Fifteen years after the sky first tore open and the world learned to fear the dark, the land had settled into a strange kind of quiet. Not peace — never peace — but a hush left behind by absence: the absence of traffic, of cities, of laughter, of the illusion that daylight made anyone safe. What survivors remained drifted like ghosts along the bones of the old world, moving quickly while the sun still guarded them, hoarding light like food.

Jaewon was used to this kind of evening. He moved with the practiced rhythm of someone born into catastrophe — scanning treelines, keeping count of dwindling daylight in the tilt of the sun, gripping a bundle of dry wood against his side. He didn’t wander far from the hydroelectric outpost; he knew better than to let dusk surprise him. But scavenging was always a gamble, and today he needed more fuel and cloth scraps before the temperature dropped.

The road he followed was cracked to the marrow, half-swallowed by vines and silence. That was why the sight of the crashed car stood out — a dark lump of twisted metal tilted off the asphalt like a creature that had tried to crawl into the ditch and died there. Jaewon almost kept walking. Abandoned wrecks were nothing new, and most had been picked clean years ago. But something tugged him off the road — that strange prickle behind his ribs that had saved his life too many times to ignore.

The door had been wrecked inward. Glass glittered in the dirt like frost. The smell of dried blood hit first.

Then he saw him.

A boy — younger than Jaewon by a few years, crumpled against the driver seat, half his weight slumped over the console. A length of metal from the doorframe had speared into his side, pinning him there. He was still breathing — shallow, ragged, but breathing — lashes trembling faintly over bruised skin. He must have crawled here from some other fate, but hadn’t made it any farther.

Logic said leave him. Nightfall wasn’t far. A stranger meant risk. A wounded stranger meant dead weight.

But Jaewon’s feet didn’t move. That same instinct that warned him of predators urged him forward now, quiet and insistent. He didn’t know why. He didn’t owe this boy anything. But he didn’t turn away.

Getting him back to the hideout had been a blur of rope, makeshift splinting, sweat, and the burning urgency of the sky dimming too fast. By the time Jaewon got him laid out on the old mattress in his fallback shelter — that half-hidden room tucked in the high-rise ruins — his hands were shaking with adrenaline. He patched the wound, cleaned the blood, stabilized what he could. He didn’t speak, and neither did the unconscious boy.

And now, in the thin amber glow of a solar lantern, Jaewon sat in silence, watching him breathe.

He’d cuffed one wrist to the support beam beside the bed — not out of cruelty, but law of survival. Injured strangers weren’t always helpless strangers. He’d seen desperate people do worse than the nocturnals ever could. Better restrained until questions had answers.

But the metal wasn’t what he kept looking at.

It was his face — strangely soft even beneath bruises, a shape Jaewon had almost forgotten the world could still make. The slope of his cheekbones, the fine structure of his mouth, the pale throat rising and falling in slow, steady rhythm. Beautiful in a way that startled him. Beautiful in a way that hurt.

Jaewon leaned back, jaw set, expression unreadable even to himself.

He didn’t know this boy’s name. Didn’t know where he came from, how he survived this long, or whether saving him would become a mistake he couldn’t afford.

But for now — just for this fragile night between daylight and danger — he was alive.

And Jaewon was the reason.