Arjes clutches his satchel to his chest, lungs burning as he bolts down the tiled corridor of the college. His shoes slap against the waxed floor, echoing like gunshots. Students wave, call his name, try to catch his attention — he doesn’t slow, doesn’t answer. No time. Not now. Not when the numbers are still screaming inside his head.
He bursts through the glass doors into the pale daylight, cutting across the street toward the cracked stone stairwell of his apartment building. His heart hammers against his ribs, but the fear that drives him is larger than exhaustion. It is dread. Cold, suffocating dread.
The key rattles in the lock as he shoves the door open.
“What’s all that for?” Tammy’s voice greets him from the kitchen, half-laughing, half-concerned — until she sees his face. He is pale, sweating, eyes wild, breath coming in uneven gasps. Her own voice sharpens, drops low. “Arjes. Talk to me. What’s wrong?”
Arjes doesn’t answer. He stands frozen at the window, staring at the sun where it hangs fat and distorted above the horizon, its glare bleeding strangely against the clouds. His fingers twitch at his side. Finally, he turns to her, his voice raw.
“We need to leave.”
Tammy sets the wooden spoon in her hand onto the counter, slowly, cautiously, as though he’s a spooked animal ready to bolt. “Leave? What are you talking about?”
“I told them this would happen,” he mutters, fumbling through drawers, pulling out keys, stuffing them into his bag with shaking hands. “And none of them listened. Not one.”
From the hallway, a smaller voice cuts through the air. “Dad?” Tymond stands in the doorway, no more than twelve, his head tilted in confusion. He sees his father’s frantic movements, the sheen of sweat across his brow. “Work go that bad?”
Arjes spins on him, his tone sharp, commanding. “Tymond — your room. Grab clothes. Enough for three days. Stuff them in a bag. Go!”
The boy flinches at the bark of his father’s voice but obeys, vanishing down the hall.
Arjes looks at her, eyes wet but burning. “They’re not going to leave us. They’re going to erase us. My research showed them the timing, the inevitability — and they’ve decided who matters.”
Her face hardens, anger blooming where fear had been. “But you’re the one who warned them! Your work gave them this chance! And they’d just—”
“They will,” Arjes cuts in, his tone low, certain. “They’ll let the rest drown, starve, claw each other to pieces while the seas rise. Only the chosen make it aboard. The rest of us? We are ballast.”
Silence hangs, broken only by the ticking of the wall clock. Then Arjes’s voice drops further, urgent, desperate.
“We don’t have time. I’ve secured a space in the Vizer Building, top floors. Reinforced. High above the floodline — for as long as there is one. It will buy us days, maybe weeks. Enough to survive while the city drowns.”
Tammy stares at him, mouth half-open, mind reeling.
“Tammy.” His voice cracks now, stripped of authority, of reason, down to something raw. “They know I know. I’ve been followed since the briefing. We have to move. Now.”
As he speaks, the faint rumble of engines carries from the street outside — a low vibration through the walls. Tammy freezes, her eyes flicking to the window.
“Who is that?” she whispers.
Arjes doesn’t answer. His hand tightens on the satchel. “They’re here.”
“You lied to those people!” Arjes roars, his voice cracking against the gray sky. His hand slams against the wooden podium, rattling the microphones wired to it. The crowd, a restless sea of bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, shifts uneasily. Some lean forward, curious. Others cross their arms, scowling.
News vans idle along the curb, their antennas stabbing into the low clouds. One camera swings to frame him in sharp focus, the red tally light burning like an unblinking eye.
“If you’re just joining us,” the anchor’s voice cuts through from a speaker, tinny and detached, “breaking news from Essex County — a former meteorologist, recently dismissed from the Vizer R&D Corporation, has called an impromptu press conference. He claims that an elite coalition has prepared an escape plan to evade a catastrophic lunar event. His words… have ignited a storm of confusion and outrage.”
Arjes grips the podium with white-knuckled hands. The sweat on his brow gleams beneath the harsh floodlights. His voice drops low, urgent, almost pleading.
“I am here because the truth has been buried. They told me my work didn’t matter. They told me your lives didn’t matter.” His gaze sweeps the crowd — the mothers holding children on their hips, the students with half-torn backpacks, the workers in dirty uniforms still clutching lunch pails. “But it does. It matters because when the water comes, when the tides rise and keep rising, it won’t care about your politics. It won’t care about your paychecks. It will swallow us all.”
A voice cuts through the murmurs: “Prove it!”
The words strike like a thrown stone. Arjes’ head snaps toward the sound. A woman in the front row pushes forward, her eyes narrowed with fury.
“Prove what, exactly?” he fires back, his voice echoing off the stone facade of the town hall.
“Prove the conditions!” she shouts, her fists balled at her sides. “You’re fearmongering! You’re spouting doomsday trash without showing evidence! You’re just a political extremist looking to divide us.”
The crowd ripples with murmurs — doubt, suspicion, anger. The air thickens. Someone laughs bitterly. Another man jeers.
Arjes slams his palm flat on the podium, his chest heaving. His voice erupts like a crack of thunder.
“There is nothing political about survival!”
The microphones squeal with feedback, a shrill cry that makes the crowd flinch. He leans forward, pointing a trembling finger skyward.
“Pull your eyes from your screens. Look at the tides. Look at the skies. The moon itself is dragging the world out of balance, and you sit here demanding paperwork like this is some committee hearing! The ice is melting! The seas are rising! The weather you think you understand is breaking apart, piece by piece!”
A young man shouts back, his face twisted in disdain: “Everything’s always changing! Storms. Politics. Governments. Always have, always will. What’s your point, Dr. Toran?”
The crowd chuckles nervously, but Arjes does not smile. His voice drops, steady now, sharp as a blade.
