The graveyard had no fences anymore.
Just rows and rows of black glass stakes driven into the earth (each one a frozen splash of the blood that fell that day).
Kamia Volkova walked between them in full dress uniform, boots crunching on brittle ash that had never learned how to rot.
She stopped at a stake no taller than her knee.
A single name had been etched into the glass with a bayonet:
SOFIA VOLKOVA
"Mr. Flopsy is waiting"
Kamia knelt.
The medals on her chest clinked once, then went still.
She placed one gloved hand on the tiny marker.
"I'm sorry I couldn't save you," she whispered.
Her voice cracked open like old ice.
"I couldn't save your father. Couldn't save the city. Couldn't save the fifteen kilometres that turned into sky that day."
The wind carried the smell of rust and distant pine.
"I'm sorry you were born without a father," she continued, heavier now, each word dragged out of her chest like shrapnel. "I'm sorry I only gave you nine years. I'm sorry I was at the front when you needed a mother. I'm sorry the last thing you saw was red."
She bowed her head until her forehead touched the cold glass.
"I'm so sorry, my little star. I'm so, so sorry."
Silence answered.
When she finally stood, the graveyard stretched in every direction (thousands of black stakes glittering under a pale sun).
Some held one name.
Some held fifty.
Some held entire apartment blocks.
Kamia looked out over the endless field of frozen blood and whispered the only promise she had left.
"I will make the sky bleed white this time."
She turned her back on the graves.
And started walking toward the horizon where the last uranium mantis waited in its silo.
Strategic Command Bunker "Kovcheg-7", Ural Ridge
Kamia stepped through the blast doors like a woman carved from frost and old grief.
Captain Aria Petrova snapped to attention, eyes red-rimmed (she had been waiting fourteen days for this moment).
"Status," Kamia said. One word, flat as a guillotine.
"Sat-link is up for the first time in eight years," Aria answered. "We have secure channels to the Scandinavian Enclave, the Pan-African Coalition, and whatever's left of the Pacific Fleet. Thirty-seven million survivors total. That's all we could find."
Kamia nodded once.
"Open broadcast. Full diplomatic override."
Aria hesitated half a second, then obeyed.
Every surviving government feed crackled to life (grainy faces from bunkers, submarines, mountain redoubts).
Kamia didn't wait for greetings.
"Fourteen days ago," she began, voice carrying the weight of every black glass stake outside Moscow, "an entity descended from the sky and erased fifteen kilometres of Russian territory in six seconds. It calls itself Namola-Zero-One. It is not alien. It is not divine. It is the first of what is coming."
She let that settle.
"We are authorising immediate, unconditional release of all sealed twentieth-century and twenty-first-century technology archives. Everything that was banned after World War Three (orbital strike packages, autonomous uranium swarms, gene-forged soldiers, continental-range rail arrays). Everything."
A dozen voices erupted at once.
Kamia raised one hand. Silence fell like an axe.
"You will receive decryption keys within the hour. In exchange, every surviving military unit on Earth is now under joint command. Objective: total elimination of Namola-Zero-One and every fragment that follows him."
She leaned closer to the camera.
"We held the bans because we were afraid of becoming monsters again. The monsters have arrived anyway. Now we become worse ones."
The feed went black.
Aria stared at her commanding officer.
"Ma'am… are you sure?"
Kamia's eyes were the same colour as the ash outside.
"I buried my daughter in a graveyard that has no bodies. I'm sure."
The secure channel lit up again, four faces this time, each one a ghost speaking from a different grave.
Jyutenberk – North-Sea Arcology, half-submerged A woman with salt-cracked skin and eyes like drowned stars. "Volkova… my granddaughter asked me yesterday why the sea is red at night. I told her it remembers. Sixty billion voices. Sixty billion. We turned the oceans into blood soup because New Geinaburg wanted one more kilometre of seabed. I will open the orbital-lance vaults. I just want her to see blue water once before she dies."
