The lights died.
Not a flicker. Not a warning. One moment the hall buzzed faintly with electricity—the hum of refrigerators, the soft drone of streetlamps, the faint whine of a helicopter circling overhead. Next, everything was gone.
The orphanage sank into a darkness so absolute it felt like the walls had closed in.
At first, there was only silence.
Then came the human noises, rushing to fill the void.
A child's startled cry from the floor below. The panicked scrape of chairs against linoleum. Three doors slammed shut in quick succession as if wood and metal locks could protect against the unknown.
"…Everyone stay calm," one of the staffers said, her phone flashlight shaking as she raised it. "It's just the grid. Happens all the time." She almost convinced herself—almost. The sentence cracked halfway through.
Around him, the younger kids clung to their blankets. Their phone screens lit the dorm room in pale squares of blue, faces carved out of shadow, eyes wide and darting.
Kieran didn't move.
His eyes adjusted faster than the rest. He could still make out the crooked roofline outside his window, the silhouette of a telephone pole, and—just barely—the last neon sign flickering across the street before it sputtered and died for good.
The city was dark. Not quiet, but dark.
Something was different about this blackout.
He pressed his palm flat against the cold windowpane.
Beyond the rooftops, the night wasn't empty—it was red. Fires glowed in the distance, miles away, staining the low clouds like a bruise. Smoke hung in the air, carried on a wind too faint to hear but strong enough to taste.
And beneath it all…
The hum.
It wasn't noise, not really. It was a vibration. A pulse that bled up from the ground, through the soles of his feet, curling in his ribs. Subtle enough that if someone didn't want to feel it, they wouldn't. But he felt it. He always did.
His hand tightened around the silver cross at his neck until the edges cut into his skin.
Seven days.
Seven days until his eighteenth birthday.
Seven days until the quiet thing inside him stopped pretending to be human.
He told himself it was superstition, nerves, paranoia from watching too many news reports. But no matter how hard he tried to believe that, the rhythm in his chest wouldn't slow.
Behind him, one of the boys whimpered. A younger kid, barely nine.
Kieran glanced over his shoulder. Normally, he would've said something short to steady him, maybe tossed a sarcastic remark to cut the tension. Tonight, the words stuck. His gaze locked back on the horizon instead.
That was when the sky split.
A white beam tore upward in the distance, spearing through the cloud cover like a spear. For a single breath, the city was outlined in stark, blinding light. Towers. Smoke. Hundreds of rooftops etched against a sky that wasn't theirs anymore.
Then it shattered.
The flare collapsed inward, extinguished in an instant.
Kieran's breath caught.
Not fireworks. Not a generator exploding. Something else.
Something worse.
His mind supplied the missing pieces with what he'd seen earlier on the orphanage television:
—monsters tearing through concrete like paper.
—soldiers firing until their rifles clicked dry.
—streets drowned in blood.
He blinked hard, but the afterimage of the light stayed burned in his vision.
———
The feed shook violently as a cameraman sprinted down an alley. Boots slapped wet pavement, the lens catching frantic flashes of broken glass and abandoned cars.
Behind him, something massive scraped against the walls. Claws gouged deep lines through brick. Sparks rained down.
A soldier screamed—cut short in a sound no human throat should make.
The camera tilted sideways. For a fraction of a second, the lens caught it: pale flesh stretched too tight across a body that didn't follow the rules of anatomy. Too many joints. A mouth splitting open where no mouth belonged.
Static.
———-
"Lakeview has gone dark," a man reported, his uniform crisp but his voice trembling. "The grid's not responding. No signals in or out."
The President leaned forward, elbows heavy on the desk. His eyes were shadowed, jaw clenched.
"Keep evacuations moving. Hold the domes at all costs. If we lose another city tonight—"
The feed cut.
———-
Back in the orphanage, the hum inside Kieran's bones sharpened.
It climbed his spine, digging into his skull, until it was no longer background—it was rhythm.
A second heartbeat.
His breath fogged the window, and he didn't wipe it away.
For the first time since he could remember, he wasn't detached. He wasn't bored. The endless routine of classes, whispers, and days spent waiting to leave this place—it all cracked like cheap glass under a hammer.
The world outside was breaking. And the silence inside him was breaking with it.
Somewhere out there—beyond the fire-stained sky—something was moving closer. He could feel it like a shadow pressed against the edge of his awareness.
It wasn't looking for the city.
It was looking for him.
Seven days. Maybe less.
Kieran's grip tightened on the cross until his knuckles whitened.
The hum in his chest deepened, steady and unrelenting.
The storm hadn't even started yet.