The following days took on a strange shape.
They were no longer quite as empty as the first ones.
But they were not normal either.
The world was not getting better. It was only growing used to its own wound.
In the building, the neighbors kept talking to each other a little more than before. The sheet in the lobby had filled up. More notes had appeared beneath it. Apartment numbers. Needs. Schedules. Someone had even started writing down which shops in the neighborhood were still open.
The front door was now locked every evening at a fixed hour.
Claire sometimes stopped by to check on the old woman on the ground floor.
The neighbor from the third floor organized runs for water and medicine.
And despite all of that, despite those almost pathetic efforts, no one looked like they truly believed in any of it.
They were holding on.
That was all.
They were holding on.
As for Evan, he had started going out a little more.
Not because he wanted to.
Because he had to.
He was eating more, but without appetite. Still sleeping badly, still half-dressed, as if his body were incapable of fully relaxing. The slightest sharp sound in the hallway made him flinch. A door slamming too hard sent his heart racing. Sometimes a scream in the street was enough to make his breathing stop.
His mother's phone remained in his pocket almost all the time.
Several times a day, he still found himself checking automatically to make sure it was there.
Like an idiot reflex.
As if losing it would mean losing something else too.
That morning, the sky was pale, almost beautiful.
A dirty kind of beauty.
A kind of beauty that had no business being there.
Evan went downstairs to buy bread and a few more cans.
In the street, more shops had reopened. There were still lines, but they were more orderly now. People spoke a little louder. Buses were running again on some routes. Cars had disappeared from the intersections. The sidewalks looked less frozen.
From a distance, it almost looked as though the city was catching its breath.
Up close, everything still felt false.
People's glances were too quick. They looked up at the sky too often. The smiles, when there were any, died too fast. At the slightest tension, voices immediately rose a notch.
A man bumped lightly into a woman at the entrance to a bakery.
She turned so violently that for a second Evan thought she was going to hit him.
Then she stopped herself.
Everyone was still stopping themselves.
But a little less than before.
The ship, meanwhile, had not moved.
Still hanging above them, enormous, silent, indifferent.
The news channels kept running nonstop, but their tone had changed. Less shouting. More exhaustion. Experts, ministers, soldiers, psychologists, religious figures, faces replacing one another without bringing anything decisive.
They were no longer talking only about the phenomenon.
They were talking about what it was doing to people.
The economy.
The hospitals.
Rural areas cut off from the rest of the country.
Overwhelmed city centers.
The missing.
The survivors.
Always the same word.
Survivors.
As if they had returned from a war whose battlefield no one had seen.
When he got home, Evan stopped by the living room window.
The curtain was slightly open.
From there, he could see part of the street, the rooftops across from him, and above them, the black ship.
He stood still for a few seconds.
Then his phone vibrated.
Hugo
Evan picked up almost at once.
"Hello?"
"You home?"
Hugo's voice sounded steadier than it had in the previous days. Tired, but clearer.
"Yeah."
"I'm nearby. I was thinking... we could eat something if you want."
Evan looked at the few groceries he had just set down on the kitchen counter.
"I've got bread. And a few things that aren't great."
Hugo let out something close to a laugh.
"That's already better than my place. My dad bought twenty kilos of pasta and nothing to go with it."
Evan stayed quiet for a second, then said,
"Come over."
"I'll be there in ten."
When Hugo rang, Evan opened the door right away.
Hugo was carrying a plastic bag with two bottles of water, a box of biscuits, and a pack of vacuum-sealed ham.
"I brought luxury," he said, lifting the bag slightly.
His tone was light, almost normal.
Almost.
Evan stepped aside to let him in.
They ate in the kitchen, sitting awkwardly around the small table like two students too tired to cook anything decent.
The bread was a little stale.
The ham was not great.
The biscuits tasted like sweet cardboard.
And yet, for a few minutes, the scene could almost have belonged to the old world.
Hugo looked around.
"It feels weird coming back here."
"Why?"
Hugo shrugged slightly.
"I've been here before, but... not like this."
Evan understood immediately.
Before, his mother had been there.
Voices in the apartment.
Something simple.
Something alive.
He lowered his gaze to the table.
Hugo seemed to regret it at once.
"Sorry."
"It's fine."
A silence passed.
Then Hugo said, staring at the edge of his glass,
"Remember when we used to study here in college and pretend we were working?"
Evan raised his head slightly.
"We weren't pretending. You were pretending."
Hugo gave a real smile, very brief.
"Yeah, okay."
"You mostly came for free food."
"Your mom made better pasta than mine."
This time, neither of them spoke right away.
Her name had not been said, but her presence had slipped between them all at once.
Evan felt the phone in his pocket.
Heavy.
Hugo finally went on, more quietly,
"She was always nice to me."
Evan nodded slowly.
"Yeah."
The silence returned, but it was not as hard as the ones before.
Just sad.
Hugo played for a moment with the empty biscuit wrapper, then said,
"Have you noticed something?"
"What?"
"People are pretending to go back to their lives. But nobody believes in it."
Evan leaned back slightly in his chair.
"Maybe that's the only thing to do."
"Yeah. Maybe."
Hugo looked out the window.
"My dad says we should make the most of the fact that we're still here to put things back in order. Clean up. Prepare. Fill the cupboards. Like any of that could protect us from anything."
