David, Cynthia, and her father Manny Volynsky stepped cautiously out of the cave mouth, blinking in the smoky light of sunset. They were somewhere in the Appalachian foothills near the Greenbrier Resort, just beyond the scorched ruins of Washington, D.C. For days, the world had trembled, screamed, and burned. Now, at last, it had fallen into a brittle, reverent silence.
The three of them approached the edge of a broken ridge. Behind them, the shelter’s reinforced steel doors stood open, their edges scorched black. Cynthia clutched David’s arm. She said nothing. Words, at this moment, felt like broken tools. But he could feel her tension through the tremor in her fingers. All three of them were ash-streaked, hollow-eyed, and aching with exhaustion. But they were alive.
So were his friends, Elana, John Grady, and his nemesis, Stan, the reporter. How they made it out of the city proper was a miracle.
Before them, the landscape lay disfigured and raw. Where a wide, forested valley had once spread—green, inhabited, and familiar—there now gaped a vast and deeply cut canyon, miles across and still exhaling heat. Jagged shards of crust lay scattered like broken bones, hurled skyward and fell again with ruinous force. What little had stood through the tremors now lay crushed beneath boulders the size of buildings.
Manny took a step forward, boots crunching through cinders. He squinted toward the horizon, where the rogue planet—twice the size of the moon—was receding into haze, dragging its luminous wake behind it like a comet. It looked smaller now. Almost merciful.
It had nearly destroyed them.
“It’s all gone…” Cynthia’s voice was hoarse and soft.
David didn’t look away. “Not all. We’re still here.”
She leaned into him. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders, grateful for her warmth, her breath, her heartbeat.
Manny nodded slowly. “We’ll begin again. It’s what we do. The Earth has scars older than memory. It remembers. So must we.”
The canyon before them glowed faintly in the dusk, its edges ragged and bright like open wounds. What nature took eons to carve, this had done in minutes—plasma fire, electric storms, a cosmic wound opened between worlds. The land hadn’t been shaped by water or wind, nor time. It had been machined by power. The kind of power no textbook had ever prepared them for. The kind only Manny had dared to name.
“No one will believe this,” Cynthia whispered. “Not unless they saw it. Not unless they felt it.” She glanced at David. “Do you think anyone else did?”
David took a breath. “Some did. I know it. Manny’s signal went out. We got it through before the satellites died.”
“They heard,” Manny added. “Maybe not many. And maybe not in time. But someone believed. I’m sure of it.”
They stood in silence. A breeze stirred the scorched pines and carried the faint tang of ozone and smoke.
Above them, the moon began to rise—blood-red and angry, its surface still reeling from electrical storms that had lashed even the heavens. It looked closer than it should. Feverish. Watching.
David tilted his head. “Even the moon’s blushing.”
Cynthia gave a faint smile. “She’s embarrassed. She didn’t believe you either.”
“No,” he said, chuckling quietly. “But she made it. Like you. Like us.”
Manny turned to face the horizon again. “It’s not gone, that planet. It’s part of us now. Bound to us. Like shadows circling a fire.”
Cynthia shivered. “Will it come back?”
“Eventually,” Manny said. “No one knows when. The old models weren’t built for this. We never imagined we’d pass each other like dancers in a spiral.”
David stared toward a flicker of movement—maybe firelight, maybe something more—on a distant ridge. “Maybe someone else is out there. Watching the same sky.”
“They are,” Manny said, his voice steady. “And we’ll find them.”
The moon climbed higher, casting a copper sheen across the land. Below them, the new canyon waited. Quiet now. But the Earth still hummed beneath their feet, resonant and alive.
And overhead, the red sky lingered.
