I’d spentyears among the dead, breathing plaster dust, hunched inside caves, my hands working brushes and shovels through the sediment of other people’s disasters. I’d traced the whorls of civilization along the lips of goblets, idols, and chipped pottery rims; I’d become fluent in the brittle optimism of those who built, lost, rebuilt, and lost again. Back then, it was all that mattered to me. Every relic I touched represented a sliver of hope that some memory, some intention, some fragment of its owner might have survived the endless hunger of time.
Reverently, I would hold up an old ring, knowing I was the first person to touch it in thousands of years, wondering who had worn it last. But no matter how hard I tried, I never felt any echo of the life it once belonged to. There were no whispers of love left on the cold metal. I wasn’t sure why I hungered for proof of an afterlife among the dead so much. If anything, it should havetaught me how limited our lifetimes truly were. And whenever I let myself dwell on that, I felt the pull of depression waiting below like quicksand. So I kept searching, trying my hardest to make sense of seemingly senseless lives.
Now, all that seemed like another lifetime, like a story told about someone else on a planet that no longer existed. The air here tasted wrong, thinner, sharper. Even the light felt different, fractured by the black void that hung where a sun should be. When I thought about Earth, it came to me only in flashes: the smell of dust, the weight of the trowel in my hand, the hush of history pressing close. Here, the ground was metallic beneath my boots, the ruins alien in their angles. I was still surrounded by the ruins of civilization, but it wasn’t ours.
More often than not, I thought of the phrase:One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.Even though I always searched for some form of identity—some trace of a person who had lived thousands of years ago—if I was honest, that’s how I’d looked at most of the skeletons: as proof of existence, yes, but still… statistics. Thousands died in Pompeii’s eruption; hundreds in battles; entire cities in sieges. Humanity was filled with disaster, brutality, and unfairness. It was easier to think in numbers. Easier to imagine tens of thousands of soldiers dying in a war centuries past than to picture one man’s terror as he fell. The further back in history you went, the more faceless it all became. Yes, it was easier to see them as statistics.
But there were no statistics here. There were no archaeologists cataloging ruins, no museums waiting todisplay the evidence. Only us—the survivors—and an endless, alien sky that didn't resemble anything we’d ever known.
So now I finally understood the phrase’s full meaning—probably not as the speaker had intended—when you become one of the numbers, you start to ache to be more than a statistic.
Suddenly, I wanted to scream at myself for how blasé I’d been when handling bones and skulls. Sure, I’d wondered about the people they once were, but it had been in that detached, clinical way that seems to come so naturally to us. It’s easy to romanticize death when it isn’t yours. When it belongs to someone who’s been dust for a thousand years, it’s only an idea, not a fear.
We excel at looking at someone else’s tragedy and brushing it off… until it’s our own.
And now, for the first time, I understood what it must have felt like for them, for the woman frozen mid-step in Pompeii, for the soldier bleeding out on a nameless battlefield. I wondered if, in those last moments, they’d asked themselves what I was asking now: Would anyone ever wonder about me? Would anyone care enough to imagine the shape of my fear?
Millions of humans had been abducted by the Cryons. I was just one small number among them. Nobody would ever know my name, my story, my fate. I was only a statistic now.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’d once spent my life piecing together the remnants of the lost.Now I was the remnant. The relic. Someone else’s tragedy, waiting to be unearthed.
Who would pick up my skull in a thousand years and ask about my life? My death? Most likely, I’d be one of millions, another nameless fossil.
I almost laughed. Irony, like I said.
"What could possibly be so funny?" Ed asked, staring at the sky again. Not at a familiar blue dome or even the pale moon I’d grown up with, but at that hungry black hole hanging where a sun or moon should have been. The thing I refused to acknowledge, no matter how much closer and bigger it got every day.
He probably wouldn't understand my sudden desire to carveElla Maininto my skull, so that whoever found me in a thousand years would at least know my name.
Desperate. I know.
I snorted again.
Ed gave me a funny look. "Don't you start losing it on me now, too."
As if to emphasize his words, loud chanting broke out from the south side of the city—or at least what we assumed to be south, going by Earthly measurements of where the sun rose. I could understand Ed's worry; a few weeks ago, these people had been like us. Humans who had been abducted and sold by the Cryons, only to be bought by an unknown alien species and dumped here in this alien city.
A city that rose before me in tiers now, a city that was nothing more than a lifeless mausoleum, a reminder of thenewly extinct. Streets wound upward like funeral processions, lined with empty houses that still held the echo of their owners. Villas with arched courtyards stood silent, fountains with no water flowing, brand-new mosaics telling stories in fragments of color. It was the kind of place I would’ve studied with reverence, notebook in hand.
Instead, I scavenged through it like a rat, because survival mattered more than cataloguing beauty. As much as I always sought answers and loved digging into history, as much as this would have been the challenge of a lifetime for me, this wasn't an ancient city for me anymore. It was a place several others and I had been abandoned at, like in one of thoseNaked and Afraid, orSurvivorshows. Only this wasn't a show. This was my life. Our life. As short-lived as it might be, judging by the looming black hole in the sky, it was stillmy life. And dammit, I would survive for as long as I could.
It wasn't too hard to figure out what had happened once we realized the big black spot in the sky was a black hole creeping closer. Whoever had lived here before had abandoned this place because the planet's end was imminent.
The chanting grew closer, and I noticed the worried look on Ed's face. He was right. It was time to find a hiding spot for the night.
"Let's go," I suggested.
He took one more look at the darkening sky before following me down a steep incline overgrownwith alien grass and, I assumed, weeds. For all I knew, these could be expensive plants, carefully arranged to appear like nature had taken over. Wait, was it nature on an alien planet?
Ed looked nervously at me when I snorted again.Right. Keep it together, Ella, you don't want to lose your only companion you have left on this rotten planet.
"There," Ed pointed at a house that looked like all the others surrounding it.
"Looks good to me," I agreed, and because I had been acting a bit strange all afternoon, I added, "Maybe we should think about getting out of Dodge like you suggested."
A few nights ago, once it had become painfully obvious that our fellow prisoners were losing touch with reality, Ed had suggested leaving. He wasn’t wrong. Staying in this city meant it was only a matter of time before we ran into one of the rival groups our original team had split into.
It hadn't seemed important when he suggested it, after all, our days here—wherever in the universeherewas—were numbered. A fact that was hard to miss with the growing darkness in the sky. After a few more days of the craziness, though, I was ready to take my chances with him further away. Up until now, I had clung to the hope that our captors would return and pick us back up, that this was nothing more than an elaborate April Fool's joke. But with every passing day, that hope sank. And the days got shorter and the nights longer as darkness took gradually over.
