Volume 4 – Chapter 20: Echoes of Tomorrow

Date: September 26

Last 5 Days.

When Kaito woke up, the sky looked like bruises, darkened purple and gray.

He sat at the bedside for a moment, feeling time sitting on his chest. Five days. It sounded like a whole lifetime and just a heartbeat.

Rika stirred beside him, her hand instinctively reaching out. "Kaito?" she murmured.

He whispered, "I am here, on the scene," moving some hair away from her face. He then placed a gentle kiss on her forehead, allowing himself to revel in her warmth.

Kanna was already up. She set two mismatched mugs on the kitchen counter. She had been more quiet than usual these past few days, not for sadness but something deeper: acceptance, perhaps? Or defiance.

Their silent breakfast was interrupted as Kanna's repaired radio crackled to life.

A voice. An actual human voice.

"...to anyone still listening... this is not the end. Hold onto your people. Hold onto your hope. We are more than our ending."

The moment the transmission was through, static consumed all frequencies. But it was enough to paralyze them in their place.

Kaito clenched his fists. Hope. Such a dangerous, beautiful word.

A message was sent that evening.

They found a crumbling wall on the outskirts of town, where graffiti, desperate thoughts, and final markers may have once run rampant.

Kaito picked up a can of spray paint that someone had discarded and wrote, slow and deliberate:

"We lived. We loved. We fought. We didn’t give up."

Rika drew a small heart beside it, smiling through the tears.

Kanna stepped up, stared for a minute, then snatched a different color, scribbling in her message below:

"Not gone. Never forgotten."

At sunset, they stood back and looked at their creation while shadows stretched long across the broken world before them.

It wasn't much.

But it was something.

A reminder for anyone — or anything — that came after.

They were here.

They mattered.