The next morning started with the sun shining through my window and a fire burning in my belly.

It was the fire—no—the blaze of purpose. The morning was beautiful. My boyfriend was rash, but very sweet. My mother was terrible. I would not let that last fact ruin the first two facts. Life was not a game, but I was going to win.

I sprang from my bed and began preparing for the day with an intensity and eagerness almost unheard of in teenagers before eight a.m. Before long, I was tying up my braid, tucking my book under my arm, and slipping on my favorite black boots.

They had once belonged to Mom.

No. No! I did not have time for this. I pulled the laces so tight my toes scrunched, and then bounded out the door. I did not have angst; I did not have backstory; I had only a future, in which I thrived, and told my boyfriend I forgave him, and loved him, and would even join him in HIVE on the day of the big Update to show how totally cool and angstless I was.

Which meant I also had a future in which I took the bus. Dad was working overtime today, and I never drove if I knew I’d be spending more than an hour in HIVE. Luckily for me, there was a bus stop right at the end of my street. Of course, there was a bus stop at the end of just about everyone’s street these days. Eric Alanick must’ve had some powerful friends, because right around the time folks started getting buzzed on a daily basis, buses and food delivery programs started receiving a lot more government funding. As a result, all I had to do to get into town on this glorious day was stroll through the crisp morning sunshine, pull up at my usual spot on the bench, open my book, and wait.

And wait.

And wait a little bit more.

And eventually look up from my book and scan down the street, wondering how much longer I was going to have to wait.

Don’t get me wrong. I love having time to just sit somewhere and read (we have discussed this). But the bus had never taken this long to arrive before, and if I sat and read any more, I was going to run into every bookworm’s worst nightmare: finishing the book I was reading without having a new one on hand.

And that wasn’t all. Now that my fire and/or blaze had been given some time to cool down, something about the morning felt … off.

I just didn’t know what. The weather was perfect; another in a string of cloudless fall days, cool enough not to sweat but warm enough not to shiver. My street looked normal—like, aggressively normal, with piles of obsessively raked leaves in every yard and funny little faces painted on the mailboxes. And somewhere in the distance, as always, the soft sound of …

Nothing.

That was it. That was what was off: the volume. Instead of cars purring down the nearest county highway or kids yelling in unseen backyards, there was just nothing at all, as if someone had hit a mute button for the entire world.

I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until a bird tweeted once into the silence, at which point I gasped, jumped two feet in the air, and fell from the bench onto the ground.

This seemed like a pretty clear sign that I had lost control of the plot. I needed to regain some of that momentum I’d felt upon waking, with or without a bus to help me—and it seemed pretty clear it was going to be without, since it didn’t sound like a single vehicle was on the move in Bullworth today. So I stood up, brushed a few leaves off my butt, and set off down the road into town. I was still in control of my destiny; I would just have to walk a little to reach it. It was still a beautiful day; there just happened to be some slightly creepy vibes afoot, if you cared to notice them.

Okay, maybe the vibes were more than slight. As I reached the outskirts of my neighborhood, I kept expecting to hear something—I wasn’t sure what, exactly, but anything would have made more sense than this endless hush. There should have been trucks rolling by, or music pouring out of open windows. But the only things I could hear were the occasional calls of the birds that hadn’t flown south for the year, and the crunching of leaves under my boots. Did everyone else die, some part of my brain thought, or just you? Where is everyone?

Well, I mean, obviously I had a hunch. It just wasn’t the kind of hunch I wanted to think about right now. But as I approached the main road into town, I have to admit I started to walk a little faster.

Then I saw the pillar of smoke, and my walk turned into a run.

As I ran, the pillar became a plume, roiling and black. For a terrible moment, I had a clear image of the dragon I’d slain yesterday, having somehow escaped into the real world and lying in wait just around the corner to catch me in a rematch. Then I turned onto the main road and discovered something much worse.

There, smoke billowing from its crumpled hood, was a bus that had veered off the road and into a streetlight.