“My point is this: if you stay silent, if you do nothing, the elites will survive. They’ve built ships you will never see. They’ve written lists your names will never be on. And when the waters come, when the horizon itself breaks, it is their children who will live… not yours.”
A hush spreads across the assembly, broken only by the click of cameras and the low hum of news drones circling overhead. Thunder growls in the distance, a rolling tremor that makes windows rattle.
Arjes leans closer to the microphones, his eyes bloodshot, his voice hoarse but unyielding.
“I am not here to scare you. I am here to tell you that survival is not theirs to hoard. It is ours to take back. But if you do not fight for it — if you do not demand it — then when the flood comes, you will drown with the truth still locked in their vaults.”
The last words hang in the air like smoke. The crowd stirs, torn between disbelief and terror. Some shout for proof again, others cry for justice. The first drops of rain patter against the podium, darkening the wood.
Arjes raises his arms to the sky, and the storm answers.
The television hisses to life as Tammy flicks it on, her weary eyes expecting the usual monotony of late-night chatter. Instead, a news bulletin overrides the broadcast with urgent tones.
“Several coastal cities remain under catastrophic impact from the unprecedented floods. Death tolls have already tripled last week’s totals, with entire districts submerged. Multiple states and sovereign territories have declared states of emergency and have called upon the Worldwide Ark Vessel Corps to coordinate mass evacuations across the oceans. Citizens are urged to seek higher ground immediately.”
Tammy clutches the edges of the couch, her throat tightening. The screen cuts to aerial footage: helicopters skimming above drowned metropolises where only rooftops pierce the rolling surface. Highways curve beneath black water, cars bobbing like toys. Faces press against broken glass as flood currents tear buildings apart in real time. Bridges collapse like paper, vanishing into the tide.
Her pulse hammers. This is it. This is what Arjes had shouted from the rooftops, what he lost his job over, what the world dismissed as paranoia. It was all here, on the screen, undeniable now.
Then — a sound. A warped howl of air pressure, like reality bending inward. It rattles the glass of the sliding window behind her, vibrating deep in her chest like the groan of a collapsing hull. Tammy rises on shaking legs.
“Arjes?” she calls, her voice breaking.
She draws toward the sound, toward the window, her bare feet sticking against the cold polished floor. She pulls the curtains aside—
And the horizon is gone.
The city is already half-drowned, but now the waters churn with a violence that no storm could explain. Whole blocks buckle beneath the currents. The sky darkens, the daylight fading as something enormous eclipses the sun.
Her eyes widen. The ocean itself is rising.
A wall of water towers in the distance, higher than skyscrapers, as if the sea has decided to stand upright. A tidal wave — no, something greater, something alive in its enormity — rises on the skyline, its sheer face blotting out the world. Shadows stretch across the metropolis, turning day into an apocalyptic dusk.
Tammy’s throat clenches. Her knees lock.
“Oh… my God…”
“Get away from the windows!”
Arjes bursts into the room, chest heaving, hair slicked with sweat. Tymond is clutched in one arm, his small face pale with terror. Arjes lunges, seizing Tammy by the arm.
The roar of the oncoming wave is deafening, like a thousand freight trains colliding at once. The apartment trembles as if sensing its doom.
Then the world breaks.
The wave collides with the city. Glass detonates, concrete fractures. The luxury tower groans before its façade explodes inward. Water doesn’t just crash — it invades, a hyper-pressurized wall ripping through steel and stone.
The window shatters, and Tammy screams as the flood hurls into the room with impossible force.
The family is lifted, spun, swept into the current. Their bodies smash against furniture, the hallway warping into a drowning tunnel. Tammy claws for air as the torrent slams them down the corridor.
“Hold on!” Arjes bellows, his words shredded by the roar of the flood.
He locks his arm around a railing, muscles screaming. With his other hand, he clamps onto Tymond, his knuckles whitening. Tammy flails, desperate, then seizes her son’s leg. For a breathless instant, the three of them hang in a fragile chain against the fury of the water.
The current is relentless, a monstrous physics that seems to tilt the world sideways. Their bodies are pulled at angles that defy gravity. The stairwell groans, metal twisting, beams ripping free.
Tammy’s nails dig into her child’s leg, but the water is merciless. Her grip is slipping. Her eyes meet Arjes’s — wide, terrified, shimmering with tears — and he knows. He knows in that single look what is about to happen.
“Baby?!” she screams, her voice ragged, her face distorted by the rushing torrent.
“Just hold on!” Arjes yells back, straining with every shred of strength in his body. But his words feel hollow even as they leave his lips.
Tammy’s fingers slide free.
“No—!” Arjes’s scream fractures as she tumbles, limbs flailing, vanishing into the liquid abyss.
“Mom!” Tymond’s shriek pierces the roar, and in his panic he thrashes. His small hand slips from Arjes’s grasp.
“Tymond! No!”
The boy is ripped away, his figure flung into the maelstrom, swallowed alongside his mother. One instant they are there, the next they are erased, carried into the watery void as if they never existed.
Arjes’s chest constricts with agony. His grip falters. He pulls himself upward, hand over hand against the torrent, forcing his broken body into the stairwell where the waters crash but do not fully consume. He drags himself onto the landing, coughing violently, his lungs burning with salt and blood.
He looks back down the corridor, eyes wide, desperate for any sign — a hand, a shadow, anything — but there is nothing. Only the churning flood, receding into silence.
His wife. His son. Gone.
The city beyond screams with sirens and collapsing steel. The wave still pounds, splitting towers like matchsticks. Arjes grips the railing until his hand bleeds, his teeth grinding. His mind collapses inward, wracked with a grief so deep it almost unmakes him.
But beneath it — buried like embers under ash — something else ignites.
Not surrender.
Not despair.
Something sharper.
Resolve.
