The five of us — Shivam, Aman, Aanchal, Naina, and Dikshant — moved cautiously through the skeletal remains of old streets, ducking between collapsed billboards and abandoned, rotting cars.
Above us, the sky no longer looked natural. It flickered — like a dying television screen — switching between shades of dark grey and bruised purple. Looming overhead, massive structures floated eerily — entire sectors of the old city, torn from the earth and suspended without any visible support. They hovered silently, heavy and unmovable, like ancient gods watching over the broken land.
Twisted flyovers and half-collapsed towers jutted into the air around us, casting long, crooked shadows that slithered across the cracked streets.
We found an old storefront half-buried under debris. The windows were shattered, the door barely clinging to its hinges. A battered sign above it read something faded — maybe a general store once, or a clothing shop.
Inside, it smelled of damp dust, mold, and something else — the stale scent of abandonment. It wasn't much — but it was shelter.
Aanchal pushed deeper in, her phone's dying flashlight cutting thin beams through the darkness.
Near the back, we stumbled across shelves toppled over, and crates of old, moth-eaten clothes. No brands. No colors. Just basic, forgotten survival wear.
Without speaking, we changed out of our torn uniforms, the silence weighing heavy.
As I pulled on a worn jacket, something slipped from the pocket — a crumpled, half-burnt piece of paper.
I smoothed it out carefully.
At the top, barely legible:
"DATE: 17th March, 2156."
The realization hit like a punch to the chest.
We hadn't just stumbled into ruins — we had fallen out of time. Over a century lost. And this…this was all that remained.
Hunger clawed at our insides. We scavenged the ruined store desperately, finding a few half-melted snack bars and sealed water bottles buried beneath collapsed shelves.
It wasn't a meal. It wasn't even hope.
But it was enough to keep moving.
Morning came slowly — bleeding into the world like a wounded thing.
A sickly, grey light filtered down through the cracked sky. No birds, no breeze. Just the low, almost electrical hum that seemed to leak from the floating structures high above.
It was Aman who finally spoke. "We should check our homes," he said, his voice rough.
"They're not that far."
We started walking — Rohini was about 20 kilometers away — but every step deeper into the city felt like slipping into a nightmare.
Sidewalks were split into jagged, yawning crevices. Entire buildings hung at strange angles, defying logic.
In the distance, skyscrapers leaned like drunkards, their shattered glass eyes watching us.
Stray figures — thin, broken people — stared at us from alleys and ruins, their faces blank, almost ghostlike.
We were being watched.
Every rustle, every gust of sick air made us turn sharply.
Shadows flickered too quickly across broken streets.
Footsteps — soft, almost polite — sometimes echoed behind us.
But whenever we spun around, there was nothing.
Nothing... yet.
We scavenged along the way — looted a broken-down pharmacy for bandages and a few faded medicine packets. Smashed vending machines for anything remotely edible.
First was Aman's place.
Or what was left of it.
A charred skeleton of what used to be a home, twisted iron rods and cracked concrete stretching up into the sickly grey sky like fingers grasping for something they could never reach.
Aman stood there silently, his face unreadable. But his hands trembled slightly, fists clenching and unclenching, the only betrayal of what raged beneath the surface.
Naina's house was next.
Still standing — but just barely.
The outer walls were scorched, windows shattered. Inside, it was hollow and blackened, a burnt-out shell.
Naina stepped forward, slowly. Her fingers brushed against the doorway she must've walked through a thousand times before. She didn't cry. None of us did. Maybe we couldn't. Maybe the fear and shock had burned even that out of us.
Aanchal's place — looted, trashed, but at least the structure remained.
We scavenged through the wreckage — finding a few half-used batteries, dented cans of food, and a rusted multi-tool barely holding together.
It wasn't much. But it was something.
Dikshant's and my home was the last.
It hit harder than I thought it would.
The house — the one Mom had polished until it gleamed, the one Dad had insisted was our "safe place" — was crushed under the corpse of an ancient, fallen tree.
Bricks spilled out like guts, splinters of furniture scattered across the dirt. The blue paint Mom had loved so much was barely visible under the grime and dust.
We stood in the ruins of everything we had ever known.
There were no tears. Just a hollow silence, so thick it choked us.
We gathered near the shattered fountain that once marked the heart of our neighborhood.
It used to sing with clean water and kids' laughter.
Now, it was a broken mess of cracked stone and twisted iron, the water long gone, replaced by silence and ash.
Five of us.
No home. No family. No familiar world left.
Only each other.
And the darkness pressing in from every side.
As night swallowed the wreckage around us, a new fear crept in.
We weren't alone.
Shadows lurked at the edges of ruined alleys — thin, desperate shapes watching us with hollow eyes.
A rustle. A whisper.
Then they moved.
Figures — once human, now barely more than skin stretched over bone — lunged from the darkness.
It wasn't a robbery.
It was something uglier.
Their eyes — sunken and wild — locked onto Aanchal and Naina with a hunger that made my blood run cold.
They wanted the girls.
We fought back.
It was clumsy, desperate — shoving, kicking, swinging broken pieces of pipe and stone.
They were weak, sluggish — years of starvation had gnawed at them from the inside out.
Still, they were vicious.
Aman's knuckles split open on a beggar's jaw.
Naina swung a shard of wood, catching another attacker across the temple.
I slammed into a thin man with cracked glasses, feeling bones shift under the impact.
Blood — ours and theirs — stained the ground.
By some miracle, we won.
Bruised, bleeding, gasping for air — but still standing.
We didn't waste time.
Aanchal and Naina quickly ripped pieces of cloth from the scavenged clothes and wrapped their hair, hiding it under makeshift scarves.
