The morning light didn't belong here anymore.
It came through the blinds in thin, reluctant bars, cutting across the chaos of Momo's room like prison stripes. Dust drifted through the beams, slow and aimless, settling on piles of newspapers and printouts that covered nearly every surface. The air was thick with staleness—old coffee, unwashed sheets, the particular smell of desperation that clings to places where someone has stopped caring about small things.
Momo sat on the edge of his mattress, shirtless, staring at a photograph.
The paper was soft at the corners from too much handling. Four faces smiled back at him: his mother with her hand on his father's shoulder, his two sisters pressed close together, their expressions frozen in a moment that felt like it belonged to a different universe. He traced his thumb along the edge, careful not to smudge what little remained of their faces.
"Guess I might not be able to see you anymore," he whispered.
His voice cracked on the last word. The room absorbed the sound and gave nothing back.
The walls around him were plastered with evidence of his obsession. Newspaper clippings overlapped in crooked layers—headlines about the countdown, grainy photographs of people mid-vanishing, their bodies half-dissolved into columns of light. Red marker circled images of forearms and shoulders, each one bearing strange luminous symbols that appeared weeks or sometimes only hours before someone disappeared. He'd drawn the patterns himself in the margins, over and over, as if memorizing them might summon his own mark into existence.
It never did.
Seventeen years old and unmarked. Statistically improbable, they said on the news. But probability meant nothing when you were on the wrong side of it.
He set the photograph down on the nightstand, face-up, and stared at the ceiling. Water-stained tiles. A crack running diagonal like a vein.
His phone buzzed.
The vibration rattled against the wooden surface. He reached for it without enthusiasm, expecting another automated message about rations. The screen lit up with a name he actually recognized.
He answered.
"Momo, get down here." The voice was breathless, urgent but controlled. "I think I found something."
There was a pause, filled with the sound of wind cutting across a microphone.
"Where?" Momo asked.
"The tunnels. Just—" Another pause. "Just come. Now."
The line went dead.
Momo grabbed a pullover from the floor, gave it a cursory sniff, and decided it was good enough. He pulled it over his bare chest, the fabric catching on his shoulder blades. Shoes without socks—his feet slid in loose, the rubber soles cold against his skin.
The door closed behind him with a hollow click.
---
The hallway was darker than his room. Emergency lights had been scavenged weeks ago, leaving only the gray wash of daylight from windows at either end. His footsteps echoed wrong—too loud in the emptiness, as if the building itself was holding its breath.
Outside, the city spread before him like a corpse in the process of decomposition.
Trash lined the streets in drifts, pushed against curbs and doorways by wind that no one bothered to clean. Newspapers from months ago fluttered in the gutter, their headlines still visible: 27 MONTHS REMAINING. MIGRATION RATE SLOWS TO 0.3% WEEKLY. UNMARKED MAJORITY FACES "STATISTICAL EXTINCTION".
He'd stopped reading them years ago.
A holo-billboard flickered on the corner, its projection stuttering in the pale morning. It showed a countdown—days, hours, minutes ticking down toward zero. Beside it, looped footage of a woman dissolving into light, her expression caught somewhere between terror and ecstasy as divine radiance consumed her from the inside out. The image froze, reset, played again.
No one watched anymore.
Cars sat rusted along the road, their tires flat or missing, windows smashed for reasons no one could remember. A few people moved through the streets like sleepwalkers—shoulders hunched, eyes fixed on nothing, their movements mechanical. They didn't speak to each other. Didn't look up when he passed.
The sky overhead was the color of old dishwater, streaked occasionally with faint auroras that rippled across the horizon. Divine energy, the scientists had called it once. Proof of the Migration's authenticity. Now it was just another part of the scenery, as common and meaningless as streetlights.
Momo walked with his hands in his pockets, shoulders tight against the cold. His breath misted in front of him. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed and died.
The silence after was worse than the sound.
---
She was waiting at the intersection where the old subway entrance gaped like a wound in the pavement.
Momo saw her from half a block away—black hair falling past her shoulders, dressed in gray faded hoodie that made her blend into the concrete behind her. She stood with her weight on one leg, arms crossed, watching him approach with eyes that didn't match.
One blue, one green.
He'd never asked her about it. It's not like he cares much about her or anything.
Dark circles shadowed the space beneath her eyes, the same exhaustion he saw in his own reflection. She didn't smile when he reached her. Didn't wave or call out a greeting. The social rituals had eroded along with everything else—there was no point in pretending things were normal when normal had ended years ago.
"Come on," she said, her voice flat. "You'll want to see this."
She turned without waiting for a response and started down into the subway entrance. The stairs descended into darkness, the emergency lights long since burned out or stolen. Momo followed, his eyes adjusting slowly as they moved deeper.
The air changed—colder, damper, carrying the smell of mildew and standing water. Their footsteps echoed differently here, bouncing off tile walls covered in graffiti that no one had bothered to paint over. Most of it was the same: symbols copied from photographs of the marked, prayers to gods that had stopped listening, countdown numbers scratched in desperate permanence.
She walked fast, her silhouette barely visible in the dim light filtering from above. Momo kept pace, his shoes scuffing against debris he couldn't see.
"We might actually have a way out of this shithole," she said, her voice echoing strangely in the tunnel ahead.
She didn't look back when she said it. Didn't slow down or elaborate.
Momo didn't want to, however he felt something stir in his chest—a sensation so unfamiliar it took him a moment to identify. Not quite hope. Hope was too bright, too naive. This was smaller, colder. The faint possibility that maybe, somewhere in the decay and abandonment and divine indifference, there was still a thread to pull. A way to stop being one of the forgotten.
Or maybe it was fear.
Fear that if he pulled that thread, he'd find out exactly why he'd been left behind in the first place.
The darkness ahead seemed to thicken, swallowing the sound of their footsteps. Momo kept walking, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, his breath misting in the cold.
End of Chapter 1