Kaigo – Underground Kyoto, magma lights An old man in a torn Imperial Navy coat, face half metal from old burns. "My wife was pregnant when the sky fell. I held her hand while the servers shut the warlords down. She bled out anyway. Sixty billion. We killed children for lithium. I still have the rail-array keys. Tell me where to point them. I no longer care if I burn with the world."
Mwafu – East-African Sky-Farm, one of the last green places A teenage girl wearing her father's medals, voice shaking. "My mother was nine months pregnant when the pulse bombs hit Nairobi. I was born in a server room while the machines sang lullabies in binary to keep the missiles asleep. Sixty billion people, and only thirty-seven million heartbeats left. I have the gene-seed vaults. Tell me who to grow into soldiers. I just want someone to remember my mother had a name."
Kailashnaagri – Himalayan Redoubt, highest bunker on Earth An old monk-soldier, orange robes over powered armour, snow in his beard. "We watched the world eat itself from the roof of the planet. We turned the servers off with prayer wheels. Sixty billion souls became sixty billion ghosts in one week. I still hear them in the wind. I will open the atmospheric-shredder archives. If this is the final war, let it be the one that ends all wars, even if nothing is left to pray."
Kamia listened to each voice break in its own language.
When the last echo died, she spoke for all of them.
"We were monsters once. We murdered sixty billion for pride, for resources, for flags that don't exist anymore. Now the real monsters have come wearing our children's faces.
This time we do not fight for land. We fight for the right to still be sorry.
Keys are transmitting now.
May whatever gods we killed forgive us… or at least look away while we finish the job."
The four feeds went dark at the same moment.
Thirty-seven million survivors, borderless, nationless, childless in every way that mattered, began waking the weapons that had once murdered sixty billion.
The second apocalypse began with tears instead of trumpets.
Captain Aria Petrova walked the cracked streets with six soldiers and one rule: no uniforms, no rifles showing. Just sidearms only, hidden under patched coats. In a city that had seen fifteen kilometres of its people turned to red mist, the sight of authority was worse than the sight of guns.
Their mission was simple on paper: find every stubborn farmer who had refused the warlord servers, refused the gene-crops, refused the drones, refused everything that needed electricity and obedience. Find the ones who still planted wheat with their own hands and prayed to gods that never answered. Take whatever grain, potato, apple they could spare. Leave receipts signed "Humanity owes you."
The first stop was an old metro tunnel turned greenhouse. Hydroponics had died with the grid; these people had gone back to dirt in broken subway cars.
An old woman (seventy, maybe eighty) stood guard with a pitchfork that had more rust than metal.
Aria raised empty hands.
"We're not here to take everything," she said. "Just enough so the children in the bunker don't learn what hunger feels like."
The woman studied Aria's face, then the six tired soldiers behind her.
"You the ones opening the forbidden vaults?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Good," the woman spat. "Maybe the devils upstairs will finally meet worse devils."
She stepped aside.
Inside, rows of potato plants grew under sunlight piped through mirrors. The soldiers filled sacks in silence. No one spoke until they were back in the street.
Next was a rooftop collective in the shell of an office tower. Corn grew in office desks filled with scavenged soil. A teenage boy with one arm watched them from the stairwell, clutching a machete he was too weak to swing.
Aria knelt, eye-level.
"Your crop or your life," she said gently. "We only want the crop."
The boy's lip trembled. He lowered the blade.
By noon they had filled three trucks and left behind every bullet casings as payment (metal was worth more than promises now).
Everywhere Aria looked, the same story repeated:
People who had chosen hunger over obedience. People who had kept seeds in their mouths during the evacuations so the machines couldn't take them. People who planted tomatoes in the bones of tanks and sang lullabies to apple trees that grew out of mass graves.
They were the last thirty thousand souls still living above ground in former Russia.
And every single one of them looked at Aria like she was already a ghost.
At the last stop (an old church courtyard turned wheat field), a priest met her with a shotgun across his knees.
"You woke the uranium angels," he said. Not a question.
"We did."
"Will they save us?"
Aria thought of Sofia's tiny glass stake.
"They'll save someone," she said. "Maybe not us."
