The turquoise water surrounding West Island had taken on a sickly, greenish tint. Rayan stood on the shore, watching the sluggish waves lap against the sand, leaving behind streaks of grey foam that didn't dissipate.
The usual vibrant coral life, visible just beneath the surface, seemed muted, indistinct. It had been like this for weeks, ever since the first global broadcasts spoke of 'subterranean instabilities.' Nobody used the word 'implosion' then. Not officially.
He kicked at a piece of driftwood, the motion feeling disconnected, sluggish. Thirty-one years he'd lived here, on this sliver of paradise in the Indian Ocean. Cocos. Home. Now, home felt like a closing fist.
The ground trembled, a low-frequency vibration that resonated in his bones more than it shook the sand. These tremors were becoming more frequent, longer lasting. They weren't earthquakes, not in the conventional sense. They felt deeper, more fundamental, like the planet itself was groaning in its sleep.
His satellite phone, clutched tight in his hand, remained stubbornly silent. No signal bars. Communication with the mainland, with the wider world, had become sporadic, then nonexistent.
News came in fractured bursts from shortwave radio enthusiasts – frantic voices talking about gravitational fluctuations, sinkholes swallowing cities whole, and the ships. The colossal evacuation arks being built, humanity's desperate gamble.
"Anything?" Maya walked up behind him, her bare feet silent on the sand. Her voice was strained.
Rayan shook his head, not turning. "Still nothing. The repeater must be down again. Or worse."
"The supply plane is overdue," she stated, a fact they both knew. Three days overdue. Their small community relied on those deliveries from Australia. Food, medicine, fuel. Everything.
"We've got enough for a while," Rayan offered, trying to sound reassuring, but the words felt hollow. A 'while' wasn't long enough when the ground beneath your feet felt like it could give way at any moment.
The sky, too, was wrong. Sunsets bled into greens and purples that felt unnatural, beautiful in a disturbing way. At night, the familiar constellations seemed subtly shifted, distorted, as if viewed through warped glass.
Sometimes, faint, aurora-like lights pulsed near the horizon, even during the day. Scientists on the crackling radio waves argued about magnetosphere disruptions, core dynamics, things Rayan barely understood. All he understood was the growing knot of fear in his stomach.
They weren't forgotten, not entirely. A garbled message weeks ago had promised evacuation support. A naval vessel was 'en route,' coordinates logged. But the ocean was wide, and the world was falling apart everywhere. Who prioritized a few hundred souls on a remote atoll?
That evening, the tremor was different. It started low, like the others, but escalated rapidly, a violent shudder that sent palm trees swaying wildly and knocked crockery from shelves.
A deep, grinding sound accompanied it, emanating from the earth itself, a terrifying noise that spoke of unimaginable forces tearing things apart miles below. Rayan and Maya clung to a doorway inside their small house, the wooden frame groaning around them.
When it subsided, leaving a ringing silence, the air smelled different. Metallic. Ozonous. Outside, the western sky pulsed with an intense, violet light.
"That wasn't normal," Maya whispered, her face pale.
"Nothing is normal anymore," Rayan replied grimly. He looked towards the jetty, towards the small collection of boats bobbing nervously in the lagoon. "We need to be ready. If that ship doesn't come…"
He didn't finish the sentence. The alternative was unthinkable. Trying to make the crossing to Australia in their small fishing boats? It was suicide. But staying might be worse.
Days bled into one another, marked by dwindling supplies and escalating tremors. The strange lights became more frequent, the ground moaned almost continuously.
People grew quiet, their faces drawn. Hope dwindled with the last bags of rice. Rayan spent hours by the shore, scanning the horizon, the useless phone feeling heavier each day.
He saw the fear in Maya's eyes, the same fear mirrored in his own reflection in the darkened windows at night. They spoke less, the silences filled with the planet's low, guttural complaints.
Then, one morning, a different sound cut through the gloom. A distant, powerful thrumming. Not the earth this time. Something airborne.
A heavy-lift aircraft, military grey and immense, descended slowly towards the island's small airstrip. Relief washed over Rayan, so potent it almost brought him to his knees. They weren't forgotten.
Chaos erupted. People scrambled, grabbing pre-packed bags, shouting questions. A stern-faced officer emerged from the aircraft's ramp, flanked by soldiers. His voice, amplified by a speaker, cut through the noise.
"Evacuation Protocol Delta. Priority One Transport. We have space for eighty individuals. Lottery system is in effect. Proceed to the administration building in an orderly fashion."
Eighty. Out of nearly six hundred inhabitants. Rayan's blood ran cold. A lottery. Their survival depended on sheer luck.
He grabbed Maya's hand, pulling her towards the building where their fates would be decided. The crowd surged, desperation overriding any semblance of order. Shouts turned to pleas, then to angry demands. Soldiers formed a perimeter, their weapons held ready.
Inside, the process was brutally simple. Names drawn from a box. Each name read out echoed like a gunshot in the tense room. Rayan felt Maya trembling beside him. He squeezed her hand, unable to offer any real comfort.
Their names weren't called. Not in the first twenty, nor the next forty. With each name that wasn't theirs, the knot in Rayan's stomach tightened.
"Maya Ismael!" The officer's voice rang out.
