Volume 3 – Chapter 29: Dust in The Air

Date: August 30

Last 31 Days. 

The air still smelled of wet ash.

Even though the storm had passed, it left something behind—something that clung to everything. To clothes. To skin. To the space between words. A damp, heavy silence. The kind that made even small noises feel too loud.

Kaito opened the rusted door to the rooftop and stepped out alone. The city stretched before him, skeletal and still. Rooftops sagged under waterlogged weight, and roads had become shallow rivers of mud and debris. But no sirens. No gunshots. No screaming.

Just birds.

Somewhere far off, birdsong cut through the stillness. Fragile, uncertain. As if the earth itself was trying to remember what peace sounded like.

He stood there for a long time.

Downstairs, Rika sat with Aya in what used to be the library. The books had swollen from moisture, their pages crumpled, unreadable. Rika was running her finger down the spine of a half-intact medical journal.

Aya broke the silence. “Do you ever think about before?”

Rika looked up. “Before?”

“Before we knew. When school was a thing. When we cared about phones, or homework, or who was dating who.”

Rika smiled faintly, but there was a sadness in it. “Sometimes I think that was a different life. Like we were other people.”

“Yeah.” Aya let out a breath. “I miss being stupid.”

Rika laughed quietly. “Me too.”

Later that evening, they gathered once more—after the feasting and discussion had finished, it was for no other reason than coming together. A small candle flame pulsed at the centre as the wind sneaked through the broken windows.

Kaito sat with his back against the wall, staring at the fire. "Thirty-one days," he murmured.

Rika heard him but didn’t answer right away. Then, “It’s not a countdown anymore, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I think… it’s not about waiting for the end. It’s about seeing how we live until then.”

Aya looked up from her corner. “So what do we do tomorrow?”

Kaito thought for a moment. “We rebuild the fence. We fix the purifier. We eat if we can. We talk. We breathe.”

“Even if it doesn’t matter?” Aya asked.

Kaito looked at her. Then at Rika. Then at the others.

“It matters because we choose to make it matter.”

No one replied. But they stayed there, longer than usual, until the candle burned down to nothing and the dark came in soft and quiet.

And no one ran from it.