Ozair sat up fast.
He was breathing hard and his heart was beating too fast for someone who had just been asleep.
He looked around the room. Desk. Chair. Torn photo on the nightstand. Everything exactly where it should be.
He looked at his hands for a moment like they might explain something.
They didn't.
He sat there on the edge of his bed, the dream still sitting in his chest like something unfinished. The old man. The gym. The glowing paper.
He could still feel the warmth of it in his fingers even now.
Then something moved at the corner of his eye.
He looked up.
A piece of paper was coming down from the ceiling. Slowly. Turning gently in the air like it had all the time in the world. No wind. No explanation. Just falling, soft and easy, like it knew exactly where it was going.
It landed at his feet without a sound.
Ozair didn't move for a full second.
Then he crouched down and picked it up with both hands. His fingers were trembling slightly and he didn't bother pretending they were not.
The glow from the dream was gone but the warmth was still there, sitting inside the paper like something breathing.
He stood up straight and stared at it.
"It's the same paper," he said slowly. "That wasn't a dream at all."
He held it up close and his eyes went wide. "Wait. Is this like a map to some legendary treasure?"
Then he caught himself and shook his head hard. "No. No, no, no. Stop. I shouldn't be thinking about fantasy things right now. Think properly for once in your life."
He grabbed his shoes without changing out of his pajamas, stuffed his feet in without tying them, and ran for the door.
He made it exactly to the front step.
Then the ground moved.
It started low and quiet, almost like a heavy truck passing too close to the house. Then it became something else entirely. The pavement outside cracked down the middle.
The walls of the house groaned like something in pain. Glass shattered somewhere behind him.
Ozair dropped hard to one knee and grabbed the door frame as the whole street buckled and shifted beneath him.
From somewhere down the road came a sound he had never heard before. Low and enormous and final.
He looked up and saw a house two doors down folding inward on itself, the walls giving way, dust rising slow and thick and tall into the pale morning air like a slow exhale from something dying.
Then it stopped.
People came pouring out into the street. Pale faces, wide eyes, grabbing onto each other without thinking about it. Voices came from every direction at once. Someone was crying. Someone else was shouting a name over and over.
Ozair stood up slowly and looked at the street around him.
A fist came down hard on the top of his head.
"Ow."
His mother stood directly behind him. Her eyes were the kind of calm that is actually the opposite of calm.
"You came running out to save your own life," she said, "and didn't bother to take one second to call for us?"
"I didn't know it was coming. It just happened."
She stared at him.
His father appeared in the doorway behind her and put a steady hand on her shoulder. "It's alright. Let him go. He's in such a hurry, maybe he has something important to do."
She turned her head and looked at his father with an expression that could have melted the front gate.
Then she punched him on the top of his head too.
"So I suppose you will be fixing all this damage by yourself then."
His father rubbed his head carefully. "We can do that later. First we should sleep and calm down, because I haven't rested in days, you know."
The silence that followed was long and very specific.
"What did you just say to me?"
"I'll fix all of it," his father said immediately. "Every single bit. Starting now."
Ozair's little sister Ava was standing just inside the door watching all of this with her hand pressed over her mouth, shoulders shaking. She was laughing.
Ozair decided that was his exit, turned, and ran before anyone could stop him.
He got halfway down the street before he had to slow down.
Aryan was coming from the opposite direction, also at a run, also looking like he had somewhere urgent to be.
They both stopped when they spotted each other, catching their breath, standing in the middle of the damaged street with cracked pavement between them.
Aryan looked at him. "What are you doing here?"
"I was going to ask you the same thing."
"Elina called me."
Ozair looked past him and to the left. Elina was already standing at the entrance to the empty lot, watching them both with her arms folded.
They walked over and Ozair raised one hand before anyone could get a word in.
"I have something I need to tell you both. Something serious. A big secret."
Elina's eyes widened slightly.
Aryan tilted his head and nodded slowly. "I knew it," he said. "I knew it."
Ozair blinked. "You already figured it out?"
"I knew," Aryan said, and now there was a small familiar smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, "that you were hiding it from us all along. That you are just a hollow, insecure coward pretending to be a man. That is the big secret you've got, isn't it?"
Ozair turned to look at him and took a step closer. "Say that again, pretty boy, and I'll rearrange every single thing on your face."
