Maya's POV
The eviction notice was still in my pocket when the world exploded.
One second, I was walking home under Seattle's gray sky, calculating which bill I could skip this month. The electric? The internet? My brain churned through numbers like it always did—rent due in three days, Derek's textbooks next week, my own stomach that hadn't seen a real meal in forty-eight hours.
The next second, reality tore open like paper.
Light slammed into me from every direction. My body stretched, compressed, shattered into a thousand pieces. I tried to scream but had no mouth. Tried to see but had no eyes. I was falling, flying, dying—all at once.
Then concrete.
Hard. Real. Painful.
I hit the ground so hard my teeth rattled. My palms scraped against broken asphalt, skin tearing, blood warm and immediate. For a moment, I just lay there, gasping, trying to remember how lungs worked.
Breathe. Just breathe.
I pushed myself up on shaking arms. My work blouse was torn. My slacks were covered in red dust. Everything hurt.
Then I looked up.
The sky was wrong.
Blood-red. Not sunset red. Not even fire red. This was the color of an open wound, pulsing like something alive. No sun. No clouds. Just that endless crimson stretched across a sky that felt too close, like it was pressing down, suffocating.
"What the—"
[SURVIVOR 1038, IDENTITY CONFIRMED.]
The voice punched into my skull. Digital. Cold. Not a sound I heard with my ears but with my brain, like someone had jammed a speaker directly into my head.
I clapped my hands over my ears. It didn't help.
[WELCOME TO THE CRIMSON WASTES. KINGDOM-BUILDING PROTOCOL INITIATED.]
"No, no, no—" My voice came out thin and broken. This wasn't real. Couldn't be real. I'd fallen asleep on the bus. Hit my head. Something.
[MISSION ONE: SURVIVE THE INCOMING TYPHOON. TIME LIMIT: 47 HOURS, 23 MINUTES. FAILURE CONDITION: PERMANENT DEATH.]
A holographic screen flickered to life in front of my face. Glowing blue text, floating in air, showing a countdown timer and a pulsing red dot labeled TYPHOON: CATEGORY 5 SUPERNATURAL EVENT.
My marketing coordinator brain—the one that spent eight hours a day making PowerPoint slides nobody read—tried to process this logically. Failed completely.
"This isn't happening," I whispered. "This isn't—"
"MAYA!"
My heart stopped.
I spun around, and there he was. Derek. My baby brother. Twenty-one years old, wearing his college hoodie and jeans, sprawled on the broken concrete ten feet away. His face was white with terror, eyes huge and lost like when he was five and had nightmares.
"Derek!" I scrambled toward him, ignoring my scraped hands and bruised knees. He grabbed me when I reached him, fingers digging into my arms.
"What's happening?" His voice cracked. "Where are we? Maya, I was just leaving class, and then—then I was falling, and—"
"I don't know." The lie tasted bitter. Because somehow, deep in my gut, I knew this was real. The pain was too sharp. The air smelled like rust and ash. And that voice in my head was still there, waiting.
[ADDITIONAL SURVIVOR DETECTED. SURVIVOR 1039, IDENTITY CONFIRMED: DEREK CHEN.]
Derek flinched. "You hear that too?"
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
[SIBLING BOND RECOGNIZED. STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE NOTED. BEGINNING ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTATION.]
The holographic screen expanded, showing what looked like a map. We were in the center—two blue dots. Around us, dozens of gray dots marked UNCLAIMED TERRITORY. And in the distance...
I turned toward the horizon.
My stomach dropped.
The city—or what was left of it—stretched before us. Skyscrapers stood like broken teeth, some collapsed entirely, others listing at impossible angles. Streets had become canyons of cracked concrete and twisted metal. Everything was covered in that red dust, like the whole world had bled out and dried up.
But worse than the ruins was what loomed beyond them.
A wall of black clouds spiraled on the horizon, so massive it looked like the sky was eating itself. Lightning crackled inside it—not white or yellow, but green and purple, colors that lightning shouldn't be. The whole thing rotated slowly, deliberately, like a living thing searching for prey.
And it was coming toward us.
"Oh God," Derek breathed. "Oh God, Maya, what is that?"
[TYPHOON DESIGNATION: THE DEVOURER. CURRENT DISTANCE: 47 KILOMETERS. ESTIMATED ARRIVAL: 47 HOURS, 19 MINUTES. SURVIVAL PROBABILITY WITHOUT SHELTER: 0.3%.]
Zero point three percent.
The number hung in my mind like a death sentence.
I'd spent seven years keeping us alive. Seven years since Mom and Dad died and left me with a fourteen-year-old brother and a mountain of debt. Seven years of working double shifts, skipping meals so Derek could eat, choosing his college fund over my own dreams.
I survived student loans, abusive bosses, apartments with black mold and heat that barely worked. I survived every cruel thing this world threw at me because I had to. Because Derek needed me.
And now some nightmare sky-voice was telling me I had a zero point three percent chance?
No.
Something hard and cold settled in my chest. Not fear. Anger.
I stood up, pulling Derek with me. My legs shook but held.
"We're not dying here," I said.
Derek stared at me like I'd lost my mind. "Maya, look at this place! We don't even know what's happening!"
"Then we figure it out." I scanned the ruins around us, and my brain started working again—really working, the way it did when I had a problem to solve. "That voice said we have forty-seven hours. That means there's a way to survive. We just have to find it."
[SKILL DETECTED: STRATEGIC ANALYSIS (RANK A). ANALYZING...]
What was that supposed to mean?
Before I could ask, something moved in the ruins to our left. A shadow, darting between buildings. Then another to our right. Footsteps echoed off concrete.
We weren't alone.
Derek grabbed my arm. "Maya—"
A figure stepped out from behind a collapsed wall fifty feet away. A man, maybe thirty, covered in that same red dust. He looked at us with eyes that were too bright, too focused.
Then he smiled.
And pulled out a knife.
[WARNING: HOSTILE SURVIVOR DETECTED. COMBAT PROTOCOLS ACTIVE. RECOMMENDATION: FLEE OR ENGAGE.]
The man started walking toward us. Not running. Walking. Like he had all the time in the world.
Behind him, two more figures emerged from the ruins.
My mind raced. Three of them. Two of us. No weapons. No shelter. A typhoon coming in forty-seven hours.
And apparently, the other survivors weren't interested in cooperation.
"Run," I whispered to Derek.
"Where?"
I grabbed his hand, picked a direction at random—away from the knife-man, toward what looked like a partially standing building—and ran.
Behind us, I heard laughter.
Then footsteps. Getting closer.