Summer break, day 11, 19:40
"And finally tonight, something the whole world has been waiting for."
The woman on the screen turned to face the camera. Behind her was a picture of a night sky full of stars.
"In just a few hours, people in almost every country will look up and see the same thing. Scientists are calling it a once in a million years event. Thousands of meteors, all at once, lighting up the sky from one end to the other."
The man next to her smiled. "And you don't need any special equipment for this one. No telescope, nothing. Just clear skies and somewhere to look up from."
"That's right. Cities all over the world are getting ready. Parks are staying open through the night. People are climbing up onto their rooftops. They're saying it'll be the brightest the sky has looked in a hundred years."
"So whatever you've got planned tonight, try to step outside for a few minutes. Look up. You may never see anything like it again."
The picture cut to a clip of tiny lights moving across a globe, soft music playing underneath. Then it faded into an ad for car insurance.
I turned the TV off and sat there staring at the black screen.
Look up. You may never see anything like it again.
Yeah. Sure.
I dropped my phone onto the bed next to me. I'd been holding it for about an hour without doing anything. Just scrolling. I couldn't even tell you one thing I'd looked at.
Most days I wake up around noon. I don't really decide to. I just open my eyes at some point and half the day is already gone, and I lie there until lying there gets boring, and then I pick up my phone, and then it's dark outside again. Wake up, scroll, sleep, repeat. That's the whole thing.
I know how that sounds. Believe me, I know.
Here's the part nobody warns you about. It doesn't happen all at once. It's slow.
You dig yourself a little hole to hide in. Just a small one. Just deep enough that the stuff out there can't reach you. And it works. It actually works. Down there it's quiet. It's warm, in a sad sort of way. Nobody can touch you and nobody can see you.
So you keep digging. Deeper, and then deeper than that, because down there always feels safer than up here.
And then one day you look up, and you can't see the top anymore.
You can't see the sky. You forget what the sun even felt like on your skin. And it turns out it's cold down there, way colder than you thought, and you're alone, and you start to wonder if you've forgotten how to climb.
That was me. Sitting at the bottom of a hole I dug with my own two hands, waiting for somebody to lower a rope.
Nobody ever did.
My phone screen lit up. 19:40.
I don't know why the time did something to me, but it did. Maybe it was the meteor thing. Maybe it was the lady on TV telling everyone to go outside, everyone except me.
I should go out.
Not because I wanted to. I never want to. But if I spent one more night locked in my room, my parents were going to start asking questions again, and I couldn't do that to them. So I got up, pulled on a hoodie and some jeans, grabbed my card off the desk, and went downstairs.
The living room was warm and bright. Some cooking show was on low. My mum was on the couch with her feet up, scrolling on her tablet. My dad was in his chair with a cup of tea that had probably gone cold an hour ago.
It looked like a happy home. From the outside, we were a happy home.
My dad looked up, and I could see him trying not to look too surprised. "Oh. You're heading out?"
"Yeah. The meteor thing. Everyone's watching it tonight."
My mum lowered her tablet and gave me a little smile. "Everyone, huh." She raised an eyebrow. "Is there a girl?"
"Mum."
"What? I'm only asking."
"There's no girl. I'm just going with Brad and a couple of the others."
The second his name left my mouth I wanted to grab it back. But it was already out, and my dad just nodded slowly.
"Brad." He set his coffee down. "Be careful with that one, alright? He's got a reputation, and not a good one. I don't love how much you've been hanging around him."
If only you knew, I thought.
"It's fine, Dad."
"And don't come home too late."
"I won't."
Outside, the evening was still warm. The sky couldn't make up its mind between orange and purple, and the streetlights hadn't come on yet.
I put my earphones in and turned the music up until I couldn't hear anything else. That's the trick. If the music is loud enough, the rest of the world kind of switches off, and it's just you and the song, and for three minutes nothing out there can reach you.
I went down into the subway.
The train was packed with people heading out to watch the meteors. A group of girls laughing at something on a phone. A couple sharing one set of earbuds. Two little kids in football shirts shoving each other while their dad pretended not to see.
Every single one of them had someone.
I stood by the door and watched the tunnel turn black in the window.
I used to be normal. Or close to it. I had people I sat with at lunch. I went places on the weekend. Then somewhere along the way I just stopped, and the longer I stayed down in that hole, the harder it got to climb back out, until even leaving the house turned into this huge thing. Like a mission. Like something everybody else does without even thinking, and I have to plan it like I'm breaking into a bank.
But I was doing it. I was actually out.
The train slowed down. My stop.
The little supermarket on the corner was still open. The bell over the door gave a tired ding when I walked in.
I went straight to the back, opened the fridge, and grabbed the same thing I always get. Dark red can, cherry vanilla. Don't judge me. It's the one thing in my life that has never once let me down.
I was at the till when I heard the door again.
"Yo, Aleks!"
I knew that voice. Tall, big smile, the guy everyone knows. Brad. He walked over and threw a hand onto my shoulder like we were best mates.
