The days following the third duel had a different color.
The world no longer seemed merely wounded.
It was beginning to come apart.
Evan first felt it in small details.
The power went out for the first time in the middle of the night, then came back twenty minutes later. The next day, the water took longer than usual to turn hot. In the street, some traffic lights went dark intermittently before starting again without logic. Two streetlights in the neighborhood stayed dead for several days in a row without anyone coming to fix them.
Before, things like that would barely have existed to him.
Now, each one felt like one more piece of the world gone missing.
That morning, he woke up early without really having slept.
His mother's phone lay beside him on the bed. He looked at it for a few seconds before taking it and slipping it into his pocket.
Then he went into the living room.
The television turned on to a news channel he had been watching almost automatically since the first duel. For a moment, he thought he had made a mistake. The screen was black. Then a banner appeared, white against a dark background:
BROADCAST INTERRUPTED — TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES
He changed the channel.
A rerun.
Another one.
Then another, with a lone journalist in a studio too large for him, his voice low, his face drawn, as if he had not left his chair in days.
Evan remained still, remote in hand.
There were fewer active channels.
Less live coverage.
Fewer people on screen.
Even the information itself seemed to be emptying out.
The journalist's voice echoed through the too-quiet living room:
"...several sensitive infrastructures have been placed under reinforced surveillance following incidents linked to a lack of qualified personnel... Localized outages have been reported in several regions... Authorities are calling on citizens to limit non-essential travel..."
The image shifted to maps, colored areas, numbers, and city names Evan only half looked at.
Then to the face of a woman in a lab coat, standing very straight despite her exhaustion.
A scientist, apparently.
"We still cannot explain the exact mechanism behind the boxes," she said. "But we now know that the phenomenon is not isolated. If this population reduction continues with each cycle, then the demographic consequences will become catastrophic in the very short term."
Evan turned the volume up slightly.
The woman continued:
"This is no longer only a problem of mass mortality. It is an accelerated collapse of human systems. Production, logistics, healthcare, energy, maintenance... everything depends on a minimum number of people still capable of carrying out those functions."
The journalist interrupted:
"Are you saying that even before total disappearance, society could stop functioning?"
The scientist lowered her eyes slightly before answering.
"Yes."
The word fell without effect.
As if it was already too late for it to shock anyone.
Evan stared at the screen.
In one corner of the living room, his mother's old alarm clock had been showing the time a little late for three days. She would have noticed immediately. She would have complained, then reset it with a sigh.
The thought crossed Evan without warning, then vanished.
The scientist was still speaking.
"If the phenomenon continues according to a pattern of reduction comparable to what we have already observed, humanity will not only face human losses. It will face a growing inability to keep its own world functioning."
The journalist tried to ask another question, but the image cut off abruptly.
Back to the studio.
Another channel.
Another hollowed-out face.
The same gray background.
The same exhaustion.
***
Later, when Evan met Hugo in front of the building, Hugo raised a lukewarm coffee in a cardboard cup as if he were holding up some absurd victory.
"The machine at the station down the street still works," he said.
Evan looked at the cup.
"What does it taste like?"
Hugo shrugged.
"The end of the world."
Evan let out a breath through his nose.
Not a laugh.
Just a little air.
Hugo handed him the coffee anyway. Evan took a sip and immediately regretted it.
"Yeah," he said. "Very accurate flavor."
They started walking.
Over the past few days, their habit had settled in almost despite them. They met up, moved around a little, sometimes went to the gym, then each went home before night.
Not a normal routine.
A survivor's routine.
"Did you watch the news?" Hugo asked.
"Yeah."
"My dad found a radio that still works most of the time. They were talking about a power plant having problems somewhere in the east."
Evan shrugged slightly.
"I heard about a depot too. And a hospital running on reduced capacity since the second duel."
Hugo lowered his eyes for a few seconds.
"It feels like everything is falling apart piece by piece."
Evan looked straight ahead.
The street was almost empty at that hour.
Two people were crossing farther down with full bags. A scooter passed slowly. A dumpster was overflowing in front of a building, with no truck seeming likely to come.
"Yeah," he said. "And the worst part is that it doesn't make noise."
Hugo lifted his head.
Evan vaguely gestured toward the facades, the shutters, the closed storefronts.
"It's not like an explosion. It's just... things that don't hold anymore."
Hugo nodded slowly.
"Like people."
This time, the silence lasted longer.
Because neither of them could contradict that.
***
They passed a pharmacy where around ten people were waiting outside, speaking quietly. A sheet of paper taped to the window read:
OUT OF STOCK
INSULIN / ANTIBIOTICS / PAINKILLERS
PLEASE DO NOT INSIST
Farther on, a small convenience store had reopened, but not all the lights were on. Through the window, half-empty shelves and a single checkout line were visible.
A woman came out of the store clutching two bottles of water and a bag of rice against her chest as if someone might rip them away from her.
Hugo watched her pass.
"Before, I wouldn't even have noticed stuff like that."
"Before, there were too many people to notice it."
They kept walking.
Above them, the black ship still occupied the sky with the same monstrous certainty. Evan sometimes felt it weighed more heavily on gray days, as if even the morning light hesitated to pass through its presence.
***
They went to the gym late that morning.
The place was functioning more and more like an autonomous organism, tired but stubborn. At the entrance, the guards no longer asked everyone the same questions. They looked at bags, faces, hands. They already knew which profiles wasted time.
Evan and Hugo were allowed through without difficulty.
Not because they were welcome.
Because they had stopped being complete strangers.
Inside, the atmosphere was denser than the day before. Not louder. Heavier.
