Laboratories will remain closed for now. Please let all your material in the respective incubators/refrigerators and we'll be contacting you soon with more information. Be strong.

Kind regards,

Doctor Anya Sánchez-Jones.

The sign was stuck to the door of their lab.

Ale heard whispers around her.

Some of the undergraduates were cursing under their breath. Summer was essential for them to process their samples and graduates were much the same.

Alejandra was one of these graduates. She had come from the other side of the world to finish higher education a few months earlier.

She took her samples and stored them safely in place. She murmured a prayer for them (she wasn't religious but who knew what kind of dangers her beloved cells would have to go through if left unattended; she shuddered just to think of it). She was the last one to leave. Her resolve not to find any of her colleagues there had to do with their behavior. Few seemed to understand she had no time to waste.

Bad luck followed her around; she was a magnet of misfortune and as such, she avoided getting involved with people as much as she could. It was the third month of the year and she was already regretting coming so far from home.

The labs are closed earlier than expected. The news of the outbreak of the virus had reached them about three months earlier but little was done to stop economic activity in their state.

That meant malls, parks, and schools, as well as banks, and all public entities, were vulnerable to the virus jumping from host to host.

People were the hosts.

After a few months, she created a new routine. She would wake up, read the papers, read some articles, and then she would start journaling. What this Earth was like, what they were missing from her own, and how she thought she could achieve it.

By then all symptoms were disclosed. People not only had started to develop strange fevers and difficulty to breathe among other symptoms but the mortality rates started to be linked to diseases too. Time seemed to pass both too slow and too fast. The news started to relate the events with the country instead of relating it with a foreign continent.

People complained.

Store clerks, teachers, and health workers had to deal with people complaining.

The rants, the mismanagement, and chaos seemed to reign.

A few nations felt the weight of it on their shoulders; their lives had changed. Others kept going with the same inertia all victims of trauma had: that sensation of not being able to notice what has been done to you.

What they kept doing to everyone.

Panic was palpable. It was around her like some kind of atmosphere that wouldn't leave her. Her accelerated heart rate was beginning to give her more anxiety than she had.

She took a shaky step to her desk and stared at the computer for what felt like the umpteenth time. All those years of civilization and both worlds hadn't mastered the art of erasing anxiety.

She was supposed to be running a gel to add to her matrix of experiments but, with her luck, she had gotten the news that non-essential experiments wouldn’t be conducted.

If only they knew how essential those experiments where, they wouldn't be making such claims!

In other words, her experiments were non-essential as they did not bring money to the university.

Cursing her lack of luck, she growled. It figured that once she was finally ever to return to her education something like this would happen.

Anxiety trickled in her mind slowly and she welcomed it like an old friend.

Instead of wishing it away, she decided to do something proactive. It’d been a while since she surfed the net for something fun to do. All her friends were scattered around the globe and it was past midnight on their time zones. No one would be awake. The twenties had taken a toll on their already worn bodies.

She typed 'coral reef' almost without giving it thought. It was one of the first ecosystems that got her interested in science.

The forum was a pretty thing. It was littered with posts of coral reefs and people explaining in detail what they would require to restore them.

She clicked in one of the recent posts.

Posted by humansoftomorrow 15 minutes ago

Can’t come up with anything to do in quarantine, so here’s a thread of coral pictures

Posted by daughterofthesea 9 minutes ago

Look at these proud boys, I already feel better by seeing them swim around the sea with such ease.

Can't you believe how happy they look?

Posted by guywithacomputerandakeyboard11

Hello. I happen to be the one who took those pictures. They did seem happy when they were swimming by the camera.

Posted by green-diaries

No way! Tell us more about it!

True to his word, the user posted a series of pictures where he's making a peace sign.

She swallowed.

She thought she knew who the person was and yet...It didn't make any sense to find him there of all places.

She sent him a private message.

Hi, I don't know if you remember me but we met a few days ago at Samir's reunion. You had the best pictures of the corals and I'd like to make a collage for my presentation.

Kindly,

Ale.

She hit send.

Coral reefs have always been fascinating to her although she didn’t work with them on a daily basis.

There isn’t much to do but wait around—there doesn’t seems to be anything else to do anymore. The summer is hot so she took a long bath before she opened the chat again.

In the shower, she thought. She reflected on the internal and external chaos of a city that gave up long before she came to the world and how that changed her outlook on everything.

She tried not to think too much of what she left behind.

If she was honest with herself, she has been isolated for quite some time now. It felt as if the rest of the world was only catching up with her until the self-imposed quarantine started.

It pained her.

The small notification appeared and the laptop pinged. The sound reverberated across the room.

I'll have to buy a new one eventually, she thought.

She looked at it with uncertainty. It is strange for one of your posts to receive any comments at all.

It was him.

Sure. I think you'll like the ones I sent you now. I love pink corals. They seem magical.

Oh, if he knew what magic was like. Magic was all-or-nothing.

She agreed.

"Can I have your number?" he said.

She sighed.

Numbers were, by the definition, verboten for empaths. It was like willingly opening a channel to other people to hurt you. No one had preservation instincts that low where she came from.

But she sent it anyway. She was, after all, the Guardian of this chaos. What else could happen to her if she gave in?

Speaking was magical. It could make you forget that, sometimes, even at your lowest, you can be someone's

Another soul has reached you through the clutter of the city. The synaptic connection is there. Palpable. Real.

He seemed to smile at her through the chat. She should know better, but all she smiled back anyway.

On a whim, she texted him. It is a good thing technology and magic don't clash anymore. Otherwise, she could have ended up burned from all the energy spent in communicating and keeping wavelengths below their threshold.

“Hi,” she typed, adding a smile emoji for good measure.

She hoped not to be too forward. Communication skills weren’t her forte. It'd been too many years since she spoke with anyone that wasn't a magic-user.

Although they had met before there was something about him that shone brighter than a thousand suns in Tailea.

“Hi!!!” he typed. “I’m Ryan. Twenty-five and unsure of what life means anymore.”

Her heart sped up. She wasn't human, what was she supposed to type?

That was the part of the conversation when people bring up their age. But she doesn't, it might make things awkward if she started lying so soon.

“Hi, I’m Alejandra.”

“I remember. Cute name., beautiful woman.”

She almost closed the chat.

But she has gone through worse things than that conversation.

“Things aren’t great here,” he said. “It seems university won’t start again and it is my only job.”

She sigh. It was also her only job. In the non-magical world, anyway. She guessed she has even less of a chance to perpetuate her education now that she had to guard the Earth against this threat by doing nothing. Living in the city wasn't going to open many doors to her, but there was nothing else she could do.

She took a glimpse at her room. She loved the sea, it made her feel just like she did back at home.

It was either jump ship and start anew or remain there in the ruins of what used to be a dream.

Food, water, medicine shortages were still fully ongoing. Their world was the same as hers, only a few moments in the past. And she is the last one in a long line of fighters and apprentices.

“I know,” she typed although it was far from the way she thought. “I look like that always.”

He replied with smile emojis.

He doesn't have to be nearby, for her to know that he is happy to have found her. Whether there is a reason or not (and she firmly believes there isn’t) she was still there, walking this Ancient Earth that was unknown to her.

During that moment the connection with the world felt less slow. A sliver of something she thought had died a hundred years before sparked alive.

“When do you think this will be over?” he typed.

“I don’t know,” she typed back.

Before she could regret anything else, she picked up the phone.

She had no way to know if the world she had jumped from could be started again, but at that moment she felt like she was going to make it happen.