Luke dragged shaking fingers through sweat matted hair, hissing as they snagged on the raw blisters covering his palm. Souvenirs from another fourteen hour shift soldering micro circuits for K.I.W., components destined for machines he'd never see, likely powering the very Initiative escape route he couldn't afford. His reflection stared back from the cracked windowpane of a derelict storefront, gaunt face, hollow eyes, smeared with grime. For a nauseating instant, the image stuttered, ghosting, doubling like a bad transmission before snapping back into focus. He blinked hard, rubbing his eyes. Just tired, he lied to himself, though the tremors, the subtle fraying at reality's edge, felt more frequent, more real, every day.

  The Great Collapse hadn't been a single event, but a slow, grinding unraveling. Wars sputtered out not in victory, but in resource exhaustion. The energy grid died with whimpers and flickering brownouts. Governments dissolved. And something deeper, something fundamental in the world's physics, had cracked. Luke's memories of it were fractured, overlaid. Hiding under the desk with his parents as riots raged outside. Was it the fire-sky riots, or the ones where metallic rain slicked the streets and shadows stretched wrong? He couldn't be sure anymore. Both felt equally true, equally terrifying.

  He navigated the corpse of the city by reflex, climbing over mountains of rubble where buildings once stood, squeezing through gaps in leaning walls that groaned under their own weight. Rusting husks of vehicles lined the buckled asphalt like skeletal remains, occasionally flickering with phantom electrical shorts in the perpetual twilight gloom. His stomach rumbled, a hollow ache that had become a constant companion. One meal a day, courtesy of the Initiative's "humanitarian aid," barely kept the gnawing emptiness at bay. Dying Earth. The phrase felt too clean, too simple for the slow rot, the encroaching strangeness. Sometimes, staring into the smog choked night sky, Luke swore he could feel something vast and cold looking back, a hungry stillness in the void between the few visible stars.

  The only real power left belonged to the corporate conglomerates, the architects of the Shadowed Dawn Initiative. K.I.W., Euro-Corp, Pan-Pacific… their names were whispered with a mixture of hope and fear. Their sleek, silent hovercraft traversed the ruins, symbols of an escape utterly disconnected from the grounded reality of the survivors. Proximity to their tech always felt wrong. Light seemed to bend unnaturally around the polished hulls, shadows clung too deeply beneath them, and the low hum of their engines left a metallic taste in the back of Luke's throat. They weren't just building ships; they were warping the rules.

  He remembered the day the first K.I.W. aid vessel descended, its silver form blindingly bright against the grey sky. Hope, raw and desperate, had surged through the starving crowds. Food, generators, order. Salvation. But the hope curdled quickly. Shadowed Dawn wasn't a rescue mission; it was an evacuation, brutally selective. The Fare. An impossible sum of corporate credits, earned through back breaking labor in their factories or scavenging valuable tech from the ruins. A price designed to leave ninety five percent of humanity behind.

  Luke squeezed through a final gap between leaning concrete slabs and emerged onto the street housing the K.I.W. mess hall, a repurposed pre-Collapse warehouse. The smell hit him first, vaguely like chili, but unstable, flickering between savory and chemical, like multiple potential meals vying for existence. He joined the shuffling queue, keeping his head down, avoiding the vacant eyes of the others. He focused on his blistered hands resting on the dented metal tray. The skin throbbed with a dull, rhythmic pulse. Was it just inflammation? Or was it syncing up with the low hum of the nearby Initiative generator, or something deeper, something broken in the world's own heartbeat?

  He carried the tray gingerly, careful not to aggravate the blisters. The line shuffled forward with agonizing slowness. The rumbling in his stomach intensified. A constant companion these days, that hollow ache. Old Man Hemlock at the factory joked it was proof he was still alive. The day you stop feeling the rumbling, kid, that’s the day you're truly done. Luke hoped Hemlock was wrong.

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  "Here ya go, lad!"