"Didn't think I'd see you out here, man. You good?"
And for one stupid second, something in me actually lifted. Like, oh. Okay. Maybe tonight isn't so bad after all.
Then he leaned in close to my ear and dropped his voice, so quiet that only I could hear it.
"Still hiding in your room all day, freak? Honestly thought you'd died in there."
He pulled back and gave me that big smile again, in case anyone was watching.
And there it was.
A girl was standing a few steps behind him. Carmen.
Dark hair, brown eyes. She used to be my best friend back in middle school, before all of this. She moved here from Spain when we were ten, and for about two years she was the only person I really talked to. We walked home together every day. She saved me a seat at lunch. There was a while where I thought that one day I'd actually tell her how I felt.
I never did. And now she was standing next to Brad.
"Brad, come on," she said quietly. "Leave him."
She wasn't really telling him off. She just sounded tired. And she didn't step away from him either.
For half a second her eyes met mine. She knew exactly who I was. I saw it.
Then she looked away. Not in a cruel way. Just the way you look away from something on the ground you don't want to step on.
The machine beeped. Paid.
"Have a good one," the guy at the till mumbled, not looking up from his phone.
I took my can and walked out. I didn't say anything to Brad. I never do. The words just never come.
Outside, the warm air hit my face and my hands were shaking. And the stupid part, the part that actually got to me, was that nothing had even happened. He didn't hit me. Nobody touched me. And I still felt like I'd been kicked in the chest.
Here's something I didn't tell my parents.
I don't have any friends.
Not one. There's no group of people waiting for me anywhere. Brad isn't my friend, he's the closest thing I've got to an enemy, and I just used his name at my own dinner table because it was the first one that popped into my head.
A few weeks ago I heard my parents talking in the kitchen, late, when they thought I was asleep. My mum was worried. She said I never go out anymore, that I hadn't been myself in a long time, that she didn't know what to do with me. My dad didn't really have an answer for her.
I heard the whole thing through the door.
So every now and then I tell them I'm going out with friends. I get dressed, I leave the house, and I go sit somewhere by myself until enough time has passed for it to look real. Then I come home.
It's easier than watching them worry.
I took the quiet way up. Past the hedges, past the old metal fence, up the hill to the bench.
My bench. Crooked, half buried in weeds, sitting under a flickering streetlight in a corner of the park nobody ever goes to. This is where I come when I tell my parents I'm out with friends. This is the whole lie. A bench.
I sat down. It creaked, like it always does.
I cracked open the can and took a sip. Cold and sweet. For about two seconds, it was the best thing in the world.
The first stars were starting to come out. I leaned back, looked up, and thought about my day. The room. The lie at the dinner table. Brad's mouth next to my ear. Carmen looking away.
Sixteen years old, and the biggest thing I'd done all summer was carry a can of soda to a bench by myself.
And something in me just snapped. It felt like a rubber band that's been pulled too tight for too long.
I stood up on the bench. There was nobody around, so I didn't care.
I yelled it as loud as I could.
"I just want to do something with my fucking life!"
My voice cracked right in the middle of it.
And then the wind picked up.
It came out of nowhere. One second the air was still, and the next it was pushing against me, hard, like a door had been thrown open somewhere.
Then the sky lit up.
A broad stripe of light appeared across the sky. The meteor. It glided slowly from one end of the horizon to the other, trailing a wake of colors that stretched and grew with every second. At the very front it was a bright gold, almost white. Then it bled into turquoise, then into pink, and at the tail a deep violet that reminded me of the evening sky I had walked through to get here. Within seconds, the trail took up almost the entire sky. .
It was beautiful. I'm not going to lie. I hadn't seen anything that beautiful in a long time. Maybe ever.
I just stood there with my head tipped back and my mouth open.
Then the light stopped spreading.
And it started to split.
Right down the middle. Slow, left to right, like something was pulling the sky apart. And what was behind it wasn't more sky. It was black. So black it swallowed the light around it and gave nothing back.
The hole opened until it stopped. A huge black oval, just hanging there, the edges still glowing with all those colors.
Everything went quiet. The wind died. Even the birds shut up.
Then a small light switched on, deep inside the black. A white dot. It grew. Got rounder. Until it sat right in the middle and looked down.
It was an eye.
The sky had an eye, and it was looking at me. The can slipped out of my hand and hit the ground.
Then it started to bleed.
Red drops appeared around the eye and came down, slow and heavy, leaving thin glowing trails behind them. They looked like blood. More and more of them, until the whole sky was crying red.
One of them landed right in front of me.
It hit the path and glowed. Then it moved. It spread across the ground, pulled itself back together, turned darker and darker, until something stood up out of it.
I stumbled back and tripped over the bench.
The thing in front of me had a body now. A head. Its edges shook and flickered, like a broken screen. It turned toward me.
Then it screamed.
I can't describe the sound. It was too loud and too wrong and it went straight through my head.
Every part of me said the same thing at once. Run.
