The silence was what Kira noticed first. Not the absence of sound—there were still the distant groans of settling rubble, the whisper of ash-laden wind through broken windows, the occasional skitter of unseen creatures in the shadows. But the silence of humanity. No voices calling out, no footsteps echoing down empty corridors, no hum of conversation or laughter or argument that had once filled these streets like a living symphony.

She pressed her back against the cold concrete wall and peered around the corner, scanning the devastated boulevard that had once been Amsterdam's busiest shopping district. The morning light filtered through a perpetual haze of dust and smoke, casting everything in sepia tones that made the world look like an old photograph slowly fading to brown. Store windows gaped like missing teeth, their contents long since looted or buried under debris. Abandoned vehicles sat at odd angles where their drivers had simply stopped, their doors hanging open like mechanical mouths frozen mid-scream.

Three weeks. It had been three weeks since the Convergence, though Kira had stopped counting days with any real precision. Time seemed different now, measured not in hours and minutes but in heartbeats and breaths, in the space between one careful footstep and the next. The old rhythms of civilization—alarm clocks and work schedules, rush hour traffic and evening television—had shattered as completely as the city's skyline.