Chapter 62: Alone

Kael walked for hours without knowing exactly where he was going.

The city on this side felt different — wider, quieter, like it hadn’t heard yet about what happened in the old neighborhood. He passed shuttered storefronts, a few half-open ones, and a handful of people moving fast with their heads down, like looking up had become a dangerous habit somewhere along the way.

He didn’t feel hungry, even though he hadn’t eaten in hours. He didn’t feel tired, even though his hand still ached and his fingers trembled a little from lack of sleep. He just felt an empty space where three voices used to be — talking over each other, arguing, laughing despite everything.

He stopped at a corner he didn’t recognize and looked at his wrist.

```

[LEVEL: 4]

[RANK: ASHEN]

```

Nothing strange in the message. No warning, no question. Just a number telling him he was a little stronger than yesterday, like the system had no way to measure the part of him that had broken to get there.

He thought he should feel something bigger than this. He didn’t.

He kept walking.

Sometime past noon, he reached a street with a small shop still selling food. The man behind the counter gave him one quick look, no interest in it and no fear either, just a routine calculation: would this customer cause a problem or not.

"Sandwich and water," Kael said.

The man handed it over without extra words. Kael paid with whatever cash was left in his pocket and sat down on a curb away from the main street.

He ate slowly, without really tasting any of it.

He thought about Dana asking him the best way to eat falafel. He thought about Nadia writing faster than she could think. He thought about Mira.

He stopped himself right there, like he’d drawn a red line he didn’t want to cross today.

He heard fast footsteps behind him.

He spun around, hand rising on instinct, but it was just a kid chasing a rolling ball, his mother calling him back in a tired voice from somewhere down the street.

He lowered his hand. He felt more foolish than relieved.

"You’re tense."

The voice came from behind him — an old woman, unhurried, like she’d been waiting for the right moment to say it for minutes rather than seconds.

Kael turned. An elderly woman sat in a wooden chair in front of a closed shop, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes on him for longer than he could guess.

"Excuse me?"

"I said you’re tense." She tilted her head toward him, no judgment in it, more like an observation from someone who’d lived long enough to notice everything and be surprised by none of it. "You look at every sound like it’s about to kill you. The kid, the ball, even the sound of your own footsteps."

"Maybe because some sounds have, recently."

She didn’t seem moved by that. She just shifted her weight on the chair a little, settling in for a longer conversation. "This city’s been like this for a long time, son, way before the sky changed. It’s just that now the sound has a name people are scared of. Used to be we’d just wait for the next one without knowing why."

Kael sat down on the curb near her, without really deciding to, like his body alone needed a short break from walking and watching at the same time.

"How long have you been here?" he asked.

"Since the sky was still blue." She let out a short, dry laugh, more like an organized cough. "People ask me why I don’t leave. Truth is I don’t know anywhere better to walk to than right here. At least here, I know exactly where I’m sitting, and I know every stone in this sidewalk."

"Isn’t that dangerous?"

"Everything’s dangerous now, sweetheart. Sitting here’s the same as walking out there. Only difference is I won’t be surprised."

They sat like that for a moment without talking, and Kael heard a distant car pass on some other street, then silence again.

"Have you seen anything strange?" he finally asked. "Someone looking for someone, or anyone acting off?"

She laughed again, deeper this time, and shook her head slowly like she was pulling up something old. "Son, everybody here is looking for someone. Even you. It’s written all over your face. You don’t have to tell me."

He didn’t answer that. He didn’t know how he would have, anyway.

She let the silence sit a moment too, giving him time before she continued, quieter now. "You don’t have to tell me anything. But if you’re looking for the old station, it’s that way." She pointed a wrinkled finger toward a side street in the distance. "People talk about it a lot these days. Say folks go in and come back out, but not the way normal people do."

Kael froze for a second. "How did you know I was looking for a station?"

She smiled, a smile with no malice in it at all, just old exhaustion built up over a long time. "Because you walk like someone who knows where he’s going. But your eyes say you don’t know why."

He stood, gave her a small nod of thanks, and started walking in the direction she’d pointed.

Before he got too far, he heard her say, from behind him, in a voice quieter than anything she’d said before:

"If whoever you left behind was worth leaving for, sweetheart, they were worth knowing why, too."

He didn’t turn around. He didn’t know what he would have said if he had.

He kept walking.

As he got closer to the side street, he started to feel something familiar move under his skin, a faint buzz at his wrist he hadn’t felt in hours.

```

[WARNING: ABNORMAL ACTIVITY AHEAD]

```

He stopped. He looked at the side street. It was empty, quiet, nothing suggesting any visible danger.

But he’d learned, in these past few days, that quiet didn’t mean safe anymore.

He thought he could turn back, look for another route, take his time.

He also thought that he no longer had anyone left to protect from the outcome of his choice, and no one who’d get hurt if he made the wrong one.

That thought, in a strange way, made the next step easier.

He walked toward the side street.

A few meters from its end, he saw the first strange thing: a window hanging in midair, no wall holding it up, reflecting a completely different street than the one he was standing in.

Kael stopped in front of it.

In the reflection, the sky was blue.

He stood there long enough for the cold to register — not the cold of the evening air, but something colder, coming off the glass itself, or from whatever the glass was actually showing him.

He reached a hand toward it, slow, testing the space in front of the frame before his fingers got close enough to touch anything.

The window didn’t react.

Behind the glass, a street unspooled that looked almost like his — same width, same slope to the sidewalk — except every building had windows that were actually windows, and every sign above every shop still had its lights on, ordinary yellow light spilling onto pavement that had never once gone gray.

A woman crossed that other street with a grocery bag in each hand. She didn’t look toward him. She had no reason to know he was watching.

He thought, distantly, that this was probably what his own city had looked like a few weeks ago, before any of this, before a shaft and an Engine and a man wearing his own face.

The wrist buzzed again, sharper this time.

```

[WARNING: PROXIMITY TO UNSTABLE BOUNDARY]

[RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT MAKE CONTACT]

```

He didn’t listen to the recommendation, not yet. He just watched, the way you’d watch something behind glass in a museum, close enough to study, far enough to still believe it couldn’t reach you.

Somewhere down that other street, faint and distorted like a radio catching two stations at once, he heard someone laugh.

It wasn’t Mira’s laugh. It wasn’t Dana’s, either. But for one unfair second his chest reacted like it might have been, before his mind caught up and corrected it.

He stepped back from the window.

The reflection didn’t follow him. It just hung there, floating, patient, framed by nothing, a small blue rectangle of somewhere else pinned to the middle of a gray street that had forgotten what its own sky used to look like.

He caught himself reaching for a memory that wasn’t fully there anymore — some detail about the window, or about Dana, that slipped sideways before he could pin it down. Grief had started doing that lately, blurring the edges of things he was sure he used to know clearly.

He looked at the window one more time.

Then he kept walking, past it, deeper into the side street, toward wherever the old woman’s directions and his own system’s warnings both seemed to agree he needed to go.

Behind him, the window stayed exactly where it was, showing a sky he no longer lived under.