"It's my house!" Kiyoshi jabbed a finger at the TV remote sitting between them on the couch. "That means I pick what we watch!"
Kaori didn't even look up from her phone. "Your parents are paying me to make sure you don't burn the place down. And I swear if I miss the last episode of Twist of Fate I will burn this place down myself." She glanced at him, one eyebrow raised. "Like watching another recap episode."
"It's not a recap episode! It's...it's important context for..."
"Kiyoshi." She set her phone down and looked at him with the kind of patient expression that made him feel like she was the adult and he was... well, he was ten. He was ten. But still. "You've been watching One Piece for three months. You're on episode two hundred and something. What I want to watch is just one hour. One. Hour."
"But... Second Gear..."
"It'll still be there in an hour."
Kiyoshi crossed his arms, sinking deeper into the couch cushions. "You just want to watch people kiss and be awkward."
"And you want to watch people scream about friendship for the ten thousandth time." Kaori grinned, reaching for the remote. "My vote counts more. I'm older."
"But..."
The lights flickered.
Both of them stopped. Kiyoshi looked up at the ceiling fixture as it stuttered, dimmed, flared bright, then settled. The TV screen glitched, pixelating into strange colors that didn't belong, greens that burned too vivid, blues that felt cold just looking at them.
"Power surge?" Kiyoshi asked.
Kaori was already standing, phone in hand. "Maybe. I'll check the..."
The air hummed.
It wasn't a sound. Not exactly. It was deeper than that, something Kiyoshi felt in his teeth, in his chest, vibrating through his bones like the world had become a tuning fork struck by something vast and invisible. The hum grew louder, deeper, resonating until his vision blurred at the edges.
"Kaori?" His voice sounded strange, muffled, like he was underwater.
She grabbed his arm. "Stay close to me."
The walls began to shake.
Not like an earthquake, Kiyoshi had felt those before, the rolling motion that made you feel sick, the way the ground moved like ocean waves. This was wrong. The walls shuddered in place, vibrating so fast he could see them blur. Picture frames rattled against the plaster. The TV screen cracked down the middle with a sound like breaking ice.
Then the sky tore.
Through the window, Kiyoshi saw it happen. The blue afternoon sky rippled like fabric caught in wind, and then it split. Colors bled through the tear, colors that had no names, that shouldn't exist (like aquamarine and burnt orange). Amber and violet and something between silver and black, all of them pouring through the wound in reality like paint spilling across canvas.
"What..." Kiyoshi couldn't finish. His head felt like it was splitting open. The migraine hit like a hammer behind his eyes, so sudden and vicious that he gasped, doubling over. Blood poured from his ears and eyes, his vision blurring.
Kaori was on her knees beside him, teeth clenched with so much force that she chipped her front tooth, blood poured from her ears too. Both hands pressed to her temple. "Fuck!!!"
The hum became a roar.
Screams.
On that day every human on earth, screamed at the same time...
Kiyoshi's vision went white. Not blank... white, like staring into the sun, every photon of light stabbing into his brain at once. He heard himself scream but couldn't hear it over the noise, the impossible cacophony of god knows what crashing together, frequencies aligning, existence itself grinding like.
Sounds layered over sounds:
Thunder that never ended Glass shattering in infinite cascade Voices shouting in languages he'd never heard Music, machinery, roaring wind, crying children, all of it at once, all of it everywhere
Smells hit him next, ocean salt and burning plastic and flowers and rot and ozone and cooking meat and fresh bread and blood, all competing for space in his nose until he gagged.
His skin felt like it was vibrating apart.
And then...
Silence.
For one impossible moment, everything stopped. The roar cut off. The light dimmed. Kiyoshi could breathe.
He opened his eyes.
The world had changed.
Through the window, the window that was now cracked in a spider-web pattern—he saw a sky that held three moons. One was yellow... no, more like a color resembling amber, one silver, one the familiar white he'd known his whole life. They hung together in a triangle formation, casting shadows in three different directions.
The buildings across the street were wrong. Some were the same apartment complexes he'd seen every day, but between them stood structures that hadn't been there before, a spiraling tower of black glass that bent at impossible angles, a squat building made of what looked like living coral, something that might have been a mansion carved from a single piece of jade.
And the street was full.
People stumbled out of buildings, onto sidewalks that had buckled and cracked. But they weren't all... human not the way Kiyoshi understood the word. He saw some part human part dog person, there were also some people with horns coming out of their knees, different kind of creatures which all appeared to be sentient .
"Kiyoshi." Kaori's voice was hoarse. "We need to..."
The building lurched.
