The sirens stopped at dawn.
All across Lakeview, they wailed over the skyline like a warning the city couldn't ignore. Streets that usually overflowed with traffic were now carved into lanes by concrete barriers and steel mesh. Soldiers in heavy armor waved cars back with hard palms, voices amplified by bullhorns that turned words into barked commands. Helicopters chopped the gray morning into pieces, their rotors thudding a heartbeat over the rooftops. Even the pigeons were gone.
Lakeview wasn't home anymore. It was a war zone waiting to happen.
Inside the orphanage, fear pressed as heavily as the boarded windows. Kids huddled together in corners with their backpacks on like armor. The staff whispered near the kitchen door, voices too low to hear, too tight to hide. Panic had a way of slipping through cracks.
Kieran sat near the common-room window, hood shadowing his crimson hair, cross pendant turning between his fingers. He watched the street below the way other people watched television. The city didn't sound right. No music from the deli, no snippets of argument or laughter drifting up the block. Just engines, boots, and orders. The air felt like the world was holding its breath.
Every phone buzzed at once.
EMERGENCY ALERT
SHELTER IN PLACE. CURFEW AT DUSK. DO NOT APPROACH BARRICADES. OBEY ALL MILITARY ORDERS.
A younger kid near Kieran held his screen up like it might protect him. The alert pulsed red. It looked like a wound.
The television flickered with static, then stabilized. A news anchor appeared: sleek hair, clean suit, eyes too wide. She tried to sound steady and almost managed.
"This is an emergency update. The government has declared Lakeview under lockdown. Citizens are advised to remain indoors. Do not approach barricades. Do not attempt to cross the river."
Her voice faltered as the screen cut to a live feed. Rows of soldiers braced behind sandbags and concrete, rifles trained on the smoke beyond the bridge. Trucks dumped more barriers into place. Medics stood ready behind an armored vehicle, gloves snapped high over their wrists.
The camera shook. A low, unearthly rumble rolled through the feed, the kind you felt in your ribs before your ears understood it. Soldiers lifted their weapons as one. Somewhere off-screen, someone whispered, "What the hell is that?"
Gunfire cracked. The anchor flinched even though she wasn't there. The microphone picked up a single shout—"Hold the line!"—before the image tore into gray and vanished.
The room froze. Then the youngest kids started crying.
"Turn it off," a staffer said, already crossing the room with a remote. She didn't turn it off.
Kieran's jaw tightened. That wasn't a broadcast. That was the city's last good idea breaking against something bigger.
Phones lit again, not with official updates but with new live streams. Teenagers crowded shoulder to shoulder, faces washed pale by blue screens.
On one stream, a supermarket boiled with bodies. Shelves were stripped bare; two men tore at a single box of instant noodles as if it were gold. A security guard tried to push through and got dragged under, swallowed by the crowd's fear.
Another showed the highway out of Lakeview turned into a parking lot. Horns blared. Police waved people back as families crammed into minivans, shouting at each other through windshields. A woman sobbed into her phone camera, "They're not letting us out. Please, I have a—" The feed jolted, turned sideways, and cut.
A third stream was filmed from an apartment balcony near the river. The person filming zoomed in until the pixels bled. You couldn't see the thing in the smoke, not exactly. But you could see the soldiers recoil as if a wave had hit them. You could see the barricade shudder. You could hear the sound—like metal and thunder and something alive.
The comments scrolled too fast to read. One line blinked up and vanished: They're here.
Kieran let the noise of the room peel away. His fingers tightened on the cross until the edges cut his palm. He wasn't fearless. He was awake. The waiting would crack people before the monsters did. The city wasn't ready—not the soldiers, not the families, not the people telling themselves they'd be fine if they stayed inside with the TV on.
He stood and drifted to the doorway as the staff tried to soothe the room with soft voices that didn't match their eyes. In the hall, he leaned against cool plaster and listened to Lakeview's new rhythm: choppers, sirens, shouted orders, and the pauses between them, where breath had to happen or didn't.
The television's volume spiked again, dragging him back.
"…we repeat, this is Lakeview News with continuous coverage. We have a live map of the quarantine zone. Districts one through five are now under martial law. If you—"
The map flashed red across whole chunks of the riverfront. It looked like skin spreading a rash.