Maya gasped, looking at Rayan, her eyes wide with a mixture of relief and horror. "Rayan..."
"Go," he urged, pushing her gently forward. "Go. Get on the transport."
"No! Not without you!" Tears streamed down her face.
"There's no time! You have to go!" He felt his own composure cracking. The officer was already calling the next name. Soldiers were guiding the chosen towards the waiting aircraft.
He saw the agony in her eyes, the terrible choice. But the instinct to survive was strong. With a final, choked sob, she let the soldiers lead her away, looking back at him until she disappeared into the aircraft's shadow.
Rayan stood frozen, watching the ramp begin to rise. Eighty names. Eighty souls saved. Five hundred left behind.
The aircraft's engines spooled up, the thrumming intensifying, whipping sand and debris across the airstrip. He watched it lift off, climbing steeply into the sickly sky, carrying Maya away from him, away from Cocos, away from the dying Earth.
He was still standing there when the next tremor hit, stronger than any before. The ground buckled. Cracks spiderwebbed across the tarmac. The administration building groaned, a section of its roof collapsing inwards.
Panic erupted among those left behind. People ran, screaming, directionless. Rayan stumbled back towards the village, the metallic smell thick in his nostrils. The violet light pulsed violently on the horizon.
The grinding sound from below was deafening now, a continuous, terrifying roar. He saw the lagoon waters receding rapidly, drawn back as if by a giant intake, exposing stretches of dying coral and mud. A precursor. He knew what it meant.
He ran, not towards his empty house, but towards the highest point on the small island – a gentle rise barely ten meters above sea level. Others followed, their faces masks of terror.
From the rise, he watched the ocean surge back inwards. A wall of murky, debris-filled water, far higher than any normal wave, crashed over the jetty, obliterating the remaining boats. It swept through the village, tearing apart houses, uprooting palms. The sound was immense, a combination of the earth's roar and the ocean's fury.
Rayan watched his home, his world, disappear beneath the churning water. He felt strangely numb, detached. Maya was safe. That was the only thought that anchored him. She was on her way to Perth, then to one of the Arks. She would live.
The water surged higher, climbing the rise. People screamed and scrambled, trying to find footing on the shrinking patch of land. The grinding intensified, the very air vibrating.
Then, something changed. The relentless noise from below lessened, replaced by an unnerving silence from the planet's depths. But the sky… the sky ripped open.
Not with light, but with darkness. A tear in the fabric of reality, directly overhead. It wasn't black like night; it was a deeper, more absolute nothingness that seemed to absorb light, absorb sound, absorb thought.
Strange gravitational effects pulsed from it. Loose debris, small rocks, even the fronds torn from shattered palm trees, began to lift uncertainly from the ground, rotating slowly before being drawn upwards into the tear.
Rayan felt a peculiar lightness, a pulling sensation. He looked down at his hands, seeing the skin ripple strangely. The water swirling around his ankles flowed upwards in bizarre, rope-like tendrils towards the rift.
Fear, cold and sharp, finally pierced his numbness. This wasn't just the core imploding; the planet's collapse was tearing spacetime apart.
A man beside him screamed as he was lifted bodily from the ground, tumbling slowly, inexorably towards the darkness above. Others followed, their cries abruptly silenced as they crossed the invisible threshold.
Rayan pressed himself flat against the muddy ground, clinging to the exposed roots of a fallen tree, fighting the impossible pull. The island itself seemed to groan, pieces breaking away, drawn into the sky-wound.
He felt the roots tearing, the ground beneath him vibrating with unbearable intensity. He looked up into the swirling non-light, mesmerized by the horror. He thought of Maya, picturing her face, hoping she was far enough away, hoping the ships could outrun this.
The pulling sensation became overwhelming. He lost his grip. For a moment, he floated, suspended between the churning floodwaters and the consuming darkness above. He saw the remnants of his island, distorted and broken, rising with him.
There was no sound, only the terrifying, internal feeling of being unmade, stretched thin across dimensions he couldn't comprehend. His last conscious thought wasn't of fear, or sadness, or even Maya. It was a strangely detached observation: the absolute darkness wasn't empty. It was full.
Full of shapes, angles, and pressures that didn't belong in the universe he knew. He felt his body contort, drawn towards something ancient and vast waiting within the tear. It wasn't an implosion of matter, but an opening, a doorway to somewhere else. Somewhere infinitely worse than a dying planet.
He didn't scream as he crossed the threshold. There was no air left to carry the sound, no physical form left to produce it. Rayan, the man from Cocos, simply ceased to be within the known confines of reality, absorbed into the silent, geometric hunger that had opened in the sky.
He wasn't crushed or vaporized; he was incorporated, becoming another infinitesimal point in an impossible, consuming geometry. A fate far stranger, and perhaps more terrible, than merely dying with his world.
The churning waters below reflected only the impossible, silent darkness in the sky, the last testament to an island and its people, utterly erased. Far above, the evacuation transport carrying Maya flew on, its occupants unaware of the specific, unique horror that had claimed the man she left behind.
Her survival was his only victory, a victory he would never comprehend, bought at the cost of his very existence. The universe had vacancies, and Earth was filling them one torn soul at a time.