They didn't need to say much after that.
The dishes were cleared, the cups washed, and somewhere in the quiet that follows a long and heavy day, they all simply moved toward sleep.
Mina and Elina took Mina's room. The door closed softly behind them, the sound of low voices carrying for a moment, then fading.
Down the hall, Mayo's room became something between a sleepover and a military camp.
Ozair and Aryan hauled blankets and pillows up from the closet, Toviro carried his own things with that particular neatness of his.
Mayo just lay down on his bed and watched them arrange themselves on the floor like it was a completely normal thing.
It was, in a way. That was the strange part.
"You can sleep over there," Mayo said, nodding at the space beside Aryan.
"Mm," Ozair said.
Then Ozair pulled back Mayo's blanket and lay down beside him on the bed.
Mayo stared at the ceiling. "Ozair."
"What."
"The floor is right there."
"I see it."
"That's where you're supposed to sleep."
"I'm comfortable here."
Ozair shifted, pushing Mayo sideways with his shoulder until Mayo was pressed against the wall with nowhere left to go.
He tried to push back. It was like pushing a wall. Eventually he gave up, turned his face upward, and stared at the ceiling.
That was the only direction left.
He closed his eyes.
They were all tired—the deep, bone-level kind that doesn't argue with itself.
One by one, the room went quiet. The lights stayed off. The house settled around them. And without much ceremony, they slept.
The city was quiet that night. Every house on the street, every window, every streetlamp, all of it still. The kind of still that only comes after something enormous has passed through.
The sky, though, was different.
Three moons hung above the world. One in the center—large, full, casting the same pale light it always had. Two smaller ones flanked it on either side, sitting in the dark like new additions that had simply decided to stay.
No one was awake to see them. No one pointed at them or took a photo or called a neighbor.
The city slept beneath a sky it didn't recognize yet, and the night passed gently over all of it, unhurried, as if the world was giving them one last quiet thing before everything changed.
Toviro's eyes opened.
Just like that, no groggy middle state, no half-consciousness. One moment asleep, the next fully present.
The window above him was pale with early light, the kind that comes just before the sun commits to rising.
He sat up slowly, supporting himself on one hand, and looked left. Aryan was still out, arms folded across his chest like a man who slept with intention.
Then he looked toward the bed.
Mayo was asleep, one arm over his face. Ozair had somehow gotten a leg across him and appeared to be drooling slightly onto his shoulder.
Mayo's expression, even asleep, suggested he was aware of this and unhappy about it.
Toviro stood, picked up his staff from where it rested against the wall, and turned to the window.
He stopped.
Outside, the street was gone.
Not gone—still there, technically.
The road was still there, the houses were still there. But everything else had been swallowed.
Vines had crept up the streetlamps and wrapped around them in thick coils.
Grass had pushed up through the cracks in the pavement, splitting it in places, long and wild and completely unbothered.
Their own fence sagged under the weight of moss, half-buried in weeds that had grown hip-high overnight.
A few houses further down were barely visible, just dark shapes under layers of green, like ruins that had been there for decades.
One house at the far end of the street had collapsed entirely, its walls folded inward, swallowed by overgrowth that had climbed through the windows and come out the other side.
Toviro stared at it for a long moment.
"Everyone," he said. "Wake up. You need to see this."
Aryan's eyes snapped open.
He sat up in one smooth motion, scanned the room on instinct, then looked at Toviro standing at the window. He rose quietly and crossed the room.
Toviro stepped aside. Aryan looked out.
He said nothing for a second. Then, quietly, he said, "This is unbelievable."
They stood there together watching the motionless green city below.
Down the road, a tree had cracked through the middle of someone's front wall. Flowers—big ones, wrong-colored ones, ones that didn't belong in this climate, had bloomed in clusters along the curb.
Aryan turned back to the room. Mayo and Ozair were still completely unconscious.
"Guys," Toviro said.
Nothing.
