Sound lagged the sight by a heartbeat. A dry rip, not thunder, tore across the lot as if someone were peeling tape off the underside of the sky. Phones came up, arms went stiff. The bus door hissed and stalled halfway shut, like it couldn't decide which way the world was about to go.
The diagonal seam brightened along its edges. A second cut budded off the first and ran a shallow angle, composing a skinny triangle that wasn't quite open and wasn't quite closed. Light leaked from inside it the wrong way—flat and too clean, as if the sun had been sanded down.
Hawke's hand slid off the bus rail. The tape on his knuckles whispered. A bead rolled under his skin—his bead, not the sky's—and stopped in a new notch. He didn't breathe bigger; he breathed narrower, like boxing in a crowded kitchen.
"Heat lightning," someone said again, braver the second time. "It happens."
"Lightning makes clouds," Peter said, voice small with trying to sound like class. "This is making… a door."
Flash finally looked up because the air had stolen his audience. His mouth opened into a perfect O. He reached for a quip and found only breath.
A hair-thin filament zipped the length of the seam and then back again, faster, like a test. With the second pass, wind changed direction. The smell came with it—metal that had been hot a long time, old wiring, something like the memory of rain.
"On or off, kids," the driver called, authority leaking around the edges. "We're not a parade float."
No one moved. The bus let out a long, annoyed exhale anyway, a machine's way of muttering. Hawke stepped backward onto the curb without deciding to, clearing the door. Peter mirrored him like a synchronized accident. Flash's satellites rediscovered gravity and shuffled their shoes.
The triangle of not-sky shivered. Then it peeled—no hinge, no logic—like two pieces of glass separating underwater. Beyond it was not more cloud. It was a color the evening hadn't ordered. A shape crossed that color. Sleek, convex, insect-precise, it slid along the gap and paused half-exposed, as if sniffing the air for a reason to finish being here.
No one said "UFO" because that would have made it smaller.
Hawke planted his feet the way you do when an elevator you're in might misbehave. Knees soft. Hips under. Shoulders unstacked from his ears. The world shrank to edges and timing. He didn't think that on purpose; the body did it for him, same as it had in the gym when the chain's note changed and the bag told the truth.
Flash found his voice by stepping on top of it. "Okay," he said, loud, "so that's… that's a thing."
The craft tilted, detail resolving as it committed to the local physics. It wasn't big as buildings go—bus-length and a half, maybe—but angles along its belly flexed like ribs, and the air scuffed around it like a hand over corduroy. It carried its own glow, a tired green that got angry at the edges.
Something smaller slipped free of it, a silver seed spitting sparks, and wobbled toward the city proper. Then another. Then three, in a tight triangle. They were not graceful. Grace was for shows. These were tools being shaken out of a box.
Sirens braided the distance. A dog somewhere lost its mind. A gull shut up mid-yell and left, a white smudge peeling away from the light pole like a sticker.
"On," the driver said now, not a request. He slapped the lever and the door shuddered open the rest of the way. "On, on, on."
People obeyed because a sentence with one word sometimes works when paragraphs don't. Flash's crew stampeded first, all posture abandoned. Flash performed helping a seventh-grader with his backpack by touching a strap and then sprinting past him into the aisle. Peter reached for the same kid and actually took the weight, angling him up the steps with a shoulder. Hawke lifted a dropped binder with his left hand and put it back into fingers that shook and didn't know it.
Another seed-thing slipped the seam and keened, a noise like a dentist drill filtered through a window. It pointed its nose downward. The bigger craft above adjusted as if in approval, like a parent guiding a toddler across a street.
The first seed clipped the corner of a high-rise three blocks away and bloomed an angry flower of glass. Shards went bright in the last of the daylight and then the light let them go and they became junk.
The bus door huffed. A boy stumbled; Hawke's palm found the back of his hoodie and guided him. The driver hauled the handle to close, thought better of it, and left the door open for stragglers. His eyes were on the mirror, on the seam, on the kids, on everything. The line of his jaw looked like it had been carved yesterday and not sanded yet.
A soft thump rolled through the lot—the kind you feel more than hear, like a bass line in another room. The big craft had drifted forward a meter, or a kilometer, or a measurement the eye didn't have. It oriented slowly, a hunter smelling a new field.
Hawke leaned toward Peter without taking his eyes off the sky. "Top deck?"
Peter blinked. "Of the bus?"
"Roof." Hawke flicked his chin at the three-story school building like the word might climb there on its own and make something useful.
"Rooftop's locked," Peter said, reflex of a rule-following brain. "Also—uh—why?"
"Angle. Eyes. If the door gets bigger."
"'Door,'" Peter repeated, tasting the choice. "Okay."
Another pulse, closer. The seam widened as if catching a breath it hadn't known it needed. Beyond, more of that wrong color moved. Three more seeds bled through, jittered, corrected, dove.
Flash's voice rose again, fighting the sky for the right to set the scene. "Everybody inside! I mean—get down! I mean—"
A seed split the air above the bus and jinked like a fly discovering glass. Its wake slapped dust into spirals. It spat a thin line of light at nothing, a test sneeze, and the smear on the asphalt went to charcoal, smoking. Gasps went sharp and then vanished like they'd been stolen by a vacuum.
The bus's mirror exploded without dramatics—no slow motion, just absence where a rectangle had been. The driver flinched, then forced his shoulders down with visible stubbornness. "Sit," he said to nobody and everybody. "Belts. Heads below window line."
"Do buses have belts?" Peter asked the air.
"Not ones we can afford," Hawke said.
