Chapter 457: Chapter 457 - Abduction Ceremony of Another World Begins Now

The first report came out of Reykjavik.

Not because Iceland was where it started. Nobody ever determined where it started. But Iceland had the clearest sky that morning, and when the aurora borealis turned the wrong color — not green, not violet, but a deep arterial red that sat too low in the atmosphere and didn’t move the way auroras moved — a meteorology student named Erika filmed it on her phone and put it online at 6:42 AM local time.

By 6:51, the video had four million views.

By 7:00, it had company.

[ BREAKING — CNN INTERNATIONAL ]

"— we are receiving confirmed reports now from at least seventeen countries of what witnesses are describing as spontaneous disappearances — individuals simply vanishing mid-activity, in public spaces, in their homes, on public transit — our correspondent in Mumbai is standing by, Priya, can you tell us what you’re seeing on the ground—"

The feed cut to a woman in a yellow blazer standing against the backdrop of Marine Drive, the Arabian Sea behind her and the sky above it the color of a fresh wound.

"Yes, I can confirm what we are witnessing here in Mumbai is — it’s extraordinary, frankly. Behind me you can see the sky has taken on this red tint that began approximately forty minutes ago, and in the last twenty minutes alone, three individuals within my line of sight simply — vanished. There was no explosion, no sound, no warning. A man was eating chaat from a stall directly behind our camera position and our cameraman actually captured the moment — he was there, mid-bite, and then he was not. The stall owner is beside himself."

Cut back to the anchor.

"Priya, any sense of pattern? Age, location, demographic—"

"None that we’ve been able to establish yet. The three individuals I mentioned were a man in his fifties, a teenage girl, and what appeared to be a young woman in her twenties. No common thread. The only consistent element seems to be the sky."

[ NHK WORLD — TOKYO ]

The anchor spoke in clipped, precise Japanese, subtitles rolling beneath.

’Confirmed disappearances in Shinjuku Ward: 847 as of this broadcast. Self-Defense Forces have been placed on alert. Prime Minister’s office has convened emergency session. Citizens are advised to remain indoors until further notice.’

The footage behind him showed Shinjuku Crossing — normally one of the most densely populated intersections on earth — with people standing in clusters, necks craned upward, watching the red sky pulse like something enormous was breathing on the other side of it.

Then, on camera, a woman in office attire simply ceased to exist.

No flash. No sound. No displacement of air.

She was there — heels clicking, phone to her ear, the hem of her pencil skirt snapping in the morning wind — and then the air where she’d been standing held her shape for half a second, the way a crowd holds the shape of the person who just left it, and then closed.

Her phone hit the pavement.

The NHK camera stayed on it for three full seconds.

[ RT — MOSCOW ]

The state broadcaster had been running the red sky footage on a lower-third scroll while the main programming — a panel discussion on economic policy — continued with increasing implausibility.

In a penthouse apartment fourteen floors above the broadcast, a man named Oleg Varenkov was not watching RT.

He was watching the ceiling.

Specifically, he was watching it from the particular angle of a man lying on his back in high-thread-count sheets while a woman — dark-haired, substantial, her heavy breasts swaying with considerable enthusiasm above him — rode him with the focused determination of someone who had been paid for her time and intended to deliver value.

Pah. Pah.

Her tits bounced, nipples drawing circles in the warm air of the bedroom, her thick thighs braced on either side of his hips while she worked herself down his length in long, rolling strokes. She bit her lower lip. Her eyes were closed.

Oleg was watching the window.

The window faced east. The sky beyond it had been grey when they’d started. It was now red — not sunrise red, not the red of clouds catching light, but a deep, pulsing crimson that pressed against the glass like something trying to get in.

"’Stop,’" he said.

She opened her eyes. Rolled her hips once more on principle.

"’Stop.’"

He sat up — she slid sideways with a wet sound and an undignified noise — and he crossed to the window in his bare feet, his thick frame blocking most of the light, and pressed both palms flat against the cold glass.

The sky looked back at him.

He unlatched the window. Pushed it open. The air that came in was not Moscow winter air. It was warm. It smelled like ozone and something else — something old, something that didn’t have a name in any language he spoke — and it moved against his bare chest with the specific pressure of something purposeful.

