Volume 3 – Chapter 15: The Mirror is Cracked

[August 16 – 45 Days Left]

The dawn had come, but the light felt empty—pale, washed-out, as if it had long since forgotten how to warm skin, to soothe. Kaito rested against the lip of the rooftop, eyes drawing along the horizon where the gray clouds hung too low and too heavy. They had scarcely stirred for hours. Days, maybe. He couldn't tell anymore. Not since he'd stopped sleeping.

Rika remained tucked in bed, curled up as if sleep were her only shred of armor. No nightmares. No dreams.

It was a buzz down there, but it was strange: neither chaos nor silence but something altogether different—an acceptance of despair. Disengaged acceptance. Like an animal that realizes it is dying, it throws its body down without fight.

Kaito, too, felt the same.

He looked back at his reflection in the glass of the rooftop access door—old, pale, and more emaciated than he remembered. The eyes behind the glass were actually different. They had no fear in them. They held something much worse.

Indifference.

Kaito hated it. But he couldn't shake it.

"What is there for us to save anymore?" he whispered to the wind. "There's nothing left. Just us pretending."

Slowly swinging behind him, the door gave a creak. A pair of soft footfalls approached.

"I thought I'd find you here," came Rika's voice, almost gently, almost uncertain.

Kaito did not turn.

For a moment they did not speak.

Then Kaito continued, "I saw a man throw food at a child today. Not give; throw. Like a transaction. Like... like that kid is a stray dog."

Rika gasped.

"The kid didn't cry. Just picked it up and left, like everything was normal."

Kaito turned abruptly to her. "Isn't that who we are now?"

Rika turned her face sideways and blinked very hard. "No... but maybe that's what we've become."

They sat next to each other on the concrete, feeling the opposing weight of every breath. Rika mused about the fragile space between them, as if it too were a thing of sanctity.

"I thought love would save us," she said suddenly, bitter slant to her smile, "not just us, but everybody. That when things turned bad, we would all hold each other tighter. Choose kindness," she trailed off obstinately.

"Scared," Kaito shrugged. "And scared people...aren't always kind."

"No," she said. "But it's more than fear now. It feels like...a slow rot. Like something is decaying from the inside, and no one knows how to stop it."

Kaito looked up at the sky. "Maybe that's the point. Maybe the end isn't a meteor. Maybe this. The unraveling. The silence inside people's eyes."

For a while, the wind was the only sound.

Then Rika asked in a whisper, "Do you still believe in humanity?"

That question hit harder than he expected.

He didn't answer at once.

Finally, he offered, "I don't know. I want to. But belief feels like something I have to force now. Like keeping a dying flame alive by breathing on it until my lungs give out."

She nodded slowly. "I think belief was never meant to be easy. That's the whole point."

Kaito tilted his head. "You sound like an old philosopher."

"I've been reading too much," she confessed with a giggle that was far too weak to be called a laugh. "Trying to find answers in books written by people who never knew a world like this."

"Still," he said, "They were wise to something. Maybe not about the end, but about what it means to be... this." He tapped his chest. "A human."

Rika looked at him, really looked, her gaze softening. "You're still holding on. Even if you don't want to admit it."

"Maybe," Kaito said. "Or maybe I just don't want to be the one to let go first."

She reached out and finally, found the fingers intertwined.

It meant something beyond words.

"I think," she said slowly, "we're all walking on the edge of ourselves. And the ones to fall are not the weak ones. They're just the ones who looked down for too long."

Kaito swallowed hard. "Lately, I have spent a lot of time looking down."

"Then look at me."

He did.

Her eyes weren't full of hope. Not quite. They were full of presence. Of quiet defiance. She was no longer trying to save the world. She had simply chosen not to vanish along with it.

"We're still here," she said. "Still breathing. Still thinking. That has to count for something."

The rooftop wind sped up, bringing with it an unusual silence, as if the city below would pause for just a moment to listen.

At that moment, surrounded by concrete and quiet dampholes, something weak and human was thrumming in between them.

Not hope.

But truth.

The world is ending.

But they hadn't.

Not yet.