They all reached him at the same time.
Elina touched his shoulder first. "Mayo?"
Nothing. Just shallow, uneven breathing and the grass dark around him.
Aryan dropped to one knee. "What just happened." Not really a question. More like something falling out of him.
"Why was he hitting himself?" Ozair said, louder than he meant to.
Toviro stared at Mayo and said nothing for a moment. His eyes moved to his face and stayed there. He had seen it. Dark gray on one side, his natural eye color. And red on the other. Two different things living in one person.
"He is unconscious," Toviro said. "But alive."
They all looked at him lying there under the pale flicker of a distant street lamp. Bruised, motionless, completely different from what they had seen ten minutes ago.
Aryan stood. "We need to take him home."
"His face," Ozair said. "The blood. We can't walk him through the street like this."
Toviro touched the middle of his chest and the light there brightened for a second. A white mask appeared in his hand, smooth and plain, like a face-care mask.
He leaned forward and pressed it gently over Mayo's face.
The mask seemed to absorb into his skin. The cuts disappeared. The blood. All of it.
Ozair stared. "That worked."
"The wounds are still there," Toviro said. "It only changes what you see."
Aryan lifted Mayo's upper body and Ozair crouched low. Together they got him onto Ozair's back. Ozair straightened slowly, adjusted the weight, and tightened his hold.
Then they walked.
Nobody spoke. Street lamps came on one by one as they moved through the neighborhood. The wind had grown colder. Mayo's head rested against Ozair's shoulder, loose and still.
The weight of him felt different from what Ozair expected. Not heavier. Just wrong in a way he could not name.
When they reached the house they stopped at the gate.
Aryan looked at the door. "We should leave from here."
One by one the others nodded.
They transferred Mayo carefully from Ozair's back onto Toviro's. Toviro adjusted his footing and settled the weight.
Aryan looked at Toviro. "We'll see you tomorrow. The empty lot."
Ozair said, "Have a good night."
Elina looked at Mayo's face resting on Toviro's shoulder. She held her gaze there a moment longer than the rest.
"Take care of him," she said.
Toviro looked at them all. "See you tomorrow. And thank you. All of you."
One quiet moment passed between them. Then Elina, Ozair, and Aryan turned and walked away.
Toviro stood alone in front of the door and rang the bell.
A few seconds passed. The door opened and Haruto stood in the frame, his expression relaxed until he saw what was on Toviro's back.
"Oh, Toviro. Good that you are back." His eyes moved to Mayo. "Is that Mayo? What happened to him?"
Toviro kept his voice easy and calm. "We were all in the empty lot together. Aryan brought food and Elina had some medicine she had bought for her mother. Ozair picked it up to look at it, his mother had mentioned the same one. He said it looked familiar."
Toviro paused, tilting his head slightly. "Then it accidentally opened and three of the pills slipped out and fell into Mayo's juice. You can probably guess what happened after that."
Haruto stared at him. Then a short laugh escaped. "He drank it."
Toviro nodded. "He probably did."
Mina appeared from the hallway, looking past Haruto with wide eyes. "What happened? Is he alright?"
Haruto turned to her. "He is sleeping, that's all."
Mina pressed a hand to her chest. "Thank God. I thought something had happened again."
"He's fine," Toviro said. "I'll take him up."
Haruto stepped aside and waved him through. "Go on, go on."
Toviro carried him up the stairs carefully and laid him down on the bed. He pulled the blanket over him and straightened it.
Then he stood there looking at him.
"What do I do now," he said quietly to himself.
He walked to the corner of the room where he always stood and sat down against the wall. He looked at the broken gadget in his hands, the metal bent and cracked, the tiny circuit board exposed. He turned it over slowly between his fingers.
He had always been able to help. Always had something. A reading, a tool, a solution to reach for. Tonight Mayo had shattered two of them before they could do anything at all.
He looked across the dark room at Mayo's face.
"You are still in there somewhere. Aren't you."
No answer. Just breathing.
Across the neighborhood, three other lights were still on, but not for long.
Ozair lay on his bed in his pajamas, knuckles scraped, staring at the ceiling with a frown that had not moved since he sat down.
"That wasn't a fight," he muttered. A short sound came out of him, not quite a laugh. "He was really fast."
The scenes kept replaying without asking permission.
He reached over without looking and picked up a torn photo from his desk. School trip last year. Mayo in the middle of the group with that wide, stupid grin, like someone had said something funny right before the photo was taken.
Ozair pressed his thumb gently against Mayo's face in the picture.
"Don't go away," he said quietly. "Not like this."
Aryan sat at the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, dried blood at the corner of his mouth. He had not touched it.
He kept going back to the moment Mayo hit him. Not the punch. The eyes. That flat, empty calm with nothing behind it. No anger. No recognition. Nothing to push back against.
