The World's End | ONC 2024 ✔

ੈ✩‧₊˚ |𝟬𝟵| 𝗪𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗛𝗲𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀

Keira

-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈

I found it quite surprising that I fell asleep that night. When I woke up, the morning was dark, but not as dark as the night. Everything was visible now. The lights in the room were dimmed, and I found myself confused. No one was in the room but me.

Wylan and his dad must have gotten up earlier. After a long-winded speech last night about how I couldn't sleep, I felt my face burn. I told Wylan everything about my family, and that I was deep in thought, and I also managed to just fall asleep.

I left the room, leaving everything as it was before. It wasn't my place to touch anything here, even if it meant that ideally, I could sell those things and buy some food whenever I got out of this mess.

The air was what hit me again, and I wanted to breathe this time. Something about it felt oddly familiar, or maybe different...I couldn't understand what it was, and I'd mentioned it already, but no one seemed to agree with me.

I took a deep breath and walked over to the living room where everyone was gathered already. I saw Alissa in the same clothes as yesterday, sipping something from a cup. Axelle looked as rich as she did yesterday morning when I first met her. Her red hair was pulled up and she looked like a Council member's daughter for once. That frightened me more than I could imagine.

I walked into the room to see a large board on the wall, multiple names, and multiple lines falling from one side to the other. It was Axelle's old painting canvas that I saw yesterday. Now, it was being used to...plot?

I approached them quietly, as I noticed their conversation was in hushed whispers. The board had multiple points and Wylan was standing next to it.

"The air composition of this house is literally perfect, Father. It's manufactured so well. I understand that she's Madame Henderson and she needs her house to be safer than everyone else's but I'm starting to think...what if the world outside is breathable? Like this house?"

I scoffed. "You think that the outside is better? How?"

Wylan looked at me in confusion. "The air composition recorded in Veridonia ever was 30% less pure than Axelle's house," he explained, his eyes expressing excitement. "How can you get purer than the purest this country has ever recorded? Yeah. If you know that there's a purer alternative."

My heart skipped a beat at the possibility that Wylan was hinting at. But I had to know how. "And how do you know the air compression or whatever it is?"

His father pulled out a small metal machine that was the size of two fingers. It had a red button in the middle and the device had a thin needle on top. I looked at Wylan waiting for some sort of explanation.

"It's an air composition detector. It checks what types of gases are in the air," Wylan explained, his eyes lighting up with enthusiasm. It was something I noticed from the little time that I knew him. When he knew something or was thinking about something, his eyes lit up.

"Father and I perfected it. I tested it last night in here, so you were right Keira, something was off about this air."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing—if what Wylan was saying was true, then it meant that there was a possibility of pure, breathable, safe air beyond Veridonia. Axelle's mother could only know that if she was aware of how good the outside world was. It was a revelation that filled me with both hope and dread.

My brother came to mind, and he was so similar to Wylan. Almost just as nerdy, passionate and I knew I had known someone similar.

"My brother said something about that...before he um, disappeared. He could just be talking nonsense, but he said something about...life outside," I let out and they all looked at me in confusion, waiting for more details.