The train took seven hours. Leo watched the cities blur into towns, the towns into villages, the villages into farmland, and finally the farmland into something wilder. By the time he stepped off at a small station whose name he couldn't pronounce, the sky had turned the color of old pewter.
He walked. The trail was marked but barely just a faded sign pointing toward the treeline. The forest swallowed him slowly, a green darkness that felt older than anything he'd ever known. The air smelled of damp earth and pine resin and something else, something ancient and indifferent.
He found a clearing by a stream. Set up his cheap tent. Built a fire with difficulty his hands remembered the motions even if his body had forgotten the strength. He sat by the flames as the light died, eating a cold can of beans, listening to the water move over stones.
For the first time in years, he wasn't thinking about money. About algorithms. About the next method, the next platform, the next failure. He was just here, in this moment, watching sparks rise into the blackening sky.
He fell asleep to the sound of nothing.
Day two was harder. His back ached. He was bored terrifyingly, profoundly bored. His hand kept reaching for a phone that had no signal. He walked for hours, following deer trails, losing himself deliberately. He talked to himself out loud, just to hear a human voice. He tried to remember the last time he'd had a real conversation. He couldn't.
That night, he drank whiskey from a flask Black Ram, of course, decanted from a bottle into something portable and looked up at the stars. They were brighter here than he'd ever seen them, a million cold fires burning in the dark. He felt very small. And for some reason, that felt good.
Day three.
He woke to a strange light.
Not dawn something else. The sky was wrong. A pale greenish glow, like the northern lights but deeper, more solid. The air felt heavy, charged with something that made the hair on his arms stand up. The birds had stopped singing. The stream had gone quiet.
Leo stood up. He looked at the sky. And then he saw them.
Meteorites.
Not one. Not a shower. A cascade of fire, a curtain of burning rock falling from the heavens in every direction. They were too many to count, too fast to track. They moved in silence for a long moment the silence of a held breath and then the sound hit.
A roar that wasn't a roar. A vibration that went through his bones, his teeth, his soul. The ground shook. Trees toppled. The sky turned white, then orange, then a deep and terrible red.
Leo ran. He didn't think. He just ran, deeper into the forest, away from the clearing, away from the falling fire. A meteorite struck somewhere behind him the shockwave threw him forward, slamming him into the mud. His ears rang. His vision blurred. He crawled, then stumbled, then ran again.
And then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.
The silence that followed was absolute. No birds. No wind. Just the crackle of distant fires and the ringing in his ears. Leo lay on the forest floor, bleeding from a cut on his forehead, and waited to die.
But he didn't die.
He waited an hour. Two. The sky cleared slowly, returning to a pale, sickly blue. He sat up. His body was bruised but whole. The forest around him was a wreck trees splintered, the stream dammed with debris, the ground scorched in places but he was alive.
He didn't know it yet, but he was the only one.