Dawn was already diluting the night through the concourse’s broad eastern windows. Stirring black to an uncertain sepia above, liminal shades that shimmered just outside of daylight’s names. The clouds were working busily to separate them, sieving gold from blue, and if she didn’t look at the horizon, she could almost believe the world was new.

Over the city’s rooftops, between skyscrapers that still seemed to hoard night in their shadows and stars in scattered windows. Past the teetering match-head pyre of one that had been burning for nine years, only hell in its smoke-blackened windows, across parks overgrown and streets, here and there, fallen through to nothing she could see the bottom of, suburbs gone to rot and fields to wild seed, to where the foothills should have tucked up into distant mountains and the day broke like a dropped mirror instead.

Gold and blue and colours even daylight wouldn’t be able to name, crackling in prismatic shards where mist should have painted the peaks and the rest of the world should have stretched beyond sight. If she squinted, she was almost certain, she could see fragments of that mist and distant grey broken and seething among the rest – a caustic mosaic, bad signal breaking down, the world as she had once known it collapsing into roaring static.

Fior still tried to paint the mountains sometimes. Sitting there in an obsolete corner of the third-floor walkway, a place no one else had any reason to go, just her and the day’s first light and the slow end of the world. With her canvas balanced on one knee and colours laid out on a low tray beside her, she tried to remember what it had been like to believe the world went on forever.

To believe it would go on forever, too solid, too big, too real to ever really change. Back when whole, nameable colours had pooled in the mist between the mountains and poured down them as rivers to flood the fields with a new day. Just fifteen years ago, the mountains had still stood whole between them and the end.