Here it is.
The history test was still in his bag.
Ren didn't know why he noticed that. The city was on fire — not literally, not yet — and the only thing his brain kept returning to was the fact that he'd never turned it in. Third period. Mr. Hayashi had called his name twice. By then the emergency alert had already gone off on every phone in the classroom, and the sound of it — that flat, mechanical shriek — had done something to the air that nobody could take back.
That was four hours ago.
Now he was running.
---
The upper district had emptied fast. That was the thing nobody told you about catastrophe — how quickly people just *left*. Doors hanging open. Shoes on the steps. A half-eaten breakfast on a windowsill, the rice still steaming when he'd passed it an hour ago. The city hadn't been destroyed. It had been abandoned, mid-sentence, like a thought someone forgot to finish.
He kept to the side streets. Narrow, shaded, the kind of alleys that smelled like laundry soap and old concrete. Less open. Less visible.
Less of them.
He didn't have a name for what they were yet. His brain kept offering him words — infected, zombies, the Changed — and rejecting all of them because none of them felt real enough for what he'd seen outside the school gate at 9:47 this morning. The thing that had been a person. The way it had moved.
He wasn't thinking about that.
He was thinking about Lena.
---
She hadn't been in third period.
That was the first thing. She was always in third period — front row, slightly left of centre, the seat with the best sightline to the board and the worst sightline to the door, which she'd once told him was a deliberate choice because she found the door distracting.
He'd thought about that a lot. That she'd told him that at all.
She hadn't been there. And when the alert went off and the classroom dissolved into noise and panic and Mr. Hayashi's voice rising uselessly above it all, the only clear thought Ren had was: *she's not here.*
Everything after that was just movement.
---
He stopped at the corner of Shiocho and Higashimachi, pressed his back against the wall, and listened.
The city sounded wrong. Not loud — that was the thing. He'd expected loud. Instead it was too quiet in the wrong places and too loud in others, sounds arriving without context, without direction. Glass breaking somewhere to the east. A car alarm that had been going for so long it had started to feel like weather. And underneath all of it, if he stayed very still — something else. Low. Rhythmic. Like the city had a pulse it had never had before.
He didn't stay still long enough to think about that.
Her apartment was twelve minutes from school on a normal morning. He'd walked it enough times to know. Today he'd been moving for forty and he was still four blocks out, because twice he'd had to backtrack, and once he'd had to climb through a second floor window of a closed pharmacy to get around a street he couldn't cross.
His left hand was bleeding. He'd punched through the pharmacy's back window when the handle wouldn't turn.
He hadn't noticed until now.
He wrapped it in the sleeve of his jacket, kept moving.
---
The street outside her building was clear.
That was either very good or very bad and he didn't let himself decide which.
He took the stairs. Three floors, the stairwell dark, the emergency lighting flickering on the second landing with the specific energy of something that had been meaning to give out for months and had chosen today. He pressed himself against the wall on the second floor landing and listened again.
Nothing.
Third floor. Her door — 304, the number slightly crooked because she'd once told him the previous tenant had pulled it off during a move-out and the landlord had reattached it badly.
He'd thought about that too. That she'd told him.
He knocked. Three times. Their knock — the one they'd developed in primary school for no reason except that they were children and children invent rituals — two short, one long.
Silence.
Then, from inside, very clearly:
*"It's open."*
---
She was sitting on the kitchen counter.
Steel pipe across her knees — he recognised it as the one that had lived in the utility cupboard outside the building's second floor bathroom, which meant she'd gone and retrieved it at some point, which meant she'd had the presence of mind to go and retrieve it, which was — honestly, completely typical.
She was looking at him.
He was looking at her.
She had a cut above her left eyebrow, shallow, already dried. Her school uniform sleeve was torn off at the shoulder — wrapped around her forearm, makeshift, neat. Her bag was packed and by the door. Shoes already on.
She'd been ready to leave.
She'd been waiting.
He opened his mouth.
She looked at him — really looked, the way she almost never did directly, the way that made him forget what he was about to say — and said:
*"Took you long enough. I almost got bored."*
He laughed. He didn't mean to. It came out wrong, too much relief in it, the kind of laugh that was mostly just *you're alive you're alive you're alive* with a sound attached.
She looked away. Out the window. The bay was visible from here, flat and silver and completely indifferent to what was happening to the city around it.
"Your hand," she said.
"It's fine."
"It's bleeding through your sleeve."
"It's fine, Lena."
A pause. She didn't argue. That was new — or maybe it wasn't, maybe she only argued about things that didn't matter and had always known the difference.
He crossed the kitchen. Sat on the counter beside her, not close enough to be a thing, close enough to feel like one.
Outside, Namiura was quiet in the wrong way.
"I didn't know if you—" he started.
"I know," she said.
"I came as fast as—"
"I know, Ren."
Not unkind. Just certain. The way she said things when she'd already processed them and moved on and was waiting for him to catch up.
He looked at his hands. One wrapped in jacket sleeve. One not.
"Where do we go?" he asked.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she reached into her bag — already packed, shoes already on, steel pipe already retrieved — and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
A map of the city.
She'd marked three routes in different colours. Contingencies. She'd marked the bridge. The arcade. The docks. She'd marked, in red, the places not to go.
She'd been planning this since the alert went off.
Of course she had.
"Harbor Bridge," she said. "If it's still standing."
"And if it isn't?"
She folded the map. Put it away. Picked up the pipe.
"Then we find another way." She looked at him, and for just a second — barely, almost nothing — something in her expression went quiet in a way that wasn't her usual quiet. "You have a better idea?"
He didn't.
She slid off the counter. Moved to the door.
"Come on," Lena said. "We're losing light."
He followed.
At a natural distance that was not accidental.
---