I.

The third day of the empty street, Ray Donatti walked from Brooklyn Heights to Canarsie and back and found nothing but parked cars with their engines still running and telephones still ringing on kitchen tables and a half-eaten sandwich on a park bench that was still warm.

He had been playing football when it happened. That was the thing that stayed with him—the football. They had been playing kickball in a vacant lot on the corner of Atlantic and Sterling, the kind of game that involved no rules and maximum chaos and exactly fourteen players, and Ray had scored the winning run in the seventh inning when he heard a scream.

Not a scream of pain. A scream of confusion. The kind of scream you make when you walk into your kitchen and the television is on and the food is cooking and your mother is not there.

He ran back to his block. Mrs. Gennaro's door was open. Her dog was barking. Her pot of Sunday gravy was bubbling on the stove, the steam rising in lazy curls in the afternoon sun. Ray went inside, called out "hello?" in a voice that cracked halfway through, and found nothing. No bodies. No signs of struggle. Just absence. A vacuum where a neighborhood had been.

By the time he reached Canarsie, he understood something that he would spend the rest of his life trying not to understand: the adults were gone. All of them. Every single one over the age of twenty-five. Gone. Not dead, not missing. Just gone, like smoke that had risen from the earth and vanished into the sky.

II.

The underground kingdom was founded in a废弃 BMT station beneath Fulton Street, on a day Ray could not name because all the days had become the same. The station was damp and smelled of old train tracks and old urine, and the walls were covered in graffiti that had been layered over itself for decades—a palimpsest of New York teenage angst going back to the nineties.

Four districts sent delegates. Ray represented Brooklyn. Dan Covin represented Midtown. Sasha Williams represented Harlem. And a boy named Tommy from Queens brought no credentials at all, just a backpack full of granola bars and a conviction that this was all some kind of game.

"We should write a constitution," Dan said, standing on a bench and waving a piece of chalk he had found on the platform. He was a small, sharp-faced kid with glasses that kept sliding down his nose, and he spoke with a precision that made the other kids uncomfortable. "Like, a real one. Rules. Responsibilities. A system of government."

"This is a game," Tommy said again. "It's, like, the most awesome game ever."

Sasha rolled her eyes. She was five-foot-nothing and could lift a vending machine if she needed to, which she had, once, to get a bag of chips that had gotten stuck on the third floor of a bodega in Harlem. She said, "If this is a game, Tommy, it's the kind of game where you lose."

Ray looked at them—the four of them, standing on a dirty subway platform in the dark, trying to build a government out of chalk and ambition—and he felt something that was not quite responsibility and not quite terror, but something that lived in the space between them, the way the express train lived in the space between the tracks.

"We need food first," Ray said. "Constitutions can wait."

They spent the next week raiding supermarkets. Not looting—Raiding. The word felt better, like an act of war rather than theft, even though there was nobody left to declare war on. Ray led a crew from Brooklyn to Crown Heights and emptied three bodegas and a Whole Foods and a liquor store that sold champagne for forty bucks a bottle. Dan organized the distribution with military precision, keeping spreadsheets on the back of a whiteboard he had salvaged from a closed school. Sasha recruited kids from Harlem who could actually cook—real food, not just microwave meals and candy bars—and they set up a kitchen in a community center on 125th Street.

The candy parties started in the second week. Catherine Stone arrived from the Upper East Side on a city bus that she had driven herself, which was impressive because she had never driven anything bigger than a bicycle. She brought with her a trunk full of champagne bottles, a suitcase of designer clothes, and a trust fund that could buy the entire neighborhood if anyone had tried to put a price on it.

"Look at this," Catherine said, opening the trunk in front of Ray and Dan and Sasha, and the three of them stared at the champagne bottles like they were relics from a dead civilization. Which, Ray thought, they kind of were.

They threw the first party in Catherine's apartment on Madison Avenue. The jazz band came from downtown—three guys who played saxophone, piano, and drums and hadn't played in public since Catherine's father hired them as a private ensemble for her twelfth birthday. The champagne flowed. The kids danced in ways that were both choreographed and completely improvised, and Ray stood in the corner watching it all happen with an expression he had practiced in the mirror at home: the expression of someone who is present but not participating, who is observing rather than participating, who is thirteen years old and has decided that the best way to survive the end of the world is to pretend you are not part of it.

III.

The neon war began on a Tuesday, which was significant because Tuesday was supposed to be a day for doing homework and nobody had any homework anymore.

It started over a block on Fulton Street—a single block, between Atlantic and Flatbush, three hundred feet of cracked sidewalk and a bodega that still had working electricity because the guy who owned it had been sixty-two years old and therefore immune to whatever had killed the adults. Four kids from Brooklyn wanted the bodega. Four kids from Manhattan wanted it too. Catherine's money had bought them influence, and Dan had drawn up a legal claim, and Ray had recruited the muscle.

They met on the block at noon. Brooklyn on one side, Manhattan on the other, separated by a line of painted traffic cones that Dan had placed there as a demarcation. Each side had built a barricade out of abandoned cars and tire stacks and neon signs that had been ripped from the tops of buildings. The Brooklyn side had a sign that read BUNKER. The Manhattan side had a sign that read PARADISE.

"This is ridiculous," Dan said, standing between the two barricades, holding his piece of chalk like a diplomat's gavel. "This is literally the stupidest thing I have ever seen."

"It's not stupid," Ray said. He was on Brooklyn's side, but he felt like he was standing outside himself, watching the boy he was become. "They want the bodega. We want the bodega. This is how we solve it."

"How?" Sasha asked from Brooklyn's flank. She was holding a baseball bat that looked too big for her but which she swung like a extension of her own arm.

"Fireworks," Ray said.

They spent the afternoon rigging fireworks—fireworks that Catherine had pilfered from a sporting goods store in Manhattan, firework stockpiles that must have been accumulated over decades of fourth-of-July celebrations. At dusk, they lit them.

The sky over Fulton Street became a watercolor painting of red and gold and blue. The fireworks reflected off the wet pavement, off the windows of the bodega, off the faces of the children who were watching from both sides of the barricade. For a moment—just a moment, maybe ten seconds, maybe less—everybody stopped breathing. The fireworks were so beautiful that even Ray, who had spent his entire life in Brooklyn and had never once stopped to look at a sunset that wasn't filtered through the gap between two apartment buildings, felt something crack open inside his chest.

When the last firework faded and the smoke cleared and the block was quiet again, nobody had said a word to anybody from the other side. But nobody had thrown a stone either.

IV.

After the neon war, Ray stood on the Brooklyn Bridge and looked at the water below. The harbor was full of abandoned boats, their engines still running, their hulls listing at angles that suggested they had tried to leave and never made it. The city was a skeleton of itself—beautiful in the way that ruins are beautiful, in the way that a photograph of a place you used to know is beautiful when you are standing in it for the last time.

He thought about the bodega. He thought about the fireworks. He thought about Catherine's champagne and Dan's whiteboard and Sasha's cooking and the way the fireworks had looked reflected in the wet street, like the sky had fallen into the earth and was burning there in the puddles.

Somewhere downtown, the candy parties were starting again. He could hear the music faintly, carried on the wind like a promise or a threat. The jazz band was playing, and the kids were dancing, and the champagne was flowing, and nobody was thinking about what came next because nobody was thirteen years old and willing to think about anything that wasn't right in front of them.

Ray stood on the bridge for a long time, watching the dark water, wondering if the candy would ever run out. Wondering if, when it did, they would finally have to grow up.

He did not have an answer. He was thirteen years old, and the world was ending, and the music was still playing, and for now that was enough.