A radio crackled on a table near the supplies, spitting out words broken by interference. Evan caught only fragments:
"...maintenance impossible on several lines..."
"...local transitional government..."
"...network overloaded..."
"...estimated population..."
"...new evacuated zone..."
No sensationalism.
No dramatic music.
Just tired voices announcing things no one had the energy to pretend were temporary anymore.
Hugo stopped for a moment near the radio.
"Did you notice?" he asked.
"What?"
"They're talking less about the aliens."
Evan listened for a few seconds.
Yes.
Hugo was right.
They barely spoke about the ship for what it was anymore.
They mostly spoke about what it left behind.
Failures.
Deaths.
Shortages.
Gatherings.
Empty buildings.
Overwhelmed hospitals.
Collapsing networks.
The ship was no longer just an apparition in the sky.
It had become the cause of everything.
"At first," Hugo said, "it was, 'What is it?' Now it's almost just, 'What do we do?'"
Evan looked around him.
A woman was folding blankets. Two men were moving water. An old radio was still coughing out its metallic breath. Farther away, figures moved from one task to another as if fatigue had replaced their names.
"Yeah," he replied. "Because we already know we can't do anything to it."
Hugo did not answer.
There was not much left to add to that.
***
They helped for part of the day.
Nothing spectacular.
Water to carry. Crates to move. Blankets to sort. A list to copy because the ink on the other one had smudged. Mattresses to push closer to a wall to make space.
The gym looked less and less like an improvised shelter and more and more like a poor, brutal version of a small society.
People there took on roles without truly having chosen them.
Those who guarded.
Those who organized.
Those who watched the supplies.
Those who tried to keep some semblance of hygiene.
Those who already seemed harder than the others.
Those who looked at newcomers as if they first had to prove they had the right to exist there.
At one point, Evan spotted the girl from the gym at the far end of the court.
Lisa.
He still did not know her name.
She was helping move empty jugs with another survivor. They barely spoke. Apparently, they did not need to.
She passed near him without slowing down, glanced briefly at the crates he was carrying, then at his arm where his grip was wrong.
"If you carry them like that, you're going to wreck your wrist," she said.
The same tone as before.
Neither harsh nor kind.
Just clear.
Evan adjusted his grip almost at once, partly out of reflex.
When he looked up again, she had already moved on.
Hugo, who had seen the scene, murmured very quietly:
"She still gives me the same feeling."
"What feeling?"
"That she already knows how all of this ends and just decided to keep moving anyway."
Evan did not answer.
Because he was not sure that was wrong.
***
In the early afternoon, the gym's radio broadcast something clearer than usual.
A man was speaking.
Not a journalist. Not really a politician either.
Maybe a researcher. Maybe a demographer. His voice was calm, almost too calm for what he was saying.
"...if the reduction phenomenon continues over time, we must stop thinking only in terms of the number of deaths. What matters now is the speed at which the survivors become insufficient to sustain the entire system..."
Evan, who was walking past with two bottles of water, slowed down without realizing it.
The voice continued:
"In many regions, we are already observing a partial breakdown of ordinary maintenance. This concerns energy, transport, healthcare, and certain industrial facilities. Even without total disappearance, a society can stop functioning long before it has lost all of its members."
A brief burst of static cut through the sentence.
Then the voice returned.
"If this process repeats, some areas will become uninhabitable not because there will be no one left, but because there will no longer be enough people in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills."
The silence in the gym was not total.
But there were sometimes these small dips where certain sentences sank deeper than others.
This was one of them.
Not because it revealed something unknown.
Because it put cold words to what everyone was already beginning to see.
Hugo appeared beside Evan, holding an empty crate.
"That's what scares me the most now," he said, not taking his eyes off the radio.
Evan turned his head slightly toward him.
"What?"
"That one day, we survive the box... and there's nothing left working around us."
The sentence hung there.
Then the radio crackled again, swallowed a few words, and moved on to another subject.
As if the future had just been summarized in one sentence before disappearing into the noise.
***
They left the gym late in the afternoon.
The sky was still overcast. The light lower. The streets still too large.
On the way back, they passed a small electrical transformer surrounded by temporary barriers. Two men in fluorescent vests were working on it under the watch of a soldier.
The scene was ordinary.
Almost reassuring.
And yet Evan was struck by the fact that it already seemed exceptional.
Seeing people still repairing something felt like witnessing some kind of ordinary miracle.
"You see that?" Hugo murmured.
Evan nodded.
"Yeah."
They walked a few more meters before Hugo spoke again:
"Do you think one day there just won't be enough people left to maintain anything?"
Evan thought of the broadcast. The numbers. The increasingly rare faces in the streets. The blackened buildings. The shorter lines. The almost empty buses.
Then he looked up at the ship.
"I think that's where we're headed," he said.
Hugo did not answer.
Because deep down, they both knew he was right.
***
When Evan got home, the television was still showing the same gray studio, with fewer people than before, fewer useless words, fewer promises.
He muted it.
His mother's phone in his pocket felt heavier after that kind of day.
Not because it had changed.
Because the world around it kept moving without her.
He took it out.
Set it on the coffee table.
Then sat down on the couch, looking at the dark sky beyond the window.
The third duel was already behind him.
The next one would come.
Between the two, survivors were doing what they could to remain standing in the middle of a world that was slowly losing its supports.
Evan thought of the gym.
Of the people clinging to it.
Of those still speaking on the radio.
Of those trying to repair things.
Then of all the others.
Those who no longer had the energy.
Those who stayed alone.
Those who might die without even entering a box.
The white box did not only take lives.
It also wore down everything around them.
And the more he thought about it, the more Evan understood that surviving the duels would never be enough.
They would also have to survive what the duels left behind.