Evan followed his gaze to the sky.
The ship was still visible between two buildings.
"And what do you think?" he asked.
Hugo rubbed the back of his neck.
"I think it reassures me for two minutes. Then I look at that thing up there again."
He paused.
"And I remember we know nothing."
Evan did not answer.
Because that was exactly it.
The waiting was getting worse every day.
In the first days, everyone had been drowned by the shock. By the news. By the deaths. By the sheer mass of the disaster.
Now the shock was settling.
And what it left behind might be even harder.
The idea that they had to keep living without knowing whether everything could start again at any moment.
Hugo finished his glass of water and set it down slowly.
"I had a nightmare last night."
Evan looked up at him.
"Again?"
"Yeah."
"The box?"
Hugo shook his head.
"Not really."
He hesitated.
"I was in my room. Normal. Everything was fine. Then I looked at the time on my phone, and it changed to fifteen minutes. Just... fifteen minutes. Like the rest of time didn't exist anymore."
Evan felt his skin tighten slightly.
Hugo gave a dry laugh.
"Stupid, right?"
"No."
"I woke up thinking that was it."
Evan lowered his eyes to his hands.
Sometimes he woke up that way too, with the impression that he had heard the voice.
Or seen the red timer behind his eyelids.
The television in the living room was playing a debate at low volume, one neither of them was really listening to.
One sentence, louder than the others, still carried into the kitchen.
"...the total lack of communication from the entity makes the situation even more alarming..."
Hugo vaguely turned his head toward the living room.
"See? Even they don't know what else to say anymore."
Evan got up to lower the volume even more.
As he passed the window, he noticed people standing still in the street, all turned toward the same point.
Not the ship this time.
A military truck was moving slowly down the end of the avenue.
Two vehicles followed behind it.
Nothing impressive.
And yet every head had turned.
As if everyone was still trying to convince themselves that someone, somewhere, was in control.
When Evan sat down again, Hugo was asking,
"Do you think they've learned anything?"
"Who?"
"The governments. The military. Whoever."
Evan shrugged slightly.
"If they'd figured anything out, I think we'd know."
"Or maybe they're hiding it."
"Maybe."
Hugo sighed.
"I don't even know which would be worse anymore."
They spent a little while longer talking about nothing and everything.
The neighborhood.
The shops.
The people in the building.
An old professor Hugo had seen in a report.
A message from a former classmate who had moved to Japan.
Little fragments of normal life, all distorted by what surrounded them.
And then the silence always came back.
Always.
Like a tide.
By the time Hugo left, the daylight was already beginning to fade.
He put on his jacket near the door and looked at Evan for a second too long before speaking.
"See you tomorrow?"
The question was simple.
But behind it, Evan heard something else.
Let's pretend tomorrow still exists the same way.
"Yeah," he said.
Hugo nodded.
Then added,
"Try to get some sleep tonight."
Evan gave him a faint, tired smile.
"You too."
The door closed behind him.
Silence settled back over the apartment.
A silence that was less empty than it had been at first.
But no more reassuring.
Evan put away the few things left on the table, washed the glasses, wiped down the counter without thinking. Those simple gestures helped him, though he did not really know why. Maybe because they required neither thought nor courage.
When he was done, he went into the living room and stopped in front of the television.
A red banner was still scrolling along the bottom of the screen.
NO CONTACT ESTABLISHED WITH THE SHIP — ALL APPROACH ATTEMPTS REMAIN UNSUCCESSFUL
Another followed a few minutes later.
SOME PSYCHIATRISTS DESCRIBE AN UNPRECEDENTED GLOBAL TRAUMA
Evan muted the sound.
Then he sat down on the couch, resting his head against the back, his mother's phone in his hand.
Outside, the city was a little calmer than in the previous days.
Or maybe he was just getting used to it.
Lights were turning on behind the windows across the street.
Shadows moved slowly through the apartments.
People were making dinner.
Others were talking.
Others were still waiting for someone who would never come back.
Evan looked at his mother's phone.
The black screen gave him back a warped reflection.
He thought of her voice.
Of the call in the street.
Of her saying, come home right now.
Then he raised his eyes to the ceiling.
And for a second, he imagined himself back in the white box again.
The even light.
The timer.
The emptiness.
The voice.
He straightened slightly.
Something was wrong.
Not in the apartment.
Inside him.
A sudden tension.
Violent.
As if his body had understood before his mind.
At that same moment, someone dropped something in the hallway.
A sharp noise.
Then a nervous voice.
Farther away, in the street, a scream.
Not a scream of pain.
A scream of understanding.
Evan shot to his feet.
The pain hit him before he even reached the door.
Violent.
Exactly the same.
An icy blade driven into his skull.
He clutched his head with both hands.
"No..."
His breath cut off.
In the hallway, several doors opened at once. People were already screaming. Someone was crying. Someone was yelling to shut the door. Someone else kept repeating no, no, no, as if that could stop any of it.
His mother's phone almost slipped from his hand.
The pain surged even higher.
Too fast.
The living room reeled around him.
The television.
The window.
The couch.
The screams in the building.
The ship above the city.
Everything began to shake.
And this time, nobody needed an explanation.
It was happening again.
Then the world disappeared.