He constructed elaborate storylines in his head, of his own devising. Ones where he and Kelly had tried to raise Addison together and it had been hard but Addison had turned out much the same, because it was hard to improve Addison. Anything else would have broken his own suspension of disbelief.

One storyline a day, to answer a question, or to explore a theory.

He lost count of the days, but he estimated where he’d been and he counted from that estimate forward. With the helmet giving him the ability to construct better thoughts and see much of the city around him, forward and backward, he built up his ideas and theorized, he unraveled what had happened and to whom, and tallied up a mental list of people to investigate. He picked a person he knew and didn’t know the outcome for, and he searched everyone nearby to try to decipher what had become of them.

Whole days were lost to despair that ate at him and left him unable to think straight for more days afterward.

He focused on the boots, and on the other things. He balanced certain lines of thinking with certain applications, to see if it felt different.

Hundreds of days in, so fast he thought he’d reverted to that accelerated time, the city crumbled. A flash of light, and the buildings fell, giving him a view of the water, of water frothing and foaming as waterside properties tipped into it.

For nine days after that, people tried to pick up the pieces.

On the tenth day, they mostly disappeared, leaving only stragglers. With every passing moment, he scoured and scanned those stragglers, used every awareness at his disposal to try to decipher, investigate, and see if they knew anyone or had seen anyone. Had one said Addison, for any reason at all, it might have stoked some hope.

By the thirtieth day after the city fell, the people who had remained were gone. Many were dead, unable to survive or sick. Others left for places where food would be more plentiful.

He pushed and tried to push his awareness through the distorted portal in the belly of the city, and no matter the investment, he couldn’t.

There was only the water, now. Watching the weeds growing into the cracks, tracking the wildlife, and the steady resurgence of those species best able to survive.

He mourned the world, and he vowed that if this was it, if this was the end perpetrated at the hands of their best hero, then he would retain some ability to explain what had happened if somehow something else were to come and pay a visit. A deity, an alien, a person from the past or from the future.

He was the most powerful person on their Earth, as far as he could tell, and possibly the most helpless. Easy, when he was one of the only ones left.

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