The university used to overlook the sea.Now the sea overlooks them.
Aaroon and Darius move through the shattered hallway of the northern wing. The once-glass corridor now hangs over the lower campus like a broken limb, twisted steel reflecting the bruised sky. Puddles ripple under their boots, echoes of the flood still clinging to the world.
Darius leads, flashlight cutting through drifting mist. "Stay close," he says. "The floor's unstable. Roofs collapsed into the plaza."
Aaroon steps carefully over fallen ceiling panels. "Feels wrong, doesn't it? "
Darius gives a short, humorless laugh. "After last night? Everything feels wrong."
They pause where the corridor opens into the old library courtyard. Half of it's gone, sunk into a crater where the earth had liquefied. Books drift in the remaining water like dead leaves, its pages curling as they dry.
The silence is suffocating. No birds. No traffic. No hum of electricity. Only the creak of metal, the slow drip of water over their heads, and the distant echo of waves.
Aaroon crouches beside a collapsed bench. "Someone's been here," he says. "Footprints."
Darius kneels beside him. There are wet boot marks leading toward the edge, fresher than they should be.
"Could be one of ours," Aaroon adds, scanning the tracks. "Or someone from another campus shelter."
"Maybe," Darius mutters. "But if they were human, they'd have come back when the flood ended."
Aaroon frowns. "You think they didn't make it?"
"I think…" Darius glances toward the bay. "I think people change when the world does. Sometimes not for the better."
They descend a flight of cracked stairs toward the lower field. Salt crusts the railing; the air is thick with brine and rust. To their left, the athletics dome has caved in, the turf glistening with trapped water. Beyond it, the ocean back to normal, a massive mirror reflecting the bright orange morning sky.
Darius stops, raising his binoculars. "Look at that."
"What?"
"Out there." He points toward the horizon.
Aaroon takes the binoculars. The bay floor dips into a vast, jagged wound, a trench that wasn't supposed to be there before. The edges shimmer faintly, as though the seafloor itself were breathing.
"Earthquake?" Aaroon asks.
"Or something worse," Darius replies. "I've seen sinkholes after storms, but nothing like this. That's kilometers wide."
A low vibration trembles through the ground, subtle but deep, a pulse that hums through their boots and bones. The puddles nearby quiver, concentric ripples spreading outward.
"Did you feel that?" Aaroon asks.
Darius nods, his face tight. "It's not aftershocks. It's coming from below."
The two men stand there, staring at the sea. For a moment, it almost feels alive, watching, listening, waiting for the next command.
Darius breaks the silence. "Let's get back. We've seen enough."
They turn to leave. Aaroon hesitates, spotting something half-submerged near the stairwell: a drone, cracked and flickering weakly. He picks it up, brushing away the grit.
"It's one of Jasmine's," he says. "She sent it out during the flood."
He powers it on. The small screen sputters to life, static, distortion, then a fleeting image:a submerged landscape, illuminated in eerie blue light. For half a second, the camera catches something massive gliding past, a shadow that doesn't match any known creature. Then the feed cuts to black.
Aaroon and Darius exchange a look.
"Could be a whale," Darius says, his tone unconvincing.
"Could be," Aaroon replies quietly.
He slips the damaged drone into his pack. Neither says another word as they start the climb back up the slope. Behind them, the wind howls through the wreckage, and far out in the bay, the water shivers as though something immense had just exhaled beneath the waves.
By the time they reach the main hall, the sky has begun to darken again.Half their dry hours are gone.
And the ocean is coming.