The priest handed over two sacks of grain without another word.
On the ride back, Aria stared out at the endless black glass stakes glinting in the pale sun.
She didn't cry.
She had used up her lifetime quota fourteen days ago.
But her hands shook the whole way home.
The trucks rolled into the cavernous storage bay and soldiers began unloading sacks under harsh LED light.
Every kilogram was weighed, logged, divided.
The rule was iron: one thousand calories per adult, seven hundred per child, extra for pregnant women, the sick, the old.
No exceptions. No favourites. No one left hungry.
Kamia stood on the mezzanine overlooking the lines, coat unbuttoned for the first time in weeks, watching mothers count lentils into their children's bowls like they were counting heartbeats.
A small girl (eleven, maybe twelve) slipped past the guards.
Deaf, barefoot, wearing a coat made from two different uniforms sewn together.
She marched straight up the metal stairs to Kamia, pulled a scrap of paper from her pocket, and held it up with both hands like a white flag.
The note was written in shaky crayon:
My mom is pregnant. The baby kicks when she's hungry. Please can we have a little more?
Kamia read it once.
Then again.
She looked down at the girl's bare feet, the hollow cheeks, the fierce eyes that had already seen too much.
Without a word, Kamia took her own ration tray (still untouched: black bread, lentil stew, one apple) and placed it into the girl's small hands.
The girl stared, confused.
Kamia pointed to the tray, then to the girl, then made the universal sign for eat.
Tears welled instantly.
The girl shook her head hard, tried to give it back.
Kamia knelt, pressed the tray firmly into the girl's arms, and closed her fingers around it.
Go, she mouthed slowly.
The girl fled down the stairs clutching the food like it might vanish.
Aria appeared at Kamia's side a moment later, holding two cups of weak tea.
She saw the empty place where Kamia's tray had been.
Without speaking, Aria broke her own bread in half, put one piece on Kamia's empty tray, then set the tray back in front of her commanding officer.
Kamia opened her mouth to protest.
Aria stepped forward and wrapped both arms around her.
Just held her.
Kamia's shoulders shook once, hard, like something inside cracked open and immediately tried to seal itself again.
Aria didn't let go.
"They'll be okay tonight," she whispered into the collar of Kamia's uniform. "Because of you."
Kamia closed her eyes.
For the first time in fourteen days, she let someone else carry a tiny piece of the weight.
The emergency hologram flickered to life again, uninvited.
A man lounged in what used to be downtown Los Angeles (sun-bleached hair, Hawaiian shirt, feet propped on a table made from a surfboard).
Behind him, golden light poured through broken skyscraper windows. Children laughed somewhere off-screen. The smell of real butter drifted through the feed like an insult.
He tore into a thick slice of fresh bread slathered with yellow butter, took a theatrical bite, then grinned straight into the camera.
"Colonel Volkova, right?" American accent, slow and lazy. "Heard you're waking the old devils. Cute."
He lifted a steaming mug of tea (actual leaves, not recycled dust).
"Out here we never turned the servers off. We just… retrained them. Food printers, water recyclers, vertical farms in every parking garage. Looters, makers, squatters (call us whatever). We're fat, happy, and watching sunsets again."
He spread more butter on another slice, licked the knife clean.
"Sixty billion dead and thirty-seven million crying in bunkers while we eat sourdough on the beach. Funny how that works."
Kamia stared, face carved from stone.
The man leaned closer, smile widening.
"Tell your starving saints to keep their uranium angels. We're good."
He reached forward and killed the feed with a lazy swipe.
The war room went dead silent.
Somewhere in the dark, a child's ration counter clicked one portion lower.
Kamia didn't blink.
After ten full seconds she spoke, voice quiet enough to cut steel.
"Log the coordinates. Mark them non-hostile… for now."
Aria looked at her.
"For now?"
Kamia turned away from the empty hologram pad.
"Everyone gets to choose how they survive," she said. "Until their choice starts costing my people bread."
The unspoken promise hung in the air like smoke.
Los Angeles had just painted a target on its sunshine.
