.
Everywhere he looked, people huddled — wrapped in blankets, charging dead phones off car batteries that wouldn't last much longer, trading rumors like currency. The President was alive. The President was dead. Washington was gone. Washington was fine. The military was mobilizing. The military was gone.
It was all noise.
He stopped near an ambulance that wasn't running — just a parked shell with its doors open, a nurse tending to a man with a broken arm inside. They talked quietly. Every few seconds, she glanced up at the sky like she couldn't help herself.
Ethan did the same.
Still wrong. Still too sharp, too many stars.
He rubbed his hands together, trying to shake off the chill.
A voice behind him said, "Hey, you from here?"
He turned — a middle-aged guy in a gray hoodie, face lined and tired, a small group gathered around him. "Wall Street," Ethan said automatically. "Worked in finance."
The man laughed, not unkindly. "Guess money's not worth much right now, huh?"
"Guess not."
"Listen," the man said, "you notice the planes?"
Ethan frowned. "What about them?"
"They're not there," another woman said — young, holding a kid who couldn't have been older than five. "There haven't been any. Not one. No helicopters, no jets, nothing. My brother's a pilot. He'd have found a way to call."
Ethan hesitated. "Could just be comms down—"
"No," the man interrupted. "Not just that. You look up — you see anything blinking? Any trails? Even a satellite moving?"
He hadn't. Not once.
A silence fell between them. Then someone muttered, "I think whatever that was, it killed the sky."
The words hung there, absurd and terrible.
Killed the sky.
By midnight, most people had settled into uneasy sleep. The hum of generators faded one by one. Fires burned in barrels, flickering against broken glass. Somewhere, a baby cried. Somewhere else, someone prayed.
Ethan couldn't sleep.
He sat against a wall, legs stretched out, jacket pulled tight. His phone lay on his lap, screen black. He pressed the power button once, twice — nothing.
He looked up again.
It was quiet now, quieter than he'd ever known New York to be. No traffic, no horns, no low airplane rumble. Even the wind seemed muted, as if the air itself was holding its breath.
He could hear individual voices. Footsteps. The snap of a lighter. A sob.
And over all of it, the faint, electric silence of a world that had gone still.
Somewhere behind him, a man muttered in his sleep. A woman stirred. A radio crackled with static — someone trying again, futilely, to reach… something.
"Mayday… Mayday… this is Coast Guard Station… New York Harbor… does anyone copy?"
Only static.
Ethan exhaled through his nose. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, the stars hadn't moved.
Or if they had, it was in ways that didn't make sense.
He didn't know then — couldn't — that they never would move the same way again.
For now, there was only the waiting.
And the uneasy feeling that the Earth beneath them was still humming — just faintly, deep below the surface — like some vast machine had been switched on, and none of them yet understood what it was.