  Luke looked up, startled from his dark thoughts. Jason. His friend, mentor, the closest thing to family Luke had left since his parents succumbed to the sickness years ago. Jason slid a ladle full of the thick, greyish stew onto Luke's tray, offering a tired smile that didn't quite reach his hollow eyes.

  "Thanks, Jason," Luke managed, forcing a reciprocal smile that felt brittle.

  Jason, older, leaner, his face a testament to years of scarcity and worry, mirrored the expression. "Another day survived in paradise, eh?"

  "Something like that."

  Jason hung up his stained apron, grabbed his own tray, and nodded towards a relatively clean table in the corner. They navigated the crowded, echoing space, the scrape of forks on metal trays the primary soundtrack. The silence between them stretched as they ate, punctuated only by the sounds of consumption.

  "Think they'll finish it?" Luke asked finally, breaking the quiet, needing to voice the question hanging over everyone. "Shadowed Dawn? Rahu?"

  Jason chewed slowly, staring into his bowl. "Pray they do, Luke. Seven years down, maybe three to go by their optimistic projections. Air gets worse every month." He looked up, his gaze heavy. "What choice do we have but hope?"

  Luke nodded, the stew suddenly tasteless. He knew about the failing magnetic field, the increasingly toxic atmosphere, the strange auroras painting the wrong latitudes with unsettling light. Ten years, maybe less, before Earth became completely uninhabitable. Unlivable. Un-real.

  "What is it, though?" Luke pressed. "The Initiative? Derek down at Onboarding talks like it's... constructed. A 'fabricated reality'?"

  Jason shrugged, pushing stew around his bowl. "Hard to say. Derek says a lot. Rumors fly. Another dimension, a stable simulation, a pocket universe built by the Initiative's tech… Does it matter? If it's off this rock, it's better than here." He gestured vaguely with his fork, and for a split second, the utensil seemed to leave multiple translucent trails in the air, like a visual echo, before snapping back to normal. Luke blinked, rubbing his eyes. The glitches were getting worse.

  The silence returned, thicker this time. Luke scraped the last smear of stew from his tray, the action loud in the sudden lull.

  "You getting any closer, Luke?" Jason asked quietly, his gaze fixed on the table. "To the Fare?"

  The question landed like a lead weight in Luke's gut. The familiar spiral of despair threatened to pull him under. "I'm trying, Jason," he whispered, the words sticking in his throat. "Working doubles, sleeping rough to save transport credits… it's never enough. The target keeps rising, or my earnings get cut. It feels… impossible." His vision blurred, the harsh lights of the mess hall fracturing through unshed tears. He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing his blistered palms against them, fighting for control. "I was born to late to learn any real skills, skills that The Initiative values, pays for. I am just a cog in the factory assembly line" he said bitterly. A single hot tear escaped, splashing onto the scarred tabletop. It shimmered strangely for a moment, reflecting a distorted image of the mess hall ceiling before evaporating. A choked sob escaped him.

  "Hey, hey now," Jason's arm came around his shoulders, a solid, grounding presence amidst the swirling despair and glitching reality. "Easy, son. Easy."

  "I don't… I don't want to die here, Jason," Luke choked out, the carefully constructed walls crumbling. He leaned into the embrace, the dam finally breaking. He cried, ragged, heartbroken sobs shaking his thin frame, burying his face in the rough fabric of Jason's worn jacket. Around them, the noise of the mess hall continued unabated. No one looked. Tears were just another part of the background radiation in this dying world.

  "It'll be okay," Jason murmured, his hand gently rubbing Luke's back. "There's still time. We'll figure something out. Promise."

  The words were kind, meant to soothe, but Luke knew, it was a promise built on shifting sand, on a reality that was itself coming undone. There was no figuring it out. There was only the relentless grind towards the inevitable end, or the impossible dream of the Fare. And for Luke, that dream felt further away than ever.