"Idiot," he said aloud, though there was no one to hear it.

He climbed back onto the saddle and pushed farther.

The second run felt wrong from the start. The machine answered, but with a roughness in the frame that traveled up through the seat and into his spine. The hum broke into pulses. Light tore sideways. Elias leaned over the controls, eyes narrowed against the rush, nursing the brake lever with his good hand and watching the interval marks spin into absurdity.

He stopped again.

There was almost nothing left.

The light was dimmer now, the red sun larger and stranger, blurred at the edge as if the air itself had grown too weak to hold clear lines. The sea was no longer a sea in any living sense he knew. It lay spread and still over a broad plain, dark and heavy, with only the smallest folds moving across its skin. No surf. No cry of anything. No insects. No wind in leaves, because there were no leaves.

Stone reached away in long, bare sweeps under a sky fading toward black. Far off, low ridges sat like old bones. The air bit with cold. It held almost no smell at all.

Elias stepped down and heard his own boot scrape travel out into the stillness until it seemed foolishly loud. He waited for some answer from the world. There was none.

This was not a ruined city. It was not even a graveyard. A graveyard needs mourners, memory, some hand left to mark a name. Here the planet simply endured the end of use.