The world had stopped mid-breath. Buildings leaned in jagged silhouettes, windows gaped like empty eyes, and streets lay deserted beneath a sky the color of ash. Liam, Kade, Serena, and Dorian wandered apart through the ruins, each carrying their own questions into the quiet.
Serena spent two days alone with the silence chewing at her edges. She searched stairwells and hollow apartments until her voice turned hoarse.
"Mom? Dad?"
No one answered.
A half-collapsed supermarket kept her alive. Canned food still lined a few dusty shelves. She slept on cardboard, waking in fits, heart hammering at sounds that weren't there.
On the third day, footsteps scraped across broken tile. She shot upright. A figure stood in the aisle's gray light, wary, tired, gentle-eyed.
"You okay?" Liam asked, voice low.
Relief broke across her face so fast it stung. "I've been looking for my parents. There's no one. What is this place?"
"I don't know," he said, kneeling to her level. "But we'll figure it out. We need to stick with each other."
They sat among dented cans and toppled displays. Liam told a small story, nothing important, to help her relax.
"Thank you," she whispered. "I didn't think I'd meet anyone."
"We're in it together now," he said. "We'll start looking for answers."
Across the city, Kade prowled the ribs of an old apartment block, muttering at dead screens. Phones lay everywhere like fossils. None would light.
"No signal. No power," he said to the empty rooms, mocking himself in the tone he used online. The bravado wore thin. Families he'd mocked once flickered through his head, photos of birthdays, shared jokes, warmth. The jealousy returned like an ache.
"Why did they get that life? While i am stuck in here." His voice was small in the dust.
At the city's edge Dorian walked until the ruins narrowed to scrub and broken fences. Memory trailed him like a shadow, the courtroom, the lawyer's practiced sigh, a smirk on the courthouse steps, rain washing red from his hands. Here there were no sirens and no cells. Just a place where the law had never arrived.
It should have felt like freedom. It didn't.
He found Kade in a dim restaurant that had survived by habit more than structure. Air heavy. Booths slumped. A plate of something edible enough sat half-eaten on a table. Kade glanced up, surprised in the same moment Dorian froze.
"Guess I'm not the last man alive," Kade said, forcing a crooked smile. "Been a while since I saw a face."
"I thought I was losing it," Dorian admitted, scanning the corners out of reflex before sitting. "Name's Dorian."
"Kade." He gestured to the seat. "You look as confused as I feel."
They compared theories because theories kept panic at bay. Kade's eyes lit with the comfort of a story. "Ninety-nine percent aliens. Look around, none of this fits. Different rules. No people. It's like we got scooped into some experiment."
"Or a simulation," Dorian said. "Or nothing at all. Dead men don't feel hungry, though."
Kade huffed. "Government project? Secret city? I'm taking bets."
"Maybe it's simpler," Dorian said, folding his arms. "We woke somewhere we desperately wanted to go to."
They ate. The food tasted like something almost food. The quiet made them talk, and talking made them human again, until Kade chuckled at a statue split neatly in two by time.
"Whoever broke that had taste," he joked. "Left only the good half."
Dorian went still. The joke fell between them like glass. "Don't."
Kade blinked. "Relax. I didn't mean.."
"You don't know what you're saying." The heat in Dorian's voice surprised even him. He breathed, unclenched his fists. "People carry things you can't see."
Kade's grin collapsed into something contrite. "You're right. I'm sorry. Sometimes I talk before I think."
"I'm sorry," Kade said, and meant it. "I'll be more careful."
They let the moment pass. Not forgiven, exactly, understood.
Days became a rhythm of searching. Two pairs, then one group moving without knowing they were converging, reading road signs in five languages, finding hospitals with equipment that looked familiar until it didn't, discovering photographs of uncanny figures in clothing that fit too well to be costumes. No birds. No insects. No stray dog trotting down an alley. The absence was louder than any noise.
A word began appearing on walls and doors in sprayed letters, sometimes neat, sometimes frantic: ALIZAXA. None of them knew what it meant.
One afternoon the air buckled.
Not a sound, exactly, a pressure wave inside their skulls, as if the world had coughed. Kade and Dorian staggered to the doorway of the restaurant. In the street, where there had been nothing, a house sat listing in the dust, peeling paint, slumped porch, the weight of years on a foundation that hadn't existed a heartbeat ago.
They circled it warily. The place radiated wrongness, like a memory wearing a mask. Inside, five minutes of dust and emptiness and creaking floorboards. No furniture. No footprints. Only the feeling of being watched by something that wasn't in the room.
They left, not sure what they'd failed to see.
