Mira's POV
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My legs are still moving on their own.
That feeling_ that pull from underground, that crack in my chest_ lasts exactly seven seconds and then disappears like it was never there. Like someone turned off a switch. I stop walking. I am standing ten feet from the Dungeon Gate and my heart is hammering so loud I can hear it in my ears.
I look down at my hands.
Nothing. They look normal. They feel normal.
I press my palm flat against my sternum and breathe. Whatever that was, it is gone now. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe grief does strange things to people. Maybe being handed a white cloth by your own father and then watching your fiancé hide behind a curtain is enough to make a person feel things that aren't real.
I turn around.
I still have three hours.
And I am going to use one of them on Cole Henshaw whether he likes it or not.
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I knew Cole before the meteors came.
We were sixteen the first time he talked to me_ really talked to me, not just the polite nothing that neighbors say to each other. He found me sitting alone on the broken wall at the edge of the zone and he sat next to me and said, "You always look like you're thinking about something that nobody else can see." And I thought that was the most seen I had ever felt in my entire life.
I said yes when he asked me to be his girl six months later.
I said yes when he called himself my protector.
I said yes and yes and yes because Cole was the first person who ever made me feel like I wasn't invisible. Like I was worth looking at. Like I mattered.
I think about all of that as I walk to his house. I think about how much I built on top of that one sentence on that broken wall. How many years of yes. How much quiet and patience and waiting for him to be what I needed him to be.
I knock on his door before I can change my mind.
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His mother opens it.
She is a small woman with tired eyes and she looks at the white cloth under my arm and her face does that complicated thing_ the flicker of pity, the undercurrent of relief_ and I know before she opens her mouth what she is going to say.
"He's not here, Mira."
I look past her shoulder into the house. Everything still. Everything quiet. The kind of quiet that is trying too hard.
"Okay," I say.
I don't move.
She doesn't close the door.
We stand there for a second that feels much longer than a second and then I look up. Second floor. The window above the front door. The curtain is pale yellow and completely still.
And then it moves.
Just the bottom corner. Just a small shift, the kind that happens when someone standing very close to a window shifts their weight from one foot to the other. The kind of movement a curtain makes when a person is behind it trying very hard not to be seen.
He is there.
He is standing right there.
He can see me. He can see the white cloth. He knows exactly what is happening and he is choosing to stand behind a curtain and let it happen.
I count to five in my head. I don't know why. Maybe I am giving him a chance to come down. Maybe I am giving myself five seconds to stop hoping before hope becomes something embarrassing.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
The curtain doesn't move again.
I look back at his mother. She can't hold my eyes. She looks at the ground between us and I understand then that she is ashamed_ not ashamed enough to call her son downstairs, but ashamed. Like that is supposed to mean something. Like shame without action is a kind of apology.
"Thank you," I say.
I don't know why I say that either. Force of habit, maybe. Mira Voss, always polite. Always grateful. Always making other people comfortable while she handles her own pain alone in a corner somewhere.
I turn around.
-
I walk back toward the main road and I feel it happening in my chest_ that quiet, final closing. Like a door. Like the last door in a long hallway that I have been walking down for years, checking each one, and now they are all shut and I have run out of hallway.
Cole was my last one.
My family closed their doors before the alarm even stopped wailing. Cole waited until he could see me standing on his doorstep with a white cloth before he closed his. At least he waited, some small stupid part of me thinks. And then I am angry at myself for that thought. For still looking for reasons to give people credit for failing me gently.
I stop in the middle of the road.
I stand there and I let myself feel it_ the full specific weight of it. Not just today. All of it. Every dinner where my father looked through me. Every time my mother forgot to mention me to people who asked how many kids she had. Every time Cole said I'll always come for you and I believed him because I needed so badly for one person to mean what they said.
I feel it.
And then I put it down.
Not because it doesn't hurt. It does. It hurts in the deep quiet way that the worst things hurt_ not loud, not sharp, just permanent. But I put it down because I refuse to walk into whatever comes next carrying weight that belongs to other people.
My name is Mira Voss. I am twenty-four years old. I have been forgotten, overlooked, and handed over. And I am still standing in the middle of this road, upright, breathing, with my ring in my pocket and my hands steady.
That is something.
I start walking toward Senna's house because Senna is the one person who I know without any doubt will answer the door.
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She does.
She opens it before I even knock_ like she was waiting just on the other side_ and the moment she sees my face and the white cloth her whole expression breaks open and she grabs my arm with both hands and says, "No. Absolutely not. I know about the tunnels, Mira, I know someone who—"
"Senna—"
"Don't you dare say my name like that. Don't you dare be calm right now."
I open my mouth to answer her.
And then every single light in the zone goes out at once.
Every lamp. Every glowing post. Every window.
Total darkness.
And in that darkness, from somewhere deep underground, something screams.
Not an animal sound. Not a human sound.
A sound like nothing I have ever heard_ long and winding and aimed, somehow, like it is looking for something specific.
Senna's grip on my arm becomes crushing.
"Mira," she whispers. "That sound."
"I know," I whisper back.
"It's getting closer."
She's right.
It is.