All it took, all it had ever taken, was one small thing. One crack, one spark, one note off key in the choruses the world had been repeating since long, long before any of them had been born.

Their world was a dam with entropy behind it, its reservoir almost filled to the brim with time. The sun had run out of sky, dissolving into the sea, it seemed, in cooling amber waves wherever they could glimpse it between buildings. Disappearing to where nothing else ever returned from. The city’s precarious patchwork of lights, life forced past its expiration date by scavenged wire and relentless maintenance and Pike, hadn’t ignited to replace it.

Streetlamps stood grey and glassily vacant as the eyes of a corpse, no cinematic spark promising resurrection as soon as someone called cut. Only occasional candles flickered behind the black windows she and Lorne passed. They hadn’t spoken since noting the first one that should already have been blazing against the dusk; the day’s last dispersing ripples reflected rapt and amber in their eyes, their blindfold tucked into their belt without light enough left to torture the damaged organ it had covered.

A flashlight flicked and roved across the next intersection. Black silhouettes trailed after it, washed past on a wave-soft murmur of restless, discontented voices.

“What do you think really happened?” Fior whispered, just to hear something from Lorne, she could hope, other than that silence. It was as unnatural in them as it was in the city’s circuits, as plainly evident of something wrong.

“She didn’t say,” they answered as softly, without taking their gaze from the dissolving dusk. “Just that things were out of control somehow.”