It didn't shake. It dropped, like an elevator with cut cables, falling six inches before catching with a groan of tortured metal and concrete. Kiyoshi's stomach jumped into his throat.
"Move!" Kaori grabbed him by the arm and yanked, hauling him off the couch as the floor tilted.
They ran.
The apartment was coming apart. Cracks spread across the walls like lightning, racing up to the ceiling. The TV toppled forward and shattered. The couch slid toward the window as the floor tilted further, groaning.
Kiyoshi's feet slipped. The world was at a fifteen-degree angle now, twenty, everything sliding toward the window, toward the drop.
Kaori shoved him toward the door. "Go, go, GO!"
He grabbed the doorframe, pulling himself through as the floor behind them gave way with a sound like the world breaking in half. He looked back, saw the couch tumble through the window in a spray of glass, saw the walls buckling inward.
"Don't look back!" Kaori was behind him, pushing him forward into the hallway.
The hallway was chaos. Other doors hung open. People screamed. An old man from 3B stumbled past, blood running from a cut on his forehead. The lights flickered and died, plunging them into darkness lit only by the sick tri-colored light coming through the stairwell window.
Kiyoshi ran.
The stairs were tilting, each step uneven, the whole building listing like a ship taking on water. His lungs burned. His head still throbbed with that impossible migraine, colors bleeding at the edges of his vision.
They made it down one flight.
Two.
The building roared.
It was the sound of a structure dying, of metal beams snapping and concrete pulverizing itself. The stairwell dropped out from under them just gone, collapsing down into the floors below.
Kiyoshi felt himself falling.
Then Kaori hit him from behind, arms wrapping around him, twisting in mid-air. She took the impact with her back, slamming into the landing of the second floor as debris rained down around them. Her breath left in a pained gasp.
"Kaori!"
"I'm fine..." She wasn't fine. She was wheezing, one arm wrapped around her ribs. But she was already pushing him forward. "Keep—moving—"
They crawled through the second-floor hallway. The building was falling apart in slow motion, each second another piece of structure giving way. Kiyoshi's hands scraped against broken concrete. Dust filled his lungs.
A window. There... ahead of them, a window overlooking the street.
Kaori smashed it with her elbow, ignoring the glass that bit into her sleeve. "Out. Now."
They were only on the second floor. Maybe a twelve-foot drop. Kiyoshi looked down at the buckled pavement below.
"Jump!"
He jumped.
The impact jarred through his ankles, his knees, but he rolled like Kaori had taught him when they'd watched those parkour videos. He came up on scraped palms, turning just in time to see her leap down after him.
She landed hard, stumbled, caught herself.
Behind them, the building collapsed.
It didn't fall all at once. It crumpled in on itself, floor by floor, each level pancaking onto the one below in a cascade of destruction. Dust exploded outward in a choking cloud. The sound was apocalyptic, a sustained thunder that seemed to go on forever.
Kiyoshi couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Could only stand there in the middle of the street, staring up at where his home had been, where his room had been, where all his things had been.
Gone.
All of it. Just... gone.
Kaori grabbed his hand. Her palm was slick with blood from the glass, but she had to smile to reassure Kiyoshi that everything was going to be alright.
"Don't tell me you're sad cuz your Nintendo was still in the building?" That seemed to lighten the mood for a moment, but one look at the street was enough to fling anyone into despair
The street was pandemonium. People ran in every direction. Some of those other people, looked just as terrified, just as lost. Buildings continued to collapse in the distance. Car alarms wailed. Somewhere, someone was screaming.
And above it all, three suns hung in a fractured sky.
The ground rumbled. Not shaking, rumbling, deep and continuous, like the planet itself was growling.
"This way." Kaori pulled him forward, weaving between debris and panicked crowds. She was limping, favoring her left leg. Blood dripped from her elbow where the glass had cut deep.
Kiyoshi held her hand tighter.
They ran through streets that were no longer streets, past buildings that hadn't existed an hour ago, through a world that had become something new and terrible and impossible.
They ran until Kiyoshi's lungs burned and his legs gave out, until Kaori half-carried him into the entrance of a parking garage that had somehow remained standing. They collapsed in the darkness, surrounded by the echoing sounds of catastrophe.
Kiyoshi's hands were shaking. His whole body was shaking.
"What's happening?" His voice came out small, childlike. "Kaori, what's happening?"
She pulled him close, one arm around his shoulders, and for the first time since the lights flickered, he felt her trembling too.
"I don't know," she whispered. "I don't know."
Outside, the world continued to end.
Earthquakes rolled through in waves. Thunder cracked across that impossible sky. And somewhere in the distance, something roared, something that didn't sound human, or like any animal Kiyoshi had ever heard.
It was only Day One.