So I ran.
I'm not fast. Never have been. But my legs took over and I ran like I never had before. Down the hill, past the fence, out onto the street.
And the street was hell.
The screaming wasn't just behind me. It was everywhere. Every direction, every building, the sky itself. A car alarm was stuck on one long note. Somewhere glass kept breaking, over and over.
A man ran past me with blood all over his hands. He didn't even look at me.
I didn't stop. I didn't want to know.
Then I made a mistake.
I turned into the alley behind the gym, because it was dark and I wanted to hide. Halfway in, I remembered. There's no way out the back. Just a wall. I'd known that my whole life, and I forgot it in the one moment it actually mattered.
I turned around.
It was already there, standing at the mouth of the alley. It didn't run. It walked. Slow. One step, then the next, like it had all the time in the world and knew that I didn't.
I put my back against the wall and held my hands up, like that was going to do anything.
"Please," I said. "Please don't."
It came at me.
And then everything went white.
I didn't see what happened. I felt a wave of heat and heard a sound like a whip cracking, and when I could see again, the thing was gone.
Someone was standing between me and the street.
It was tall. It had something like wings behind its back. I couldn't look straight at it, the light was too bright. It didn't help me up, and it didn't come any closer. It just looked down at me, and when it spoke, its voice was calm.
"Hold on a little longer, Aleksander."
Then it disappeared.
My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. And the only thing I could think, over and over, was that it had known my name.
I don't know how long I sat there. Eventually I got up. Everything hurt.
I walked, because I didn't know what else to do.
The city I grew up in was gone.Buildings torn open, smoke everywhere, something in the air that burned the back of my throat. A phone was ringing somewhere and nobody answered it.
I just kept walking. One foot in front of the other. I wasn't really thinking anymore. I was just a body moving forward.
Then the ground lit up under my feet.
A circle. Strange symbols switching on one by one around the edge.
I didn't even get a word out.
The ground disappeared.
And I fell.
I couldn't feel my body. My thoughts came apart in my head, and I reached out for something, anything, and there was nothing to hold.
So this is it, I thought. Sixteen years of nothing, and then this.
But if I was dying, shouldn't it be darker? Shouldn't I be seeing something? My parents. Their faces. Anything.
I saw nothing.
Then I hit the ground.
Stone slammed into my back. Cold air rushed into my lungs and I rolled onto my side and coughed until my ribs hurt.
I opened my eyes.
The sky was blue.
It wasn't torn open or bleeding. It was just blue. Bright and clear and endless, like a photo of somewhere you'll never get to go.
I blinked. It stayed blue.
I pushed myself up. My arms were shaking. My shirt was soaked through with sweat and dust and stuff I didn't want to think about.
I wasn't home anymore.
And I wasn't alone.
Voices. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.
They came from every direction at once. Crying, screaming, praying, talking in languages I didn't understand.
I turned my head, and there they were.
A huge crowd, packed together across a wide open field. Grass so green it looked fake. People in business suits standing next to people in hospital gowns. Teenagers with school bags. Little kids holding onto strangers. Old people sitting on the ground, staring at nothing.
Everyone looked lost. They all looked exactly how I felt.
I searched for something I knew. A building. A road. A sign. Anything.
Nothing. Just the field, some trees far off in the distance, and that too-clean, too-bright sky. Everything looked different. I can't really describe with what I mean different. Just different from Earth. Everything, even the sunlight was wrong. It came from the wrong angle and threw the shadows the wrong way.
My chest went tight.
"This isn't Earth."
I looked at the crowd again, and this time I really looked.
Not all of them were human.
There was a group standing off to one side, a little apart from everyone else. Same height as the rest of us, regular size, but their ears were long and pointed at the top, and their clothes were old and kind of fancy, nothing you'd ever catch someone actually wearing.
I stared way longer than I meant to.
No way.
I've played enough games and watched enough anime to know exactly what I was looking at. I just never thought I'd see one standing a few meters in front of me, blinking and breathing like a real person.
Elves.
Then I noticed the short ones. Built like brick walls, arms thicker than my legs, beards halfway down their chests. Not short humans. Something else entirely.
Dwarves.
My legs gave out and I sat back down on the ground.
"Okay," I said. My voice came out shaky. "Am I dreaming? Did I actually lose it?"
Nobody answered.
The ground beneath us pulsed.
And then a voice came from the sky. Not from speakers. Not from a person. From everywhere, all at once, as if the air itself was speaking. It pressed against my chest and hummed inside my skull and I knew with absolute certainty that every single person on this field could hear it.
"You have been spared."
Silence. Total, immediate silence. Thousands of people stopped breathing at the same time.
"The creatures which destroyed your worlds will also come for this one."
My stomach twisted into a knot.
"You have six months."
Someone in the crowd shouted. "Six months for what?!"
The voice did not acknowledge him. It did not pause. It did not care.
"Unite. Learn. Survive."
A beat of silence.
"Or perish, like your world did."