Behind him, the woman sat up in the ruined sheets, her breasts settling against her ribcage, nipples still peaked from the interrupted activity. She followed his gaze.

"Oleg—"

He leaned out the window.

The red sky pulled at him.

Not metaphorically.

He felt the tug at his sternum — literal, physical, the sensation of a hook finding purchase behind his ribs — and his hands tightened on the window frame and for three seconds he held on.

Then he let go.

The window swung empty in the warm anomalous air.

The woman in the sheets sat very still.

Then she pulled the sheet up to her chin and screamed.

[ TV AZTECA — MEXICO CITY ]

"— estamos viendo desapariciones en masa en el Zócalo, en Coyoacán, en Santa Fe — los testigos describen una sensación de ser jalados hacia arriba antes de desvanecerse—"

’We are seeing mass disappearances in the Zócalo, in Coyoacán, in Santa Fe — witnesses describe a sensation of being pulled upward before vanishing—’

The footage showed the Angel of Independence monument against the red sky, tourists and locals standing around its base with their phones raised. Half of them documenting. Half of them simply watching.

One by one, at irregular intervals, the crowd thinned.

Not running. Not fleeing.

’Gone.’

[ BBC WORLD SERVICE — LONDON ] 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

"Our science correspondent joining us now — Dr. Chen, what are the working theories at this stage—"

"Well, I want to be careful here because we genuinely do not have sufficient data to — the honest answer is that no working theory currently exists within any framework I’m familiar with that would account for what we’re observing. The chromatic shift in the sky is being monitored by every major observatory and none of them can identify a source. The disappearances don’t correlate with proximity to the sky anomaly, they don’t correlate with atmospheric conditions, they don’t correlate with — anything. The pattern, if there is one, is not visible to us yet."

"And the numbers? Current estimates—"

"The last figure I saw before coming on air was approximately nine million globally. That was eleven minutes ago."

The anchor’s composure held.

Barely.

"Nine million," he repeated.

"In the last two hours. Yes."

The bridge had no name worth remembering.

It crossed a river on the eastern edge of a mid-sized city that the international news hadn’t reached yet, in that particular urban fringe where apartment blocks met industrial nothing and the streetlights were spaced too far apart to matter.

She was nineteen.

She had a knife in her right hand — not for anyone else, she wasn’t that kind of angry, she had never been that kind of angry, she was the kind of angry that turned entirely inward — and she was standing at the railing with the river below her, black and indifferent, moving at the pace of something that had somewhere to be and didn’t care about the bridge.

Her name was Danya.

Her phone had buzzed fourteen minutes ago.

She’d read the message four times since. Kept reading it like the words would change. Like her brain would find the interpretation that made it mean something other than what it meant.

’We have the video. You remember the video :) come have some fun tonight or we send it to your mom. and then well just pay her a visit too haha. your choice babe.’

Below the text was a screenshot.

She knew what was in the screenshot. She’d been living with what was in the screenshot for six weeks.

She pressed her thumb against the screen until it went dark.

Looked at the knife.

Looked at the water.

She wasn’t even crying anymore. She’d been crying for six weeks and she’d run out of it somewhere around the third week and now there was just this — the specific hollow clarity of someone who had done the math and found only one answer that made the problem stop.

Her hand tightened on the railing.

The red sky above her pulsed.

She didn’t look up.

’Mom,’ she thought. Just that. Just the word, plain, with no sentence around it.

She moved her hand from the railing to the top bar.

The air changed.

She felt it first in her sternum — warm, purposeful, the same sensation Oleg had felt fourteen stories up in Moscow before his hands let go of the window frame, but she didn’t know that, she’d never know that — and then the warmth spread outward through her chest and into her arms and down into the hand holding the knife.

Her fingers opened.

The knife fell.

She watched it turn once in the air and disappear into the dark water below without sound.

She hadn’t decided to let go.

The warmth pulled at her — gently, the way you’d take something fragile from someone who was holding it too tightly — and she felt herself lift.

Not falling.

’Lifted.’