Aryan looked at Toviro. Toviro looked at Aryan.
Aryan raised one hand, and water gathered in the air above the bed, not a flood, just enough. A neat, cold curtain of it dropped directly onto both of them.
Mayo and Ozair shot upright at the exact same moment, gasping, looking around with the wild eyes of people who had just been yanked from a deep dream by something very cold and very rude.
"What—" Mayo swiped water off his face. "Where did that—where did the water come from—"
Ozair was already processing what had just happened. He looked at Aryan.
Then, slowly, he clenched his right hand. The gauntlet appeared immediately—metal rising over his knuckles, solid and real. And then he swung his fist at Aryan.
But Aryan's hands were already moving. Water rose from his palms and shaped itself in an instant into two short blades. They were pale, with sharp edges. He held one in each hand. Fang and Rend.
Aryan caught Ozair's punch between the two blades with a sharp crack. He held it there, stopping the attack completely.
"Cool," Mayo said. He was standing on the bed now, still dripping, looking at both weapons with the expression of someone who had just seen something they very much wanted.
"Wait, the gauntlet just appeared? And the daggers just—how are you doing that, can I—"
"There is nobody here trying to kill each other," Toviro said.
He stepped between them, staff already planted. The shield he called up between them swallowed both the surge of water and the forward push of earth that followed, reducing them to nothing and scattering the energy cleanly.
Ozair and Aryan both stared at the dissipating shimmer.
"You just made that useless," Ozair said slowly.
"I did."
"...That was amazing."
"It was necessary." Toviro turned to face them both. "We were given these powers to fight what's out there. Not each other." He let a beat pass, then added, "Go look outside."
Ozair, still scowling faintly, walked to the window.
He looked for a long moment. His mouth opened slightly.
"What the hell is this," he said, not loud, not angry. Just the flat quiet of someone genuinely not sure what they're looking at.
Mayo wedged in beside him. He took in the street, the vines and the collapsed walls and the grass growing through everything, and was quiet for a second. Then,
"I swear this window grows plants just to scare me." Mayo pointed at the nearest streetlamp, wrapped almost entirely in green. "Wait. Is our house—are we being eaten by bushes?"
"Partially, yes," Toviro said.
"Okay." Mayo leaned back. "Just wanted to confirm that."
Ozair thumped a fist against the windowsill. "The world went completely nuts while we were sleeping!"
"The Recast changed more than just us," Toviro said. He stood back, looking at all of them.
"Time outside moved differently in some places. Nature filled in the gaps." He looked out at the collapsed house at the end of the road.
"The structures people abandoned—nature didn't wait for them. It moved in."
Aryan had come up behind them and was looking over their heads at the street below. His eyes swept it slowly, cataloguing.
"Survival will take precision," he said. "Impulse won't help here."
"Yeah, yeah," Ozair muttered. "Careful, I know. It's still a jungle out there."
Mayo stared at a cluster of oversized flowers growing through a neighbor's front gate and let out a long breath. "I guess we start with surviving the backyard first."
The bedroom door opened.
Elina leaned in, already dressed, and looked at the four of them crowded at the window. "Good morning."
"Morning," they said, in varying states of alertness.
"Outside gets stranger," she said. "More than just the plants." She looked at them. "But before we deal with any of that, we're out of supplies. So." She pointed.
"You two." Her eyes landed on Ozair and Mayo. "Go shopping. List is downstairs."
Ozair and Mayo turned to look at each other.
Their eyes lit up at the exact same time.
"We'll go," they both said.
Elina smiled. "I know."
Downstairs, Mina was already at the table writing the list in her careful handwriting, and Ozair and Mayo hovered beside her like dogs waiting to be let outside.
Toviro came in after them and said, "Mom, double the supplies. We're heading somewhere we can't predict. Food sources unknown."
Mina didn't look up from the paper. "Already done."
Toviro blinked. Then his mouth opened in a slow, genuine smile. "Nothing less from you."
