I remembered my mother insisting we hang that frame near the front room because "if a house is going to have one thing right away, it should have proof that it belongs to someone." I had rolled my eyes at the time. Dad had laughed and helped her hammer it into place anyway.
Proof that it belongs to someone.
My throat tightened.
I stood slowly, the frame still in my hands.
The front room was torn apart, but pieces of us were everywhere once I started seeing them. A dish I recognized. A cracked shelf bracket. Part of the rug near the fireplace. One of my father's books with the spine torn off and the pages swollen from water or something worse.
The remains of ordinary life.
That was somehow the cruelest part.
Not the destruction itself.
The evidence that normal things had existed here right before everything ended.
I swallowed hard.
They're alive.
They left before it happened.
They had time.
I repeated the thoughts until they stopped sounding like thoughts and started sounding like instructions.
Keep moving.
Find them.
Don't think about anything else.
The numbness in me shifted slightly, not gone, but hardened into something that could function. I tucked the framed photo under my arm and made myself take a fuller look around.
The kitchen was half-collapsed, buried under roof beams and stone. One cabinet hung off its hinge. Broken crockery glittered among the dust. A pan lay overturned near what had once been the stove. I stared at it too long, imagining food still cooking, a meal interrupted in the middle.
No.
Don't do that.
I looked away.
"Nate?" I called, but my voice came out thinner than I expected.
No answer.
I frowned and took a step deeper into the house.
The floor was unstable in places. Plaster crunched under my boots. One wrong step sent a sliver of wood skidding into a pile of debris with a sharp little clatter that made me flinch hard enough to nearly drop the frame.
I paused and listened.
Nothing.
No monsters. No voices. Just the distant groan of the city and the creak of damaged wood shifting under its own weight.
"Nate?" I tried again.
Still no answer.
He had gone into the back part of the house.
Toward my parents' room.
A strange discomfort stirred low in my stomach.
Not fear exactly.
Not yet.
Just something off.
Something I didn't want to name.
I tightened my grip on the frame and forced myself to breathe slower.
They're okay.
They escaped.
Maybe Nate found something useful. A back exit. A sign they left. Anything.
Yes.
That was all it was.
I latched onto the idea quickly, almost desperately. The house was destroyed, but destruction didn't mean death. People survived attacks. People got out. My parents weren't helpless. My father had always known where the emergency bundles were. My mother thought ahead about everything. They would have heard the alarms. They would have run.
I pictured it immediately, trying to make it solid.
Mom grabbing a bag.
Dad calling her name.
The two of them leaving through the back before the worst hit.
Maybe heading toward shelter. Maybe trying to find me. Maybe waiting right now somewhere safe, terrified and angry and alive.
Alive.
The word steadied me.
Of course they're alive.
The conviction rose so fast it felt almost real. I clung to it with both hands.
I looked down at the picture once more, then leaned it carefully against a broken section of wall where it wouldn't get stepped on.
"I'll come back for that," I muttered, though I didn't know who I was promising.
Then I moved toward the back room.
The hallway was barely a hallway anymore. One side had cracked open, exposing torn beams and strips of wallpaper fluttering against broken stone. I stepped over a fallen lamp and edged around a splintered section of dresser that had somehow ended up halfway across the floor.
As I got closer to the bedroom door, that feeling in my stomach sharpened.
Too quiet.
That was what it was.
Nate had been right ahead of me. I should have heard him moving. Shifting debris. Saying something. Cursing under his breath. Anything.
Instead there was silence.
Then Nate appeared in the doorway.
So suddenly that I stopped.
He stood half in the room, half out, shoulders tense in a way I had never seen before. His face had gone pale—paler than before—and there was something in his eyes I didn't understand at first.
Not fear for himself.
Fear for me.
I frowned. "What are you doing?"
He didn't answer immediately.
That was when the discomfort inside me turned uglier.
"Nate?"
He took a step out into the hall, enough to block the doorway fully. "Mark," he said quietly, "we should go."
I stared at him.
For a second the words didn't make sense.
"Go where?"
"Just… out of here."
I blinked at him. "What?"
His voice tightened. "We've seen enough."
The uncomfortable feeling in my stomach dropped like a stone.
I looked past his shoulder, but he shifted just enough to block my line of sight.
"Nate," I said, more sharply this time. "Move."
He shook his head once. Small. Immediate. "Mark."
Move.
He wasn't moving.
A pulse started hammering behind my eyes.
"What are you doing?" I asked again, and this time my voice sounded wrong even to me. Too flat. Too controlled.
Nate glanced back into the room for the briefest second, then looked at me again. "I'm serious. We need to leave."
My skin went cold.
"No."
"Mark…"
"No." I took a step forward. "Move."
He stood his ground.
I had known Nate long enough to know what it meant when he got that look on his face. He wasn't uncertain. He wasn't arguing. He had already decided something and was going to hold to it.
He was trying to protect me.
From what?
The answer was there. I could feel it behind my ribs, a shape my mind kept refusing to touch.
My breathing grew sharper.
"Nate," I said, each word more strained than the last, "step away from the door."
His jaw tightened. "You don't need to see this."
The hall seemed to tilt.
For a second I genuinely thought I might hit him just for saying it.
"What do you mean," I asked, and now my voice was shaking, "I don't need to see this?"
He didn't answer.
That was worse than anything he could have said.
The awful shape inside my chest sharpened all at once.
No.
No.
They got out.
They're alive.
That was the truth. It had to be the truth.
I took another step and he put a hand out instinctively, not grabbing me, just stopping me.
That did it.
My agitation snapped upward so fast it almost felt like panic finally reaching me after all this time.
"Move!" I shouted.
Nate flinched, but he still didn't step aside. "Mark, listen to me—"
"Move!"
My voice cracked through the ruins louder than I meant it to. The sound bounced off broken stone and dead wood and came back thinner.
Nate's expression twisted. "Please."
Please.
Not no.
Not you're wrong.
Not they aren't there.
Please.
Everything in me turned sick and hot.
I shoved him.
Hard.
He stumbled sideways into the broken wall, one shoulder striking exposed timber. He caught himself immediately and reached for me, but too late.
I was already through the doorway.
And then I saw them.
The room looked like the rest of the house—broken open, half-collapsed, shredded by violence—but none of that mattered, not after the first second.
My parents were on the floor.
They were there.
They were there.
For one impossible heartbeat my mind still tried to deny what my eyes were telling it. It searched for movement, breath, anything, some proof that this was wrong, that I had misunderstood, that the scene in front of me could still become something else if I only looked at it correctly.
But there was no mistake.
No movement.
No breath.
Only the dead bodies of both my parents.