Prologue

A city does not so simply die.

Even though no one walked through this city's streets, no children played in its parks, no families walked down its desolate sidewalks, and no traffic rumbled through the countless rows of empty boulevards, it had still not been laid to rest. It should have rejected all sense. It did not breathe. The city did not speak or move. It only laid here, its abandoned cars, cratered streets, and ruined storefronts all half-buried in a rain of white snow like a beaten corpse left naked and cold in the permafrost.

Yet it was aware. Awake.

Anyone who so much as stepped a foot onto its charred pavement would know. Maybe even understand. They would hear the growling timbre of crackling power lines, smell the rancid stench of festering waste, and feel the glare of a thousand broken windows stabbing into their back.

This was a city of ghosts. Its people were gone and yet something was left in their place. Here in the desolate cold, the echoes of its lost inhabitants remained trapped and shackled like beasts. Left to rot like an infected wound. Their malice bubbled in every razed skyscraper, every singed crater, and every pulverized structure like bile gathering in an upset stomach.

The city was alive. More than that, the city was seething.

And within those remains, a young man walked. Alone. A speck of motion in an ocean devoid. Heedless of the cold, he marched through ice and ash, boots crunching with every step onto the frozen streets. Red eyes scanned the charred walls of abandoned edifices, roaming across the decaying wreckages with a gaze as cold as the ash-stained snow. 

He wandered. For meters, blocks, miles. The distance grew hazier the deeper he entered. Faced with the biting winds, it seemed not even time could escape the freezing chill. Seconds crawling over minutes crawling over hours like droplets trickling down an icicle.

The young man only stopped when he caught sight of a ruined gate, its metal rails warped and ripped away from the charred leftovers of a brick fence. He halted by the gaping entrance and placed a hand over the wall's blackened surface—soot-stained stone still warm beneath his fingers despite the winter cold—and peered at the structure that awaited beyond the wall.

A school is there, tucked away in the nooks of the city's heart.

His eyes scanned the edifice, taking in its peeling and debris-shredded walls like a mortician trying to piece together a mangled corpse. Parts of the main building had collapsed, and its once symmetrical design had been left as a mangled abomination of cracked windowpanes and crumbling rooftops. The grass and trees that decorated the entryway were scorched barren. Now, blackened soil and husks of burnt wood were all that marred the cobblestone path. At its center, what must've once been a grand monument dedicated to the institution's long history had been melted into a disfigured stump by heat and rubble. 

Something about it tugged at him—at the small, childish part of his soul that wanted to go back to better days, and it was with a hollow aching in his bones that he tried to imagine a time when this school would still stand untouched.

He placed students milling along stained, well-traveled halls, and he listened to teachers as they droned on and on over the same lesson in the thousandth lecture to the thousandth class. He set a couple of furtive lovers squirreling away for teenage dalliances in an empty classroom, marched teams in sweat-soaked uniforms as they carried colorful banners through a marked field and guided the calm melancholic sunset that fell over the campus on the day's end.

Over and over, the little beauties of a normal life played before him. Each scene papered over cold reality as a bandage would stretch over a gaping wound.

It did not last.

The images faded like a receding tide, leaving him with nothing but a ruined future and bitter dreams of what could have been—what perhaps should have been…had the world been a little less cruel.

His arms fell to his side, numb fingers curling into white-knuckled fists. Without a thought and before he even realized where his legs now carried him, he stepped through the cracked walls—over the brittle skeletal remains littering the grounds—and made his way inside.

Some ghosts never went away.