Aryan stepped closer too, same pace, same energy. "Hollow. Insecure. Coward."
Ozair grabbed Aryan by the collar, bunching the fabric in his fists. "Keep barking, junkyard dog. We both know you are too scared to actually bite."
They were close enough that neither of them had much room left to step.
Elina moved between them, both hands out. "This is no time for you two to argue," she said firmly. "I've already called Toviro and he'll be here any minute. Now both of you, calm down."
They separated. Slowly. Still watching each other from the corners of their eyes.
At that same moment, Toviro was running through the streets toward them.
The memory of the earthquake still lingered in his system. Even though the shaking had stopped, the feeling of it had not fully left him.
Just minutes earlier, the house had been thrown into chaos. The walls had trembled, shelves had fallen, and objects had crashed to the floor one after another.
"Mayo!"
He had rushed straight to him.
Mayo was still lying there, unconscious, completely unaware of everything happening around him. Without wasting time, Toviro pulled him up and moved him toward the door as quickly as he could while the house continued to shake.
By the time he made it outside the room, the tremors had begun to fade. The ground was settling, but the fear in the air remained.
People had gathered in the streets, their voices filled with panic. Some were shouting, some were crying, and others had simply sat down on the pavement, staring ahead as if they could not process what had just happened.
Toviro carefully leaned Mayo against a wall and looked around, trying to understand the situation.
Then his attention was drawn to an emergency broadcast shining on a spherical LED balloon floating in the sky.
"Attention, everyone!" the anchor's voice boomed from the floating LED balloon above.
"Our galaxy, A-Nebula, is predicted to collide with the neighboring Milky Way in less than two days," the spherical screen pulsed red as it drifted. "The President of the Space Company will address humanity shortly."
The words spread through the crowd quickly, making the panic worse. People reacted in different ways. Some argued, some broke down, and others simply stood still in the shadow of the floating TV.
Toviro clenched his fists.
"I knew it. These earthquakes, the climate changes, this isn't normal. Something big is coming."
After things calmed slightly, he went back inside. He laid Mayo carefully on his bed again.
That was when he saw it.
A piece of paper lying on the floor beside the bed.
He stopped.
It was the same one from his dream.
For a moment he hesitated. "I am a machine. How can I even dream like a human?"
But the doubt faded quickly. He stepped forward and picked it up.
"It seems, this wasn't just a dream."
Just then, Mayo's phone began to ring.
Toviro glanced at the screen.
It was Elina.
Now Toviro slowed as he reached the empty lot and stopped in front of the others.
"I have something to tell you," he said, slowly but clearly.
"So do we," Aryan said.
Elina looked between all of them quietly. "We had the same dream," she said. "All of us. And I don't think it was just a dream."
Ozair nodded. "That old man. He came to all of us." He reached into his pocket and pulled out the paper.
Nobody argued. Nobody even looked surprised.
The four of them stood there in the lot for a moment, the damaged neighborhood carrying on noisily around them, and something shifted between them.
A kind of understanding without words, the kind that comes when everyone in a group realizes at the same moment that they are all holding the same thing.
Aryan reached into his jacket and held his up without saying anything.
Elina already had hers out, held carefully open in both hands.
Toviro slowly raised his.
Four pieces. All of them warm. All of them carrying that same faint glow in the morning light, steady and patient.
Ozair looked at each one and then back at his own. "The same old man. He came to all of us and gave each of us one piece of paper… What could this mean?"
"Separately," Elina said. "He visited each of us alone. In completely different places."
Aryan turned his piece over in his hands. "Same dream. Same paper appearing in the real world when we woke up. That isn't something you can explain away."
"No," Toviro said quietly. "It isn't."
He had been turning something over in his system since he found his piece on the floor of Mayo's room that morning. He was a machine, and machines don't dream.
There was no process in him that should have produced what he experienced last night, no function, no error, no glitch that looked anything like that white space and that rusted tree and that old man's voice. And yet it had happened.
He didn't have an explanation for it. That alone told him it mattered.
Elina stepped forward and began looking at each piece carefully, moving between them, tilting her head left and right. She picked up Ozair's and held the edge against the edge of hers. The lines matched.
She looked closely at the borders of each sheet, her eyes moving quickly from one to the next.
"Hey, guys," she said quietly. "I think these papers… connect with each other. Look at the lines."