They sat in the living room in the quiet that follows funerals, the kind that doesn't ask anything from anyone, that simply exists around people who have run out of the energy that ordinary conversation requires.
Toviro looked over at Mina. "Mrs. Mina, please tell us what happened here. People are dead, and the streets are in ruins. How did all of this start?"
There was a brief silence.
Then Mina lowered her gaze to her hands resting in her lap and began.
"Three days ago," she said softly, "a few hours after that terrible earthquake struck at dawn."
She and Haruto had been in the living room. He was reading the newspaper, she was nibbling on something with her tea. The morning had that kind of quiet that comes when the day before was rough and neither of you was ready for the next hard thing.
Haruto looked up from the paper. "Things are bad out there," he said. Not worried, exactly. Just saying it, the way he always said things.
"You're right," she replied.
He put the paper down. "Let's put on the international channel."
He turned on the TV and flipped through the channels until the screen filled with the image of a female anchor standing somewhere that clearly wasn't a studio.
She was outside, in a country called Balinza, in the southwest.
Behind her, off in the distance, the sky had something strange about it—heavy, colorless, off in a way you couldn't quite put into words.
"The ocean is swallowing everything in its path," the anchor was saying.
Her voice stayed steady, but you could tell it was taking effort.
"The rising water is moving from the southwest toward the central regions at a speed we've never seen before. We're afraid that—"
She stopped.
Not because she'd finished her sentence. But because something came from above.
The blade went through her head before any of them could fully understand what they were seeing.
The camera held on the image for a moment, a moment that felt much, much longer than it actually was.
Then the person who had done it stood up straight and turned toward the camera.
Long hair, pulled back.
Eyes the color of something between purple and grey. A color that had no ordinary name.
A short, straight mustache.
He turned his face toward the camera and looked directly into it.
And the camera broke.
Not malfunctioned.
The screen fractured from the inside outward—like something deep in the transmission itself had been severed.
The broadcast cut to static.
Mina paused.
Her voice had stayed steady, but her hands had tightened in her lap.
A second or two later, someone began filming on a phone, and it was showing on the same channel.
The same location. The same street.
People running in every direction—the kind of running that isn't going somewhere, but away from something.
And moving through them—not running, not hurrying—figures that were doing things people don't do.
Moving faster than ordinary people move.
Hitting harder than people can be hit.
"We watched it for as long as we could stand to watch it," Mina said.
"But eventually, even that video didn't last."
We heard the sound from close by a minute later.
Something enormous falling apart nearby.
Then voices, not ordinary voices, not conversation or argument, but the voices of people in the street who were afraid and running.
She and Haruto went to the window and looked through the curtain at the edge.
A man in the street raised his hand, and a mass of earth the size of a vehicle formed above him, pulling itself up from nothing.
Then the people who had stopped running to look at it made the mistake of standing still. And the stone came down on them.
Mina closed her eyes briefly and opened them again.
"Haruto took my hand and we ran to the back of the house. He made me hide. Then he went to the front door and stood there."
She looked at the doorway without seeing it.
"That's what happened, Toviro. That's what we saw."
The living room was completely still.
None of them had anything to say that would have fit into the space the story left behind.
They just sat with it.
Then Toviro spoke, not loudly, just the way he worked through things, out loud, in order.
"It's unclear who they are, what they want, or why they did this. We can think about it all we want and not get anywhere without more information."
He paused.
"But this I do believe: more than half of humanity has been eliminated."
Ozair looked at him. "For real."
"Yeah. This world has nearly four billion people, and if these figures reached the central regions and then arrived so fast here in the northeast—the scope of it is what that number suggests."
Ozair said quietly, "We are cooked."
"Not only that," Toviro continued. "The water is moving from the southwest at speed. Rising, moving northeast, consuming everything in its path. It's not slowing down."
Aryan looked at him directly. "How long do we have? Estimated."
Toviro was quiet for a moment.
"Based on what Mrs. Mina described and what I observed on the way here, three days. Four at the absolute most."
Nobody spoke.
Elina said, "If the whole world is sinking, where do we even go?"
Toviro looked at her. "Don't forget, Elina. Our world is sinking—not the first Unitedverse. It's not alone, and it's not the only option."
She looked at him. Then something moved in her face as the memory of the cave returned to her, everything Atsal had shown them, the three great merged realities, the map of what existence had become.
She nodded slowly.
They all went quiet again, thinking in their separate ways about a problem that was too large for any of them to hold entirely.
Then Ozair broke the silence.
"Hey."
Everyone looked at him.
His expression shifted into something that was half realization, half disbelief at himself for not figuring it out sooner.
"Mayo," he said. "Where's Mayo?"
The name landed on all of them like cold water.
Aryan sat forward. "We almost forgot about him."
Elina said, "We came here for him and then the world happened."
Toviro was already reaching into his clothes. From the inner pocket he took out a small bottle—the liquid inside a deep reddish brown, the same bottle Atsal had pressed into his hands before they left the cave.
He looked at it for a moment, then at the others.
"He's upstairs," Toviro said slowly.
They all stood at the same time.
They moved together through the hallway and up the stairs toward Mayo's room, and the house was quiet around them, the bottle was warm in Toviro's hand, and whatever was waiting behind that door had been waiting since the night the world changed.