Something fell out of the seam that wasn't a seed—junk, a shard, some shedding the big thing had sloughed off to fit better. It tumbled end over end, shedding sparks that went out before they could decide what they were going to be. It would miss the lot. It would hit two streets over and make a sound that would be a story tomorrow.
The second seed came in lower and wider, drawing a curve that would pass over the bus and turn the bus into a problem to solve if it felt like solving it. Hawke stepped to the front of the door, interposing himself between its mouth and the lot because standing three inches to the side would have been worse, would have felt like pretending he wasn't part of an equation he was very much inside of.
The bead in him slid again—one notch, not more. He felt his shoulders line up on the rails of a track he couldn't see. He didn't like that it felt good.
"Get in," the driver said to Hawke. Not angry. Practical.
"In a second," Hawke said.
Flash had made it two steps up the aisle and discovered something he didn't have a name for pinning his calf muscles in place: responsibility. He looked back at the lot and the wordless math of counting heads. When he met Hawke's eyes, everything smug drained out as if through a hole. There was a person left. He didn't enjoy being that person. He was, anyway.
"I'll—uh—save seats," Flash said, which was nothing and everything a seventeen-year-old could figure out to do in a universe that had decided to unzip.
Peter hovered on the threshold, half inside, half out. "Hawke—"
"Go," Hawke said.
Peter obeyed because sometimes a single word does more than logic. He vanished into the aisle, slight and elastic, herding smaller bodies toward empty vinyl like a sheepdog with algebra homework due.
The second seed's nose dipped. Its glow thickened—a jelly of light he could almost taste in his molars. It tilted another degree and the light licked the edge of the bus like a cat. Paint boiled. The driver cursed, quiet and sincere.
Hawke moved because something in him refused to stand fully still under a beam that acted like it wanted to remember his shape. He dropped off the curb and two steps into the lot, right hand up not like a block but like a man feeling rain. Heat glazed his skin. The tape smoked the tiniest white. He didn't flinch. He catalogued.
"Get down!" someone yelled—Flash? Peter? The driver?—too late for the instruction to land.
The seed skated past, annoyed it had failed to accomplish a thing it hadn't yet defined, and cut a tight arc above the rooftops. Its wake cracked the air again. The bus rocked. Inside, a younger kid cried, then did that hiccuping inhale that threatens more.
A smaller sound came—sick-bird wrong, metallic and hurt. From the seam dumped something that had lost a fight before it arrived: a fishtailing scrap, half a seed maybe, sparking with a ferocity that said dislike rather than power. It tore its own spin apart and picked a line for the lot entirely by accident.
"Move," Hawke said to nobody in particular, and then he hunted the line with his eyes, ran the math of velocity the way a body does when a bag swings too close to the nose, and chose a point on the asphalt where the math would become object.
He beat the object there by half a second.
The scrap hit at a stupid angle and skipped like a stone, shedding a spray of needles that wanted to be shrapnel when they grew up. Hawke squared to it, turned his ribs, and took the first needle on the outside of his forearm instead of center chest. It bit. The sting had a taste, copper plus battery. He stepped through, caught the second spin-bounce with a kick that was less martial art than refusal, and sent the thing yawing into the side of a Volkswagen that didn't deserve any of this. The car alarm woke up shrieking and made the night smaller.
People yelled new things. The driver swore in a different language and found neutral, then drive, then neutral again because the aisle was a river and he couldn't flood it without drowning someone.
The big craft made another of those distance-adjustments that translated down here as pressure. The seam puckered and opened wider as if satisfied with its decision. Three new seeds zipped out in formation and fanned—one north, one east, one low.
Peter's voice: "Heads down!" Flash's voice: "Seat backs up! I mean—down! I mean—just—" There was the sound of kids discovering the floor and choosing it.
Hawke shook his arm once, flicking off a glow-worm of something that had tried to burn through the tape and given up. He assessed the burning place: small, ugly, not important. He didn't bother cataloguing pain. He had catalogued it before; it never surprised him anymore.
The low seed banked toward them, interest acquired. Its belly irised open—a daisy of hard metal overlapping with a soft thrum behind it—revealing a barrel that was less a tube than a throat. Light gathered there, not white, not blue, a color between, thick as syrup.
Hawke stepped forward because backward had no math in it he liked. He put his weight on the balls of his feet, he felt the crackle of grit under his shoe, he let his elbows live close to his ribs where they belonged, and he watched the barrel build.
"Inside!" the driver said, as if commands could be bullets if you said them from the diaphragm.
Hawke didn't go inside. He did the only thing that had ever made sense: he put his hands where they could work if work became necessary.
The glow deepened. The barrel's throat flexed.
Beside him, Peter's fingers found the door edge like a thought trying to help. He didn't tug; he knew better than to tug. He just anchored himself to the same reality as Hawke and waited to be part of the same outcome.
Flash, halfway down the aisle, forgot he was Flash and yelled, raw, "Down!" The word had no swagger. It carried weight anyway. Kids folded behind seats as if they'd practiced for this in a drill they never would have taken seriously yesterday.
Hawke's breath cut itself into one, two, four pieces, perfectly square. The bead in him moved again—not celebratory, not reward, just position. He recognized the sensation the way you recognize a street you've never been to but somehow still know the median of.
The seed's muzzle tightened to a point, and light agreed with the point, and the world around that point decided to wait.
The beam didn't fire yet.
It gathered, a heart pulling blood, a held note swelling.
Hawke leaned in, the way you lean into a punch that's coming because adding your own timing to an inevitability sometimes changes the math.
The barrel shivered.
The light thickened.
And then the whole sky—seam, craft, seed—took a breath that wasn't the city's, and the barrel's heart began to beat.