He picked up his phone and scrolled to an old video. Mayo in gym class, tripping over nothing, going down completely flat while everyone lost it around him. Mayo laughing too, even though his face was red from embarrassment, laughing harder than anyone else at himself.
Aryan watched it twice.
Then quietly, to no one: "Come back, you dumb loser."
On the other side of the neighborhood, Elina sat at her desk with her sketchbook open. The drawing on the page was Mayo from last month, holding a tray of snacks in front of a birthday cake they had made together. He was smiling in it. The real kind.
Tears dropped onto the desk beside the book.
She thought about his hand, raised and then held back. The silence that followed had been like something waking from a dream and not knowing where it was.
He had stopped himself.
"He is still in there," she whispered. "He didn't hit me."
She went to the window. Outside, the moon hung large and deeply red, bigger than it had any right to look, a blood moon sitting heavy over the quiet street.
She put her hand against the glass.
"Wherever you are in there, Mayo," she said softly. "I'll wait. We will bring you back."
Sleep came for all of them faster than it should have. Heavy and sudden, pulling each of them under before they were ready.
In Mayo's room, Toviro sat quietly in his corner, back resting against the wall as the night stretched on without disturbance.
At first it felt like nothing more than a faint distortion at the edges of his vision, the kind that made him pause and recalibrate. The room was still there, unchanged, yet something about it no longer aligned the way it should.
He lifted his head. "What is—"
The question never reached its end.
His vision did not dim in any measurable way, nor did it transition into rest. Systems like his did not sleep, did not drift, did not lose awareness without cause, and yet something bypassed all of that as if those rules had never existed.
It wasn't darkness in the way humans understood it, but a complete absence of input, as though the process of seeing had been interrupted at its source.
For a moment that couldn't be tracked, there was nothing.
No signal. No data. No self.
Just a void where function should have been.
Outside, the sky remained clear, stretched wide and calm above the silent streets. The stars were sharp and untouched, and for a brief second everything seemed perfectly normal.
Then the lightning appeared.
It moved without warning, thin streaks of red slipping across the sky in slow, unnatural patterns, weaving between the stars like something alive and searching.
There was no sound to follow it, no crack or echo, only the unsettling sight of it spreading where it didn't belong.
The air grew heavy, as if the world itself had begun to listen.
Then the thunder came.
It did not roll across the sky or strike from a distance. Instead it formed all at once, a single overwhelming sound that seemed to erupt from everywhere at the same time, from the ground beneath, the air around, and the vast emptiness above.
It lasted only a moment.
Then it was gone.
Silence fell immediately, thick and absolute, pressing against everything like a held breath that refused to release.
And within that silence, something slipped through.
Toviro sat beneath a rusted tree growing alone in the middle of a white space with no edges and no sky. His systems ran checks. None returned anything useful.
An old man appeared from behind the tree, wearing a simple robe and carrying a calm expression.
"You seek answers," the man said.
"Who are you?"
"Someone who has been watching for a long time."
A glowing paper appeared in his hand. He held it out.
"This will guide you. Follow where it leads."
Toviro reached for it. But the white space was already dissolving.
–––
Aryan stood in his backyard.
The sky above was packed with stars, more than it ever was in reality. He sat looking up at them and it felt natural, until the voice came from behind.
"You fear what your friend has become."
He turned. The old man stood near the fence, half lit by the moon.
"Is this a dream?"
"Perhaps. Or a warning."
He held out the glowing paper. Aryan looked at it for a moment, then stepped forward and took it.
"Follow this to find the truth."
"Truth?" Aryan said quietly, reading something in it he could not describe.
The wind swept through and took everything with it.
–––
Ozair stood in the school gym alone, a broken bat in his hands, the lights above flickering unevenly. A shadow passed along the far wall. He spun toward it.
The old man stood by the door, unhurried, as if he had always been there.
"You are brave," he said. "Not only in body… You still believe in your friend."
"I don't know what's happening to him," Ozair said.
"You will." He held out the paper and it glowed in the dim gym like a piece of the moon had come inside. Ozair reached out and took it.
"Who are you?" he asked.
But the man was already gone.
–––
Elina stood barefoot at the river's edge. The water was cold, the sky gray, the wind moving without stopping. She didn't know how she had gotten here.
The old man appeared beside her.
"You are the light he still sees," he said. "But even light needs a path."
He held the paper out. The glow of it reflected in her eyes.
She took it without hesitating. "What am I supposed to do?"
He looked up at the gray sky.
"Follow this," he said. "And you will understand."
The water rippled outward around her feet in circles with no source.
Then she woke up.
The room was pale with early morning light. She sat up slowly, the dream still sitting clearly in her mind in a way dreams usually don't.
Outside, the sun had barely started to rise.