Red — Giant

“Solace,” she said. “What’s that?”

The final transmission ended. The ceiling of the Archive groaned and split. Elara looked up one last time, through the widening gap, and saw Helios fill the entire sky. Its light was no longer red. It was white, then blue, then a brilliance beyond color.

“We always knew,” she whispered. “We just thought we’d have more time.” Red Giant

“Solace,” she said. “What will remember us?”

Solace, ever logical, complied. It had learned long ago that Elara’s heart knew things its algorithms could not. “Solace,” she said

A pause. Then: “That is the transit of Venus. Its orbit has decayed. It will impact Helios in approximately three months.”

On Earth’s last inhabitable continent, a woman named Elara watched the bloated sun rise. It filled half the horizon, its photosphere a churning sea of fire that occasionally spat tendrils of plasma into space. The heat was unbearable now, even at the poles. The oceans had boiled away centuries ago, leaving vast salt flats that glittered like fractured mirrors under the crimson light. Elara looked up one last time, through the

Three months. Less than the time she had thought.

In the final years of Helios, the sky turned the color of rust. The star that had nurtured humanity for four billion years was dying, swollen into a red giant whose surface lapped at the orbit of a long-vanished Mercury.

She closed her eyes.