The watch on Giovanni Taylor's wrist had stopped at 9:47 AM.

He didn't notice at first. The old Seiko had been running on borrowed time for three years anyway—a relic like everything else in his garage, ticking away in the corner of a world that had already moved on without him. Giovanni had moved on too, or so he'd convinced himself. Moved on from cities, from people, from the pretense that any of it mattered.

The garage sat on the outskirts of what used to be called civilization, a squat concrete structure surrounded by salvaged machinery and the kind of dust that never quite settled. Inside, the air hung thick with the smell of burnt oil and rust. Giovanni stood hunched over a carburetor from a 1987 motorcycle, his weathered hands steady despite the tremor that had started creeping into his left fingers last year. He was fifty-three, though he looked closer to seventy. The world had that effect on people who paid attention to it.

The sirens started just after the watch stopped.

At first, Giovanni didn't register what he was hearing. Sirens were normal—they'd been normal for decades. But these were different. Multiple frequencies, overlapping, a chaotic symphony that suggested something more than the usual urban emergency. He set down his tools, straightened his back with a wince, and listened.

The radio on his workbench crackled to life, unprompted. Giovanni hadn't turned it on. That should have meant something, but his mind was already elsewhere, already cataloging the sound signatures. His fingers moved across the carburetor with muscle memory while his ears tried to make sense of the broadcast fragmenting through the static.

"...all automated systems offline... power grid failures in sectors seven through—"

A voice cut through, panicked, official: "—advise all personnel to shelter in place. Do not attempt to—"

The transmission dissolved into white noise.

Giovanni's hands stilled. He looked at the watch on his wrist, as if the frozen numbers might suddenly explain what was happening. The second hand hung suspended at the twelve, refusing to move. 9:47 AM. The exact moment everything had changed, though he didn't know it yet.

Outside the garage, the sirens continued their frantic wailing, growing louder, more insistent. Whatever was happening, it was close.

Giovanni turned back to his work, though his concentration had fractured. He was good at ignoring the world. He'd spent the last decade perfecting it. But something in that silence between broadcasts—that terrible, electric silence—suggested that ignoring might no longer be an option.