See, it’s good you didn’t catch the bus after all, thought a distinctly unhelpful part of my brain. The rest of me concentrated on running as fast as I could toward the crash. Since there was absolutely no one else in sight, it was up to me to check if there was anyone still inside.

Which, again: unfortunate. We’ve established that I’m not the tallest heroine around, so even as I hopped over the curb and ran along the half of the bus that had ended up on the sidewalk, I didn’t have the best view through the high windows. That said, the shapes flashing by above me looked distressingly like the prone forms of passengers. By the time I reached the front doors, my eyes were watering from the fumes, but when I leaned up against the glass and squinted through the smoke, I was able to make out a driver slumped over the steering wheel, as if she had just decided to take a short nap between stops.

“Hey! Come on! Wake up!” I yelled, banging my fists on the doors. “Please!”

Maybe it was my asking nicely, or maybe it was the particularly hard thwack I gave the bus door just then. Whatever it was, as a thick belch of smoke rolled up from the hood, the bus driver’s head jerked up with a start. There was blood dripping down her face, and her features screwed up in confusion as she looked forward into a world that must have been pure black with streaks of red.

“Hey!” I shouted again, and she turned and saw me. If she was confused before, she was entirely lost now, but she opened the bus doors and I stumbled inside, wrapping my arm around her to help her out of her seat.

“Come on!” I said. “We gotta go before this thing goes—I mean—is it going to explode? I don’t actually know how buses …”

I stopped speaking then—one, because I was panic babbling, and two, because I had looked up into the mirror over the bus driver’s seat.

Behind me, there was a passenger in every single seat of the bus. Well, not every seat—some riders had been flung out of their seats when the bus crashed; still others had been slammed into walls. Almost every one of them was wearing a HIVE headset.

And absolutely none of them were moving.

“Are they …” I began, frozen in shock. It was now the bus driver’s turn to push me toward the door.

“I don’t know,” she said, hustling us down the steps and onto the grass. While I’d been staring at the chilling tableau of bodies, she’d grabbed a plastic jug from under the dashboard, and now she ripped at the safety cap with her teeth. A drop of blood fell from her forehead and spattered onto her uniform’s name tag: Sheila.

“But should we get them out?” I asked helplessly. “I mean, is the bus going to explode?”

“No,” Sheila said, spitting the cap onto the sidewalk and striding around the front of the bus. “The engine is just overheating. But smoke inhalation is still very bad.”

She popped the hood, releasing a mushroom cloud of fumes into the air, which seemed like a weird way to not inhale smoke. But as she wheezed and waved away the smog, she tilted the jug into the reservoir, and bright blue coolant poured out into the engine, turning smoke into hissing steam.

Sheila spoke as she poured. “I was driving,” she said, “and everyone was on their headsets. Which isn’t that unusual. But it can get creepy when it’s everyone, you know?”

I did know. More than once, I’d stepped onto a bus where almost every passenger was staring into a void, getting in a quick HIVE session during their commute.

“The intercom’s hooked into HIVE, so normally they know when to get their stop,” Sheila continued, pushing the jug up to empty it out. “But today, I noticed we were making great time. I mean, too great. No one had asked to get off in a few stops. And no one had gotten on, either. I looked in the mirror and saw what you saw—no one moving. Like they couldn’t be bothered to get out of HIVE. Hey, call nine one one.”

She added this to me almost as an afterthought, as the last drops of coolant trickled out and she tossed the jug onto the grass. While I fumbled frantically through my pocket for my phone, Sheila scrubbed the blood away from her eyes and looked out at the road.

“So just as I’m wondering what that’s all about,” she continued, “this maniac comes swerving down the road. So I think he’s totally buzzed, and I swerve out of the way, but we’re talking a totally out-of-control vehicle here, so I have to swerve again. And we go off the road, and next thing I know, you’re knocking at the door. Any luck?”