Serena, still learning the shapes of this world, turned at the sound of a sharp breath. Two men stood at the end of the street, the younger with wary eyes and a defensive posture, the older moving like a coiled spring. Surprise ricocheted between them.
They approached too fast.
"When did you get here?"
"How did you arrive?"
"What do you remember?"
"Do you know where we are?"
"Hey, slow down." Serena lifted her hands. "I'm confused too."
Dorian's gaze measured her, protective by instinct. "Who are you?"
"Serena."
Before the next question could rise, footsteps pounded from around the corner. Liam appeared, breath fogging, eyes narrowing when he saw the strangers near her. He crossed the space in three strides and angled himself just ahead of her shoulder, not aggressive, present.
"You two," he said evenly. "Where did you come from?"
"Restaurant a few blocks over," Kade said, palms open. "We're not here to start anything."
Dorian nodded once. "We're just trying to figure this out."
Questions overlapped, fragments of origin, flashes of arrival, the house that shouldn't have been. The chaos softened as the four of them realized how much of their confusion matched. Serena rubbed at her temple, overwhelmed; Liam steadied the tempo of the conversation with calm, simple prompts.
"Let's sit," he suggested finally. "Somewhere off the street."
They found a hollowed-out office nearby, its windows blown and its lobby scattered with paper that had long since forgotten its words. The four of them settled on cracked vinyl chairs beneath a ceiling that ticked as it cooled. Outside, the wind moved dust through the door like a tide.
They sat together in the shell of an abandoned office building. Dust floated in the shafts of light that slipped through cracked windows, and the air smelled faintly of rust and damp paper. Outside, the wind hummed through the empty streets, a reminder that this strange world was still, somehow, alive.
At first, no one spoke. They were four strangers sitting at a table that looked like it had survived an explosion. The silence pressed on them until Serena finally broke it.
"I think we need to talk," she said quietly. "We need to figure out what's happening to us."
The others nodded. One by one, the questions began to spill out.
Liam leaned forward, his brow furrowed. "When did you all get here? What's the first thing you remember?"
Serena hesitated, fingers tracing circles in the dust. "Two… maybe three days ago. I woke up in my room, or what I thought was my room. Then I realized everything was gone. The city, the people… everything." She glanced at Liam. "You?"
"Same," he said. "I think I fell asleep, and when I opened my eyes, I was here. No sound, no light from the city. Just ruins."
Dorian folded his arms, gaze fixed on the floor. "I was running through the woods. The next thing I remember, I stepped out and this city was just, there." His voice dropped to a low rumble. "Like it had been waiting."
Kade exhaled through his nose, half laughing, half trying to keep his nerves hidden. "I was sitting at my desk, typing. Then the screen went black. When I looked up, I was on the street. No transition, no warning, just gone."
They shared a look. The same bewilderment flickered in each face, the same quiet fear they didn't yet have the courage to name.
Serena's voice trembled slightly. "Did anyone see you before you came here? Talk to you? A stranger, maybe?"
Dorian shook his head. "No one. I was alone."
Liam rubbed the back of his neck. "Same here. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just… the world changing between one heartbeat and the next."
Kade leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "So we all just, vanished. Different places, different moments. No link. That doesn't make sense."
"None of this does," Serena replied. "It feels like we've been dropped into a world that doesn't belong to us."
A long pause settled over them. Outside, a piece of metal rattled in the wind.
Liam finally spoke, his tone steady but thoughtful. "Do any of you remember why this could've happened? Did something happen before, something that connects us?"
They exchanged uncertain glances. Dorian's jaw clenched, and he looked away first. Kade fidgeted with a broken piece of glass, avoiding their eyes. Serena's throat tightened as she thought of her fiancé's betrayal, the laughter of her friends, the hollow feeling that followed. Liam watched them all, realizing that each of them was hiding something they weren't ready to say.
"No," Serena said at last. "But maybe… maybe we're not here by accident."
"What do you mean?" Kade asked.
She lifted her gaze toward the shattered window. "Maybe we were meant to see this place. To understand something. Or to pay for something."
Dorian's voice was flat. "If this is punishment, it fits."
That silenced them again. Only the wind answered.
After a while, Liam stood and brushed the dust from his hands. "Then let's not waste time sitting in one place. If we keep moving, maybe we'll find others, or find out what this city wants from us."
Kade looked skeptical but pushed himself up anyway. "Fine. But if some creepy creature jumps out at us, I'm blaming you."
Serena managed a faint smile. "You'll probably be the first to run."
"I'll survive longer, that's the difference."
For a fleeting second, the tension eased. The four of them left the building together, their shadows stretching long across the cracked pavement. None of them knew what waited ahead, but for the first time since they'd woken up in this world, they weren't alone.