I had said I would follow him to the ends of the earth. I didn’t quite mean it like this. The road had vanished hours ago, swallowed by the sky the colour of old bruises. Our bikes idled beneath us, engines ticking like nervous hearts as we stared across what used to be the Midlands and now looked more like the surface of Mars. Heat shimmered off the ground in warped, metallic tasting waves. like a storm without rain.

Jax lifted his visor, reflecting the horizon. “Told you it’d be an adventure,” he said.

I nudged his boot with mine. “An adventure is a weekend in Snowdonia. This is whatever Americans mean by the rapture.”

Behind us, the wind carried the distant groan of something collapsing, steel and concrete. The last stubborn bit of civilisation giving up. Ahead of us, the sky split open in a slow, silent ripple, like a knife through velvet, light pouring from the gash and painting the world in colours I didn’t have names for.

Jax revved his engine once, a nervous habit. “We should probably go,” he said.

“Go where?” I asked. “The ends of the earth are coming to us.”

He looked at me then, and for a moment it was just us, two idiots on bikes. “Wherever you want,” he said. “Long as we ride together.”

The ground trembled beneath us.