Los Angeles was renamed Angelos after the war. No borders, no nations, just one city-state that never turned the servers off.
The man who laughed at Kamia lived in the old Bonaventure Hotel, now a vertical garden. Every floor was a terrace of tomatoes, avocados, and wheat. Solar glass kept the temperature perfect. Drones the size of dragonflies pollinated flowers and delivered fresh bread to balconies.
Children played actual video games on rooftop holograms (bright colours, laughter, no guns). Old people napped in hammocks strung between skyscrapers while AI sprinklers misted citrus scent into the air.
This was where Nero had grown up.
Not in a bunker. Not under red alerts and ration cards.
She had lived in a sun-lit room on the 34th floor of the Westin tower, walls covered in hand-painted murals of space whales and pixel stars. Her console was older than she was, but the servers kept the games alive. She played co-op shooters with kids in Kyoto and Berlin who never knew what fallout tasted like.
Every teenager in Angelos grew up the same way: school in the morning (real teachers, real windows), farming shift in the afternoon (everyone tended one row), evening free for games, music, rooftop parties under strings of real bulbs.
They never learned war songs. They learned synthwave and lofi beats to farm by.
They never learned hunger. They learned how many tomatoes one person could eat before getting sick (current record: 47).
They never learned borders. They learned that "refugee" was an ancient word for "new neighbour."
When the rest of the world bled sixty billion lives into the oceans, Angelos simply closed its doors, turned the servers toward feeding people instead of killing them, and waited for the screaming to stop.
Now the screaming had started again, somewhere far east, and they were still eating butter in the sunshine.
A girl on the 42nd floor looked out over the endless green terraces and asked her mother:
"Do you think the people in the dark still remember what strawberries taste like?"
Her mother, watering basil that grew in an old arcade cabinet, answered without looking up.
"They will," she said. "Or they won't. Either way, we keep the seeds."
That was Angelos.
Paradise with a locked gate.
The sky turned tangerine when the shadow fell across it.
Nerúdium landed without sound (eight and a half feet of living apocalypse touching down on sun-warmed tiles like a nightmare that had learned manners).
The man who called himself President (Hawaiian shirt, butter still on his fingers) froze mid-bite.
Children on nearby balconies went silent.
Nerúdium folded her wings, tail curling once, lazily, like a cat deciding whether the mouse was worth the effort.
"I require ten percent," she said, voice layered silk and furnace. "Seeds. Every crop. Every fruit. Every grain you hoard while the rest of the world eats dust."
She stepped closer, talons clicking.
"In exchange…" She let the serpent suit loosen just enough (scales parting over collarbone, thigh, the soft curve beneath a breast) before snapping closed again. "…I can be very generous."
The President swallowed.
Glanced at the open glass doors behind him (inside, shelves of vacuum-sealed seed packets glittered like treasure).
He disappeared for thirty seconds.
Came back with two heavy pouches and set them at her feet.
"Strawberries, avocados, three kinds of wheat, tomatoes that still taste like summer," he said. "Ten percent. Exactly."
Nerúdium tilted her head, lava eyes glowing.
He licked butter from his thumb, found courage somewhere.
"So… about that generous part. My bedroom's right—"
He gestured inside.
Nerúdium looked down at him (way down).
He was five-foot-nine on a tall day.
She was eight-foot-six of muscle, horn, wing, and molten ruin.
She smiled, slow and terrible and amused.
"Little man," she purred, leaning until her horns cast shadows over his face, "the last person who tried to take me to bed melted from the inside out."
She tapped one talon against his chest, right over his heart.
"We're not compatible," she whispered. "You're bite-sized."
The President's tan went three shades paler.
Nerúdium straightened, scooped the seed pouches with two fingers like they weighed nothing, and spread her wings.
"Tell your children the strawberries came from monsters who still remember being human."
She launched into the sky, a red comet against the dying sun.
The President stood alone on the rooftop, butter suddenly tasting like ash.
Somewhere below, a sixteen-year-old girl who had never known hunger clutched a single strawberry seed and wondered why it felt warm.