Mina handed the list to Ozair. He glanced at it, folded it, stuck it in his pocket, and didn't look at it again.
Then he and Mayo were out the door.
The air hit their faces, cold and clear, carrying the smell of wet earth and green things.
Ozair tilted his head back and exhaled. "So peaceful," he said.
"Terrifyingly peaceful," Mayo agreed. He eyed a vine that had crept over the top of their gate. "If that moves, we run."
"Deal."
They walked through streets that felt like the opening hour of a world that hadn't finished building itself.
Plants had claimed the gaps between houses, flowers bloomed on rooftops, and somewhere down one of the side roads, a tree had grown through a parked car so completely that the metal had bent around it like an embrace.
They passed it without slowing down. There was too much to stop and look at, they would've never moved.
The big market came into view at the end of the main road.
Its front windows were intact, its sign still lit, emergency power still running somewhere inside.
The automatic doors didn't work, so they kicked them open together in one clean shove and walked in.
The lights were on. The shelves were full. No one was there.
They stood at the entrance for exactly two seconds.
Then they ran.
Ozair made straight for the drinks aisle, pulling bottles off the shelf one after another, cracking them open, trying them, lining the ones he liked up on the floor like trophies.
Mayo hit the snack aisle and started eating immediately, a packet of chips in one hand, a second already open and waiting.
He found the candy tower near the center, one of those tall display racks stacked floor to ceiling. He ran at it, grabbed the top shelf, and swung himself up to reach the expensive ones.
The whole structure wobbled.
"Ozair," he shouted, "come here."
Ozair appeared around the corner, sitting on a shopping cart, one foot dragging along the floor to steer.
He rolled to a stop beside Mayo and looked up.
"Those are the ones from the ads," Mayo said, pointing at the top shelf of chocolates.
Ozair was off the cart before Mayo finished the sentence. He grabbed the edge of the shelf. Mayo grabbed the other side.
They both pulled in slightly different directions, and the entire section tipped forward, and a small avalanche of expensive chocolate fell across the floor and both of them.
They lay in it for a moment.
"This is a dream," Mayo said.
"No," Ozair said, unwrapping something slowly. "This is paradise."
They found the remote-control cars near the back. Then the gaming section.
An hour passed.
Ozair's hand went into his pocket for something, and his fingers found paper. He pulled it out and looked at it.
The list.
He went very still.
"Mayo."
"Mm."
"Did we get any of the things on the list?"
A pause.
"...I forgot about the list."
They looked at each other. Then they both got up.
Moving with sudden purpose, they pushed two large carts between the aisles and started grabbing everything, the essentials first, then the extras Toviro had called for, then more extras because they were already there, then things that seemed important without being sure why.
They moved fast, calling across aisles, tossing things to each other, filling the carts until they were overflowing. Four carts, eventually. Stacked high. They met in the middle of the store, breathing slightly hard.
"Alright," Mayo started, "I think that's fin—"
The roof exploded.
It didn't come off with a slow creak. It blew apart in one violent burst, chunks of ceiling tile and metal raining down around them.
The cold morning sky appeared above, framed by the torn-open hole.
Then something dropped through it.
It landed between them and the exit, and the floor cracked where it hit. It straightened slowly.
Dark skin, ridged with something between armor and bone. Spikes running along its shoulders and forearms.
Eyes that glowed red in the dust and the morning light, not like an animal's, not reflecting. Actually glowing, lit from somewhere inside.
It was looking directly at them.
Mayo stumbled back and grabbed Ozair's sleeve without thinking. "I—okay—I didn't sign up for—"
"What is that thing," Ozair said. His voice was flat, but his weight had shifted forward.
Mayo pressed in behind him. "Does that matter right now?"
The monster tilted its head. The red eyes didn't blink.
The carts sat between them and the door, full of groceries that nobody was going to carry home unless they did something about the very large problem currently standing in front of the exit.
Ozair's hand closed into a fist.
Nyro appeared.