The world was too still. Too intact. Fowler stood in the middle of what had once been the epicenter of the collapse. The air smelled of ozone and petrichor. Buildings stretched upward unbroken.Windows reflected sunlight, not flame. The silence that followed was the wrong kind of silence the kind that hid the hum of something breathing beneath it.He reached for the comm link in his ear long dead, dusted from another life. Static answered, faintly patterned like a heartbeat. “Selene,” he whispered, almost a test.Nothing. Then the static stuttered. Three short bursts. A pause. Two long ones. Morse code her signature. He froze. “No…”He turned toward the sound. It wasn’t coming from the comm; it was coming from everywhere.The city’s frequency, the electric murmur beneath its surface her code threaded through it, as if the entire network was breathing her name.You made the choice. The words pulsed through the air again, gentler now. He closed his eyes. “You’re still here.”Not here. N

Fowler woke to light that didn’t have a source. It pooled at the horizon like a slow, patient tide not blinding, but insistently bright. The air tasted of metal and rain, of old circuits being warmed back into life.He lay for a long moment, listening. The pulse beneath the world faint at first, then unmistakable kept time like a second heart. Fowler...Her voice threaded through the hum, thinner than memory and no less real. He pushed himself up. The ground under his palms was not quite ground: a membrane of shimmering glass that flexed when he moved.The city around him was a wash of familiar shapes and wrong colors. Buildings leaned in the wrong directions. Street signs showed names that no longer existed. Somewhere far off, a fountain ran backward.He rubbed his jaw. His hands felt foreign to him warmer than bone, veins like filaments beneath skin. The pulse answered his touch.“Selene,” he said aloud, and the name echoed, folded over itself, answered by a chorus of tiny, unrelate

Light fell inward. It didn’t explode this time. It folded slow, deliberate, like the world itself was exhaling through a narrow throat. Fowler drifted weightless at the center of it, caught between implosion and rebirth.He wasn’t sure where his body ended anymore. Every breath felt like fire turning to sound, every heartbeat like a ripple through glass.Fowler…Her voice again. But softer now, woven through the light. “I’m here,” he whispered. “I’m not gone yet.”You’re everywhere. He opened his eyes or thought he did. The darkness around him wasn’t empty; it was alive. Shapes moved through it threads of gold and silver, converging, stretching, blooming.He recognized them before he understood them: memories. Their wedding. The night she asked for the divorce. The first time he held her hand. The time he didn’t.Every moment they’d ever shared unfolded in silence, suspended in the air like constellations.He reached toward one the image of her turning away from him on the courthouse

Silence.Not the absence of sound but the kind that erases it. The kind that seeps under the skin and hollows out the memory of what a heartbeat used to feel like. Fowler stood in the ruin of everything.The glass plain had turned dull, colorless, cracked open in wide, geometric veins. Where Selene had been, there was nothing not even light. Only the faint echo of her outline burned into the air, fading a little more each second.He tried to speak her name. Nothing came out. His throat moved, his lungs strained but the sound was devoured before it could exist.He dropped to his knees, pounding the ground once, twice the impact gave no echo. The fracture had taken sound, light, maybe even time itself.He was alone. He had always feared dying. But this was worse. It was being erased slowly enough to notice.He stood, his boots crunching on the fractured glass. The Sanctum’s silhouette shimmered far in the distance, broken into a thousand floating shards. He started walking toward it, ea

Silence had a sound.It wasn’t absence not really. It was the hum of something listening. Fowler stood in the aftermath of the shatter. The world had dissolved around him the beach gone, the horizon erased.Only suspended fragments remained, drifting in a slow orbit around him. Each shard reflected a different memory some real, some false, all unfinished.He reached toward one. Inside, he saw Selene standing at a window, her reflection fractured by rain. She was older. Or maybe younger. He couldn’t tell anymore.Her mouth moved words he couldn’t hear. Another shard spun past his hands bound, the prison floodlights glaring. He flinched instinctively, as if the memory still hurt to touch.The air trembled.Something deep beneath the fragments was breathing. Slow. Rhythmic. Each inhale pulled the shards closer together. Each exhale pushed them away again.The pattern was almost biological like the heartbeat of a thing that wasn’t supposed to exist. Fowler closed his eyes and whispered, “