Ragna woke to the same ceiling staring down at him. He sat up slowly, checked his watch—8:15 a.m.—and instinctively tried to yawn. The thick bandages sealing his mouth turned the reflex into a weak, strangled breath.
Beyond the glass, the sky was still blood-red, as though the dawn itself had hemorrhaged and never recovered.
The crimson sky never changed.
It pressed down on Grimveil like a lid of scorched iron—deep, unchanging red, thick as drying blood. No sun. No moon. No stars. The apocalypse had devoured day and night, leaving only this eternal, feverish twilight. What people called "morning" was simply when exhaustion gave way to movement; "night" was when the last oil lamps flickered out and the cold sank deeper into the bones.
Ragna stepped out from the narrow alcove where he'd spent his first night in the Forge, boots grinding glass into the concrete. The ruddy light bled through the warehouse's broken skylights and gaping roof holes, painting everything in shades of bruise and ember. Silent construction machines hulked in the gloom—cranes with snapped cables hanging like dead vines, excavators slumped half-buried in rubble, their yellow paint turned sickly ochre under the red wash. Twisted rebar stacks and crumpled scaffolding caught the glow, throwing long bloody shadows across the floor. Beyond the wide loading bays, the city lay broken: skyscrapers leaning drunkenly into one another, streets drowned in ash and the husks of cars that would never roll again.
Faces moved through the haze. People he'd only glimpsed through the window yesterday now took solid form in the crimson half-light: a woman with soot-blackened cheeks hauling water in dented buckets, two men wrestling a salvaged beam to brace a sagging wall, children darting between tarps and crates, their laughter sharp and short. Everyone moved with the careful economy of those who knew the world could finish breaking at any second.
"You're up," came Elara's voice behind him, calm and familiar.
Ragna turned. She approached through the red-tinted gloom with Tomas a step behind, his broad shoulders cutting a dark shape against the glow. The doctor's once-white coat was now patched and stained, almost black in this light. Tomas carried a small crate of scavenged tools, the same steady hands that had carried Ragna here on his back the day before.
"Better," Ragna said, eyes flicking upward to the sky visible through a torn section of roof. "That red… it never stops."
Elara followed his gaze. "The Veil. Whatever burned the world left us this instead of a sky. No dawn to promise anything. No dark to hide in. Just the red. At least fires show up clear against it."
Tomas set the crate down with a low clang. "Makes sleeping a fight. But we manage."
Elara gestured toward the scattered groups working in the warehouse. "Come. You should meet the rest properly. Yesterday was stitches and shock. Today we plan."
She led him deeper into the Forge, past stacks of salvaged crates and barrels collecting the slow drip from above. The crimson light made every face look forged from old copper—worn, stubborn, alive.
"Mikey," she called.
A lean man with a knife-scar across one cheek straightened from sharpening his blade on a whetstone. He wiped his hands on threadbare trousers and offered a firm grip.
"Elara says you're hunting your little sister," Mikey said. "Eastern camps are my stretch. Give me her name, age, anything that stands out—hair, scar, the way she walks. Runners move between bands every few days. If she's still breathing, someone's seen her."
Nearby, a woman with cropped hair and grease-smeared fingers looked up from a nest of wires and salvaged radio parts.
"Mira," Elara said. "Our ears. She keeps the patchwork bands alive—short-range signals, no grids, no satellites. But word still travels."
Mira gave a quick nod. "That broadcast about the ships is the biggest signal we've caught in months. Refugees supposed to gather at the coastline in seven days, maybe less. If your sister's moving toward it, our paths will cross. I'll listen for her name."
As they spoke, a figure approached from the far shadows—an older woman leaning on a length of rebar she'd turned into a cane. Shawls hung heavy around her small frame; her white hair was braided tight against the dust. The way the others unconsciously gave her space told Ragna everything before words did.
"Nana Voss," Elara said, voice softening with respect. "She keeps the Forge standing."
The old woman stopped, eyes sharp beneath heavy lids. They studied Ragna in the red light, unblinking.
"New blood," she rasped. "Elara says you're looking for kin. Good. Family's the only thing worth more than scrap these days."
She turned to Elara without pause. "Filters are fouling again. Newcomers doubled the draw. We ration tighter or we start losing people to sickness."
"I'll check them now," Elara answered. "And we'll need to settle quotas before the next supply run."
Nana Voss grunted, then looked back at Ragna. "You pull your weight here, boy, and we'll pull strings for your sister. Those ships might save us—or they might just be another ghost on the radio. Either way, we don't sit waiting to die."
She turned away, cane tapping a slow, deliberate rhythm against the concrete, her small figure carrying the invisible weight of everyone's survival.
Ragna stood a moment longer, the crimson sky bearing down through the broken roof like a lid on a grave. No morning. No night. Just this endless red, and the thin, fierce web of people holding on beneath it—scavenging, mending, refusing to forget who they'd lost.
Somewhere out there, under the same blood-colored sky, his little sister was still alive.
He clenched his fists until the knuckles whitened.
They would find her.
Or they would tear the broken world apart looking.