Mika is four years old when she sees someone flying for the first time. A tremor inside of her comes shortly before a bold white flame streaks across the sky, and she is certain that there was a person inside of it. She runs home and tells her mother, and her mother hugs her tight and tells her about a tournament she saw in her childhood, and how there are things in the world for which there are no explanations. Mika is five when she first learns of death-undeath, when the sky goes black and two hundred thousand people in East City rise from the dead, their bodies healed entirely, with strange dreams of gold and blue.
Don't worry about it, Mi-Mi, her mother says. Strange things happen, but it's a part of what makes this world lovely.
Mika is nine when an explosion destroys Amenbo Island. She's old enough to wear her hair in braids and wear pants if she wants to, and she still thinks the world is lovely. She's ten when her school takes a trip into the countryside and something crawls into Ginger Town. When they return the dust has settled, and nobody is alive.
She cries, for a while, even after her uncle with a country home takes her in. Sadness turns to begging; she spends hours staring up at the sky, waiting for the darkening that signals undeath. Strange nightmares of gold and blue are coupled with stranger nightmares of white on white. Something screams into the air over the Southern Isles, and when she is ten-and-a-half, a documentary on dinosaurs is interrupted by a thing named Cell. It introduces itself as the monster from Ginger Town. It is the monster who killed her mother.
In the ten days that follow the countryside is stomped flat by people fleeing the cities, and though Mika hasn't a clue why they would run from a world-destroying force, she understands their fear and rage. In their darkest hour, a martial artist from Orange Star City steps into the light, claims to be a saviour. Mika knows better than to trust a stranger, but she is scared of dying and willing to believe anyone, and someone that arrogant couldn't be wrong, right?
They stockpiled jam and bread, dug a hiding-hole in the backyard, left the TV running all day, and otherwise acted like people with only ten days to live. By the eighth day her aunt is singing Hercule's praises, and her uncle is laughing at the audacity they had to worry in the first place, and the dinner table-talk with the relatives who have joined them is a lively debate about how quickly it will all end. Mika eats little and says less, wonders why adults say one thing and do another, and if the thing that murdered her mother would be afraid of trash-talking and truck-pulling.
On the ninth evening she is outside, lying in the grass and watching the stars and trying to think of nothing in particular, when a tremor inside her seems to lift her blood skyward, and someone streaks through the air. Then the fire pauses, hovers, and stops above her. It descends. It's a boy, a boy about her age with yellow hair and bright green eyes.
"Hi," he says.
"Um, hi," she returns, as she scrambles to her feet. "Were you, um, flying?"
He looks down and to the left. "Yeah," he says, finally. "This is going to sound weird, but it felt like you were calling to me."
"Oh. I wasn't calling anyone in particular."
He steps closer. There is something uncanny about him in the way he walks, or the pale flame that burns around him, blurred edges that disappear when she looks too closely, as though he's not entirely human. "You were calling," he says. "There's a pain in you, something making you angry."
"Yeah, well." She swallows hard, but the emotion is pushing up and out. "Cell killed my mother, and –"
And of course she starts crying in front of a stranger, because the world is not lovely but awful, and people die for no reason. She's sobbing, big ugly tears rolling down her face, when he gathers her in his arms, and she screams into his shirt because she doesn't want to die too.
After she has cried herself out he lets her go, awkwardly. "Um, if it means anything, I'll be there tomorrow." He smiles. "At the Cell Games. And your mom – she might come back, you know. I have a feeling."
He lifts off with a breath like roaring, and that night she dreams of a strange planet where the sky is green and the grass is blue, and the feeling of seeing a loved one again after a very long time, and of stepping forward onto a ring made of stone holding out a flower to Cell. When the broadcast begins she, like everyone else, becomes a pair of eyes; when he steps forward something in her lifts once again, with his beautiful world-beginning light. Years later she would call it love, but back then, she just felt that she was learning how to hope, slowly, at the end of the world.