“It’s ringing,” I said. Now that the smoke had dissipated, I could see what I hadn’t noticed earlier: another car, farther down the road, also up on the sidewalk. As the phone rang for the eighth or ninth time at the 911 control center, I started to wonder if maybe they were getting an unusually high number of calls today.

“Good.” Sheila crossed back to the side of the bus and peered up through the doors. “You tell ’em to come here when you get ’em on the line. I’m gonna boot up, see if I can’t send a message to our sleeping beauties through the intercom.”

For some reason, this plan set off alarm bells in my head. But before I could open my mouth and say something, Sheila reached up and pinched the bridge of her nose.

There was a moment in which she looked at me and smiled, rolling her eyes good-naturedly at the inevitable few seconds of lag as HIVE booted up.

And then Sheila’s eyes kept rolling, all the way back into her head, until they were totally white. With a soft exhale, she fell forward onto the bus steps, as limp and motionless as all her passengers.

“Sheila!” I cried, rushing toward her and putting my free hand on her neck. She had a pulse, but it fluttered frantically—pounded, really, as if she was awake and agitated rather than totally unconscious.

This was when I realized the phone had been ringing for more than a minute.

More than a couple of minutes, come to think of it. And it wasn’t a busy signal, as it would have been if my earlier theory had been correct. Just an endless, unanswered ringing.

In that moment, I had a chilling vision. Let’s say you were an emergency dispatcher who got a call about a HIVE-related emergency, and then two calls, and then three. And let’s say you finally said, “Okay, let’s just boot into HIVE real quick and see what’s going on.”

And let’s say you really shouldn’t have done that. And now you were just lying there, unmoving, in an emergency call center where the phone would just keep ringing, and ringing, and ringing, as the emergencies piled up in the world outside.

Assuming, that is, that there was anyone else left out there to be getting into emergencies.

Slowly, hands shaking, I pressed the red icon on my phone screen and lowered it back into my pocket. I stepped gingerly out into the middle of the road, looking left and then right, and seeing nothing beyond the wrecked vehicles around me. In no time at all, that terrible silence had flooded back into the morning.

Had I finally become the only person in the world not inside HIVE?

The answer presented itself very quickly.

I heard the roar before I saw it, but only just barely: A car, old and battered and veering erratically, tore around the corner and sped down the road—toward me. We’re talking a totally out-of-control vehicle here, Sheila had said, and now I understood what she’d meant. The driver, if there was one, seemed two steps past buzzed, maybe even actually buzzed (though that didn’t seem likely—in a post-HIVE world, being addicted to an actual physical substance was pretty retro). Whatever it was, the car’s path was totally unpredictable. I leaped to the right, but the car just swerved to match. I almost feinted left, but the car was already going left, so in a split-second decision I just froze, standing statue still and throwing my hands over my face as the car took one more hard turn, spun out, and whirled past me like a poorly skipped stone.

There was a crash, and then there was just blood rushing in my ears.

And then I turned around and realized that wasn’t blood I was hearing but water, gushing from where the car had crashed right into a fire hydrant.

Ten minutes ago, I would have run toward the car, desperate to help the driver out. Now I just sighed and made my weary way over, preparing to be met with another headset zombie.

Then the door to the driver’s seat flew open.

I came to a halt with a few yards to go. A hand emerged, grabbing at the top of the door, and then another hand. A foot stepped onto the street, wobbling like a newborn calf, and the driver’s voice gasped and cracked with the strain of pulling themselves up and out of the car.

And I knew that sound.

“Jason?!” I cried as Jason Alcorn heaved himself up onto the door of the car. He was paler than ever, and blood trickled down his forehead as he looked from me to the bus and then back to me again.

“Kara?!” he said, which, all things considered, seemed understandable.

“What—what’s happening?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

Jason looked down, considering either my question or his wobbling legs or the water from the fire hydrant that was now flooding past his feet.

When he looked up again, a chill ran down my spine, and then all the way back up again, as if a pulse had boomeranged from my BrainSTIM Card.

“The world is collapsing,” Jason said. “The Update is here.”

And then he fell into the water.