Chapter 2: The Reckoning

The day after the announcement felt like a slow, suffocating march toward something inevitable. There was no way to outrun it. People weren’t just walking through their lives anymore; they were walking through their final days, trying to make sense of it all.

Evelyn sat at her desk, staring at the disjointed data on her screen. She’d been pouring over it for hours, hoping—praying—that she’d missed something. There had to be something they could do. The hours blurred together, her mind too tired to process the numbers, too fragmented to form a cohesive thought. She could feel the weight of the world pressing down on her shoulders, and yet, she couldn’t stop searching. She couldn’t stop hoping.

The idea that there was no solution, no way to reverse this, gnawed at her, eating away at the core of her identity. She was a scientist. She was supposed to find answers, solutions, explanations. This wasn’t just a crisis. It was a failure—a failure of her knowledge, of all the years she’d spent at the lab, teaching, learning, studying. This was beyond her.

A knock on the door interrupted her spiraling thoughts. It was Liam.

“Evelyn,” he said, stepping into the room with a slight hesitation. His voice was quiet, uncertain, but there was something in his eyes that made her pause. He wasn’t the kind of person who normally came to her with questions about the world’s end. He was the optimist, the one who always believed there was a chance, a way forward. He was her younger brother, the one who still saw a flicker of hope in the darkest of times.

But now, standing before her, there was something different in his gaze—something that told her he wasn’t just confronting the world’s impending demise. He was confronting himself.

“Can we talk?” he asked softly, stepping closer.

Evelyn nodded, her heart heavy. She closed her laptop, the faint hum of the machine a reminder of how utterly disconnected the world seemed from what was really happening. As she motioned for him to sit, her thoughts continued to spiral. What could she say? She had no answers. She had no way of explaining the raw, aching grief she felt.

Liam hesitated again before sitting down across from her, his eyes searching hers. The silence hung between them for a long moment before he finally spoke.

“I don’t understand,” he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper. “We’ve always had time. We’ve always had tomorrow to fix things, to do better, to save the world. And now…” He trailed off, his words hanging in the air. “Now, there’s no tomorrow.”

Evelyn swallowed hard. She couldn’t look at him—not now. Not when she couldn’t find the words to comfort him. She had never been good at that anyway. Words had always been her brother’s domain, his way of connecting with the world. She was the one who solved problems, the one who fixed things. But how do you fix something like this?

“I’m sorry,” he said, running a hand through his hair, his frustration growing. “I don’t know how to deal with this. I don’t know what to do anymore. I thought… I thought I could just keep going, keep trying. But now? There’s nothing left to try. No plans. No solutions.”

Evelyn reached across the desk, her hand resting lightly on his. The gesture was simple, but it carried the weight of everything they hadn’t said. It was a quiet acknowledgment that they were both lost in their own ways. She didn’t have the answers, but she could at least offer him the truth.

“There’s nothing we can do to stop it,” she said softly. “I’ve looked. I’ve checked every model, every hypothesis, every possible angle. This isn’t something we can fix.”

Liam looked at her for a long moment, and for the first time, she saw a crack in his optimism—a flicker of defeat.

“I can’t accept that,” he whispered, shaking his head. “I can’t just give up.”

Evelyn squeezed his hand gently, a faint ache blooming in her chest. She wanted to tell him it would be okay, that they’d find a way through this, but she knew better. The world wasn’t going to be okay. And neither was she.

“I know you can’t,” she said quietly. “None of us can. But sometimes, the best we can do is just… live.”

Liam let out a short laugh, though it sounded more like a breath than an expression of amusement. “Live? For a year? That’s all we have left?”

Evelyn nodded, her throat tight. “We can’t change the world’s fate, Liam. But we can change how we spend the time we have left.”

For a long time, neither of them spoke. The weight of her words hung in the air, pressing down on both of them. There was no magic fix, no last-minute miracle. What was left was the uncertain and often unsatisfying reality of living through the final year.

Liam was the first to break the silence, his voice quieter now, more introspective. “I don’t know if I can handle it. Watching everything fall apart. Watching people give up, watching it all burn…”

Evelyn’s heart clenched at the raw pain in his voice. It mirrored the ache in her chest, the helplessness that had become her constant companion. But there was something in his words that stung her more deeply than she expected.

“I don’t know if I can either,” she admitted, her voice barely a whisper. “But what else is there? We can’t stop it. So we have to choose how we face it.”

The room fell silent again, the only sound the distant hum of city life continuing as if nothing had changed. People were still walking down the streets, still buying groceries, still carrying on with their routines. But Evelyn knew it was all a lie. The world wasn’t going on. It was dying. And so were they.

“We need to do something,” Liam said suddenly, his tone now more resolute. “I can’t just wait for it to end. I can’t let it happen without doing something.”

Evelyn looked at her brother, seeing the determination behind his words. It was a quiet defiance, one that she couldn’t bring herself to fully understand. But she admired it, even as she felt the quiet despair settling deeper into her bones.

“What do you want to do?” she asked, her voice tinged with curiosity and sadness.

“I don’t know yet,” Liam replied. “But I think we need to help people. We can’t just… accept it. We have to live. And help others live.”

Evelyn’s chest tightened as she nodded slowly. She wasn’t sure what this would mean for them—what it would mean for the world—but for the first time, she saw a spark of something beyond despair in her brother’s eyes. There was still something left in him. Something that refused to let the world simply slip away.

“We’ll figure it out,” she said softly, though her voice wavered. “But right now… right now, we have to hold on. We have to find meaning in what’s left.”

For a long moment, they sat there together in silence, two people bound by blood, by love, and by the unspoken knowledge that nothing would ever be the same. The end was coming. But somehow, in the face of that, they both knew—they would survive the last year.