The feed jumped to a reporter in a Kevlar vest by a barricade, wind pushing hair across her mouth. "We're told the National Guard is—" Gunfire cracked off-camera, closer this time; she flinched, glanced at her cameraman, then tried to keep smiling as if a smile could hold the world together. "—continuing to reinforce—"
"Cut it—" someone shouted. The screen collapsed into the daytime logo. The anchor's voice returned, trembling, as if she'd borrowed it from someone bolder a minute ago and it had to be returned.
"Stay indoors. Stay with us."
No one moved to turn off the TV. Watching felt like a duty, the way staring at a crash does when you can't help it.
Beyond the river, men waited at the barricade.
A private cupped a lighter against the wind, cigarette flaring bright in the dim. The glow etched a jawline that wasn't done growing. He took a drag that tried and failed to calm his hands. Next to him, another soldier slid his phone into his helmet with a text on the lock screen you could read if you paused just right: Be good for your mom. I love you.
"Reinforcements are en route," their commander said, voice cut from steel. "We hold this line. Whatever crosses, we stop it here."
The ground answered with a sound like the bridge itself breathing. Something moved in the smoke—so big you saw it in the air first, the way heat bends the view over asphalt.
Someone laughed, a single sharp sound that didn't know where else to go. Then the laughter turned into prayer.
Inside the orphanage, the staff taped cardboard over a broken pane. Kids took turns at the sink, splashing water on their faces for no reason except that it felt like doing something. A lanky boy tried to make jokes that fell flat as paper. Another sat very still and fed crackers to a trembling dog someone had smuggled in.
Kieran kept moving. He wasn't a leader and he wasn't trying to be one. He was a pair of steady hands in a room full of shaking ones. He passed a stack of cups to a staffer without being asked. He picked up a phone someone dropped and handed it back. He stood where the younger kids could see him and pretended his calm was catching.
Afternoon sank toward evening. The sirens outside changed pitch, farther away now, then closer, from different directions like the city was being circled.
A new clip rolled on TV: a hospital loading bay crowded with stretchers. Nurses barked orders, faces drawn tight behind masks. A doctor leaned into the camera for a second and said, "We need O negative. If you are O negative—" Someone pulled him away and the shot tilted to the ceiling, then cut.
The anchor came back with a voice that had been crying and was done. "If you are in District Six or Seven, do not—"
The screen stuttered. For a full second, it held on a single frame: a line of soldiers in silhouette, every rifle raised at a thing that wasn't in the shot yet. Then it snapped to the logo again.
Kieran stepped to the window. The day had dimmed without clouds. Smoke turned the sun into a coin. Streetlights blinked on early when they shouldn't have.
Curfew rolled through Lakeview on loudspeakers. "Return to your homes. Curfew is in effect. This is for your safety."The voice was neutral and wrong in the same breath.
On the street below, a woman dropped a bag and knelt to gather oranges scattering across the asphalt, hands moving too fast as if speed could turn back time. A man argued with a soldier until his gestures slowed and his shoulders sagged. The soldier's rifle never moved. Somewhere nearby, a generator coughed to life, hummed hope for a moment, and died.
Night fell like a lid.
The orphanage lights flickered. Stabilized. Flickered harder. The refrigerator hummed. Stopped. Hummed again. A transformer somewhere outside bloomed green against the sky. The kids made the noise people make when the roller coaster tips over the edge and there's nothing to do but drop.
The lights went out.
Not just in the orphanage. In the block. In the district. Lakeview's grid folded like a house of cards and the city fell into a darkness so complete it felt alive. Sirens choked mid-wail. The refrigerator's buzz vanished. Even the helicopters fell away, as if the sky had blinked.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing.
Then the human sounds rushed in to fill the space: a child's scream from a nearby building, three doors slamming in quick succession, a man yelling a name out into the dark like he could throw it far enough to find the person who wore it.
Phone screens lit the room in cold blue squares, faces carved out of the black. "Everyone stay calm," a staffer said, and believed it for half the sentence.
Kieran didn't move. His eyes adjusted faster than most. He could still make out the edge of the opposite roofline, the last neon sign across the street flickering twice before dying for good. He pressed his palm to the glass. The city beyond the rooftops glowed faintly—the red of fires a few miles off, staining the low clouds like a bruise.
The floor thrummed, so slight that if you didn't want to feel it, you wouldn't. He felt it anyway. It ran up through his bones, a pulse that wasn't the city's and wasn't his.
He wrapped his fingers around the cross until it bit. Seven days until his eighteenth. Seven days until whatever he was decided to stop hiding.
Lakeview was out of time.