Hana woke to the taste of ash.
It clung to her tongue, her teeth, the back of her throat. Each time she inhaled, the air scraped like sandpaper, thick with dust and something sharper—something chemical.
She coughed once, twice, then forced herself to breathe deeper. The burn spread through her lungs like wildfire.
This is new, she thought, blinking grit from her lashes.
She pushed herself upright. The world around her was a smear of gray, a landscape erased and redrawn in charcoal. Buildings sagged like exhausted giants. Cars lay overturned, their metal skeletons still steaming. The sky was a bruised, unmoving sheet of smoke.
Hana rubbed her eyes.
The last thing she remembered was the prison bus—sirens, shouting, the metallic slam of the doors. She'd broken into that bus more times than she'd broken out of it. A revolving door of bad decisions and worse luck.
But this time felt different. The guards were nervous. The air had tasted strange even then.
Silence. Then a flash. A roar. And another quiet moment, so incomplete it felt like the world had stopped breathing.
She stood, wobbling slightly. Her boots crunched over a layer of fine gray powder. She brushed some off her sleeve, looking at her arm.
It glowed.
Not brightly—just a faint, sickly shimmer, like moonlight trapped under her skin. She held her breath and lifted her hand. The glow pulsed once, twice, in time with her heartbeat.
A small laugh escaped her.
Radioactive. She was radioactive.
She flexed her fingers, and the glow brightened, humming through her bones. It wasn't painful—not exactly. More like pressure. Power. A coiled storm waiting for permission to break loose.
Hana exhaled slowly.
She took a few steps forward, surveying the ruins.
The apocalypse—the apocalypse—had finally happened. It felt like she had been expecting it, half daring the universe to try her. And now here it was, sprawled at her feet like a gift wrapped in smoke and devastation.
"No laws. No rules," she murmured. "Finally."
A gust of wind swept through the street, stirring the ash into swirling ghosts. Hana shielded her eyes and kept walking. The city was unrecognizable, but she felt strangely calm. Maybe it was because of shock. Maybe it was the radiation humming under her skin like a second heartbeat. Maybe it was the fact that, for the first time in her life, she wasn't being watched, judged, or locked up.
She was free.
But freedom came with questions. Big ones. Like: What happened? Who survived?
She rounded a corner and stopped dead.
There was a figure, standing in the middle of the street.
Watching her.
Hana's pulse spiked, and the glow in her bones flared in response. She clenched her fists, trying to steady her breathing. It didn't move. Didn't speak. Just stared through the haze.
A twig under her boot snapped, causing an echo.
The figure tilted its head.
Hana took a step back. The glow in her chest surged, heat blooming beneath her ribs. She didn't know how to properly control it yet—didn't know if she could—but instinct told her she was seconds away from either defending herself or accidentally vaporizing something.
"This is it," she whispered. "The apocalypse."
The figure took a single step toward her.
Hana's power roared to life.
And the new age began.