It was dangerous to be noticed.
Too dangerous.
One of the attackers — a filthy beggar with one eye milky and dead — was still breathing, moaning weakly on the ground.
Aman knelt beside him, voice hard.
"Tell us," He growled. "Where is safe?"
The man coughed, spitting blood, but fear loosened his tongue.
The spoke of the "sectors" — floating structures above Delhi's corpse, shimmering dark monoliths in the poisoned sky.
The rich had abandoned the ground long ago, retreating into gleaming cities that floated effortlessly, suspended by technology none of us could understand.
Above, entire sectors drifted — Sector 8, Sector 9 — like forgotten gods.
The beggar rasped about a secret way up.
A mining site, hidden near the old Bypass along GT Karnal Road.
A tunnel where the floating sectors dumped their garbage, and where workers were sometimes taken — the broken, the desperate.
A way in. It wasn't much. But it was hope.
As the man fell silent, his last breath rattling in the dust, we looked up.
The night sky pulsed dimly with sick light, the floating cities looming like silent judges.
We had a new mission now.
Get to GT Karnal Road.
Find the mine.
And claw our way into a world that had already abandoned us.
We moved into the ruins, wounded but not broken — yet.
The air around us was heavy, thicker than before, like the city itself was breathing down our necks.
We moved through the ruins with quiet steps, slipping past fallen billboards and crumbling concrete, the distant groaning of broken buildings filling the air like dying whispers.
Above us, the floating sectors loomed — monstrous slabs of metal and glass hanging in the sky, weightless, effortless, like forgotten gods staring down at the wreckage below.
They didn't need engines or cables to stay afloat.
They just floated there — whole cities torn from the earth and stitched into the sky, casting long, shifting shadows over the dead streets.
We didn't belong to that world anymore. Maybe we never had.
The night sky was wrong — too dark, too still.
The stars seemed scattered in unfamiliar patterns, as if someone had grabbed the sky and shaken it like a snow globe.
As we moved toward the GT Karnal Bypass, the ground beneath us grew more twisted, more broken.
Cars were fused into the concrete like melted skeletons.
Storefronts leaned at impossible angles.
We passed a half-burned bus still carrying the charred remains of passengers inside, their faces forever frozen in panic. Nobody spoke much.
We scavenged where we could — pockets of old shops and half-collapsed houses.
Found a flashlight that flickered more than it worked. A few dented cans of food. Rusted knives. Dikshant even pulled a dusty backpack from under a fallen roof — still intact, still usable.
Everywhere we went, we felt it — eyes watching us from the ruins. Not machines.
People. Broken, hollow-eyed shadows clinging to the edges of the dying city.
Some followed us for a while, their footsteps soft against the cracked roads. We picked up the pace.
First it was a beggar boy, too thin to be a threat. Then two older figures — men, maybe — keeping their distance but closing in.
When we glanced back, they'd vanish behind wreckage, only to reappear again further down the street.
"They're following us," Aman muttered, not bothering to whisper.
"Yeah," I said. "I see them."
We tried to lose them, ducking through alleys and over rubble piles, but they stayed with us, like vultures circling something already dying.
When the attack came, it was sudden and messy.
One of the men lunged from the shadows, grabbing at Aanchal. She fought back hard, slamming her elbow into his ribs. Another man rushed at Naina, who barely dodged in time. We fought like cornered animals. Dikshant smashed a broken pipe across a man's face. Aman tackled another to the ground, punching wildly. I swung my rusted flashlight like a club, connecting with bone.
The men were bigger, but they were slow — starved, desperate. We were faster. Angrier. We knew what was at stake. Blood was spilled, but it wasn't ours.
Panting and bruised, we stood over the last conscious attacker — an old man with wild eyes and cracked lips.
He spat at the ground, snarling, but there was no fight left in him.
"Why were you following us?" I demanded.
He laughed — a dry, broken sound.
"You don't belong here," he wheezed. "Girls like them... they're currency now. Worth more than food. Worth more than anything."
A chill ran down my spine.
Without thinking, Aanchal and Naina grabbed cloth from the wreckage and covered their hair, wrapping themselves tight, hiding their faces as best they could.
We couldn't afford to draw attention anymore.
Not if we wanted to stay alive.
"Tell us something useful," Aman growled, kicking dust into the man's face.
"Or we leave you for the dogs."
The man coughed, chuckled bitterly.
"You want to get up there?" he jerked his head toward the floating cities above us.
"You'll never make it through the gates. Only way in... is the mines."
"What mines?" I asked, stepping closer.
"Near the Bypass," he rasped. "North side.
Old industrial garbage mines.
They take workers there. Garbage runners.
Some of 'em get pulled up... into the floating sectors... to clean their filth."
"And how do we get in?" Naina asked, her voice cold.
"Blend in," he grinned, showing yellow teeth. "Or fight your way in. Either way... you're dead either side."
We left him there, lying in the dust. No goodbyes.
We regrouped behind the shattered husk of an old petrol station, catching our breath.
Wounds were checked — bruises, shallow cuts — nothing fatal.
Not yet. The sky above rumbled quietly, a slow pulse of thunderless noise from the floating cities.
I tightened the straps of my scavenged backpack and looked at the others. "We've got our way in," I said. Aman wiped blood from his cheek.
"Yeah," he muttered. "If we survive the mines."
We stood together; five kids lost in a world that had forgotten them.
No home. No family.
Only a broken map and a plan built out of desperation.
Above us, the floating sectors drifted silently across the ash-choked sky, casting long shadows over the dying earth.
And somewhere ahead, buried in the ruins, was our only chance to escape.