“That’s not true! People don’t say things like that in real life,” but Maria laughed, just the same.

“That’s what I thought,” Emily agreed, “and then she just blurted it out.”

Maria’s greatest strength and failure was that everyone loved her. A career extrovert, she often showed up to Emily’s door hours later than promised, but every time she had an excuse—not always a good excuse, but always an entertaining one. Maria was, above all, the person Emily called when she wanted to have a good evening.

It seemed Maria must have been trying to experience a dozen lifetimes in one. She would arrive and hold up three expensive looking bottles of liquor, costume jewelry, and a half-eaten cake, and Emily would be so intrigued to know how she had come into possession of these things that she did not care about the hour. That night, she invited her friend simply to stay in. The clouds had already begun to roll in and pack tightly over the city as the sun set. It was threatening to drop the sort of cold, stinging rain that would turn into a wet, heavy snow by morning. The river had become enveloped in a fog, and the buildings on the far side were reduced to vague shapes of light and dark.

Besides, they had to eat the rest of that cake.

It was in between peels of laughter that the power went out.

The ignored hum of electronics became noticeable as they wound down. The two ducks stood in the dark and quiet, and the carefree night was snatched away.

“So, was your power being shut off today?” Maria asked, sipping at her drink. The glow of light from outside was just enough that Emily could see the hint of a cocked, smug eyebrow.

“I… don’t know?” Emily fumbled for her screen, abandoned somewhere in the dark on the counter-top. This side of the bridge was older, and sometimes neglected, but redundant systems were supposed to reduce a power outage to a flicker. They should not have been sitting in the dark.

Maria’s face disappeared, becoming a blurry outline, as more lights outside went out. The fuzzy shapes across the river turned into nothing but gray, and then just a dark wall of cloud, with scattered hints of traffic glimmering. A few buildings with their own backup generators flickered back on, but the rest remained in darkness.

There had not been a blackout of that scale in living memory. Not in a city like Bridgebane.

Emily found the screen, but was not sure who she was supposed to call, or what she would even say that would have done any good. Surely, everyone already knew, and it wouldn’t have made a difference if she told them again. She stared out the window, at the inky swath that must have been the expanse of the river, and wondered what it was she was witnessing.

The apartment was lit suddenly, as a blinding light in the city cut sharp silhouettes of the buildings through the rain and reflected on the river. The fog rippled, the dark river distorted and pushed outward, and there was hot air on her face as the window shattered, the shock wave pushing it inward. The sound came as a roar, drowning out any screams or breaking glass.

Emily had summoned the memory of her last moments in the safety of her own apartment many times in the months that came after. She could not remember what the conversation had been about, anymore, but that mattered little. Truthfully, the exact shape of Maria’s face had been lost to her in the time since. She told herself that was just the effect of time, but it still felt somehow rude, to have spent the last night of the world with a friend, and forgetting their exact face. No one else was going to remember, and it seemed like it was her job to, and she had failed at it.

What Emily wanted to recall, rather than the guilt or disaster, was how mundane the evening had been. The unremarkable act of sitting with a friend, and laughing until strange hours of the night. The normalcy of a life before they had to flee into the freezing rain, chased alongside a hundred-thousand other people that had been shocked awake by the sounds of Bridgebane collapsing into the harbor.

That she found herself back in that evening was not surprising. It was a melancholy sore that she prodded at, usually without thinking. The problem was this time it felt a little too real, that it was more than memory, complete with details that memory and time would have scrubbed away. She had forgotten the shards of the smartglass window had stung her hands as she covered her face. It was so trivial a pain, that she had lost it when presented with every other horror that followed it.

Maria held a clarity that her memory had not managed in months, perfectly crisp in her movement, and how had Emily forgotten that she had brown eyes? She had known that, and forgotten, and learned again.

The flash of the explosion did not fade this time. The memory did not move to what she knew came next: herself and Maria running into the night. Instead the flash turned into brilliant white that spread in all directions. A horizon that separated into a gray sky and white ground. She was no longer in her home, instead standing alone on a white plane that went on in every direction. The rumbling of the fireball resolved into the whisper of white sand in the wind.

The red writing sat in the sky again, throbbing and unmoving. It did not itch and sting to look at, as it had before. She could not gauge the true size of it, with nothing that would have normally acted as a measure of distance. It could have been a hundred feet away, or a few thousand miles. She stared up at it, finding the words would still not resolve into intelligible language. She moved slightly, to take in her surroundings, and felt her head swim.

She was hit by a wave of despair with a depth and breadth that winded her, though she could not recall a cause. There had been moments very like it, in the grip of that illness, and even fleeing into the freezing night, or the weeks after where nothing happened at all, but the anticipation of what could happen gnawed away at her. This was worse, somehow, as if she were standing in a space that amplified and threw the ache back at her, and the resonance of it built on itself as it sloshed around her.

The sand rippled, as if it were water that she had disturbed.

Something called in the distance, a strange buzzing noise that trumpeted across the ripples. Dread and fear kept looping and compounding, irrationally building as she stood in the middle of nothing, and it felt as though her lungs would simply burst from her in an attempt to escape.