At 14:07, the sky stuttered.
Not thunder. Not lightning.
A horizontal line carved itself across the blue — thin, luminous, unnervingly straight. It stretched from one end of Halcyon Grid to the other, hovering above the towers like a scar that hadn't decided whether to heal.
Most people didn't look up.
They were busy. Late. Distracted. Streaming. Working.
But three people stopped breathing at the exact same second.
1
Arin Vale – Rooftop Level 38
Arin was midair when it happened.
He'd leapt from a water tower to the adjacent solar deck — an illegal shortcut that shaved three minutes off his delivery time. His boots hit metal with a hollow clang, momentum rolling him into a crouch.
That's when the light shifted.
He looked up automatically. Rooftop couriers learned to read the sky — storms meant drone congestion, congestion meant patrols.
The crack glowed.
It wasn't jagged like lightning. It was too clean. Too deliberate. A ruler-straight incision across the atmosphere.
"What the hell…" he muttered.
A drone buzzed past his head, nearly clipping his ear. Its navigation system didn't react. The traffic lanes above the city remained perfectly ordered.
He narrowed his eyes.
The crack flickered.
For half a second, the blue behind it fragmented into tiny squares — like low-resolution pixels struggling to load.
Arin's stomach dropped.
The sky wasn't tearing.
It was buffering.
He blinked hard.
The pixelation vanished.
The crack remained.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out his cracked-screen handheld. No alerts. No emergency broadcast. No trending tags.
He angled the camera upward.
The screen showed clear sky.
No fracture.
Arin lowered the device slowly.
The crack was still there.
Visible to him.
Invisible to the network.
His pulse kicked up.
He had a delivery to finish.
Instead, he kept staring.
2
Doctor Selene Ibara – Observatory Level 92
Selene believed in patterns.
If something existed, it followed rules. Gravity curved. Light refracted. Matter decayed predictably.
For the past eight months, her equations had been misbehaving.
Tiny deviations in stellar positioning. Micro-delays in light arrival from distant pulsars. Nothing catastrophic. Just… wrong.
At 14:07, every screen in the observatory went white.
Her assistant gasped. "System crash?"
Selene didn't answer.
A single line of text appeared across all displays simultaneously:
SIGNAL INTEGRITY: 92%
SOURCE ORIGIN: UNRESOLVED
Her heart began to pound.
Integrity of what?
Before she could access the backend logs, the windows dimmed automatically — glare compensation triggered by a sudden atmospheric spike.
The crack was visible even at this altitude.
Straight. Glowing. Stable.
Her assistant whispered, "Is that a reflection?"
Selene stepped closer to the glass.
"No."
She pulled up satellite imaging.
Every feed showed normal sky.
But the gravitational sensors — the most precise instruments in the building — began recording noise. Sharp, symmetrical interference pulses.
Not random.
Periodic.
Like a heartbeat.
Selene's breath slowed.
This wasn't weather.
It wasn't a solar flare.
It wasn't a malfunction.
Something had just interacted with the fabric of measurable space.
And it hadn't finished.
3
Kael Reth – Sector D Underground
Kael drove his opponent into the cage hard enough to rattle teeth.
The crowd roared. Neon lights flickered above the pit, painting sweat-slicked bodies in violent pink and electric blue.
He barely heard them.
Debt erased sound.
Survival narrowed vision.
He swung.
Connected.
The lights went out.
The crowd booed instantly.
Backup generators kicked in — but not fully. The overhead lamps flickered at half power.
Kael turned instinctively toward the ceiling.
The reinforced steel above the cage shimmered like heat distortion.
Then it became transparent.
Not broken.
Transparent.
For less than a second, Kael saw past the concrete and metal layers of the city.
Past the transit rails.
Past the drone lanes.
He saw a grid.
A vast, luminous framework stretching across the sky — intersecting lines of pale white light, geometric and impossibly precise.
Then it vanished.
The ceiling snapped back into solid steel.
The generators stabilized.
The crowd resumed shouting.
"Fight!" someone screamed.
His opponent lunged.
Kael blocked automatically, but his mind was elsewhere.
He'd seen something.
Not imagination.
Not concussion.
Structure.
And it hadn't felt distant.
It had felt close.
Like scaffolding around a building.
Or bars around a cage.
4
Convergence
Across Halcyon Grid, the crack remained visible for exactly three minutes and twelve seconds.
Then it dissolved like breath on glass.
Traffic resumed its rhythm.
Notifications stayed silent.
News channels continued their scheduled programming.
No official acknowledgment followed.
But something subtle shifted.
Arin noticed it first.
He finally forced himself to finish the delivery — a data chip exchange on Tower 41. The client scanned his ID, barely glancing at him.
"You see that?" Arin asked casually.
"See what?"
"The sky."
The client frowned. "Clear day."
Arin forced a laugh.
"Yeah. Guess so."
But as he turned to leave, every public display screen in the lobby flickered for half a second.
A white line flashed horizontally across each one.
Gone instantly.
He wasn't alone.
At the observatory, Selene reviewed the logs.
The interference pulses hadn't stopped.
They'd weakened.
But they were continuing — faint, rhythmic distortions, evenly spaced.
She overlaid the timing pattern on a city map.
The peaks aligned with infrastructure hubs.
Transit cores.
Power relays.
Data nexuses.
The pulses weren't cosmic.
They were local.
Her assistant swallowed. "You think someone's running an experiment?"
Selene didn't answer immediately.
Experiments had margins of error.
This felt integrated.
As if whatever had happened wasn't invading.
It was embedded.
In Sector D, Kael stepped out into the alley behind the fight pit.
He needed air.
The city smelled like oil and overheated wiring.
He leaned against brick and closed his eyes.
That grid in the sky replayed in his mind.
Precise.
Engineered.
Intentional.
A public screen across the street buzzed.
Static.
Then a flicker.
A thin white line flashed across it — identical to the crack he'd glimpsed overhead.
Kael stared.
The line remained for one extra second this time.
Long enough for him to notice something else.
Tiny symbols embedded along its length.
Not letters.
Not numbers.
Coordinates.
Then the screen snapped back to an advertisement.
Kael straightened slowly.
Somewhere above the city, something was calibrating.
5
The First Drop
At 18:22, the sky glitched again.
Not visibly this time.
Audibly.
A low-frequency hum rippled across Halcyon Grid — too deep for most people to consciously register. It vibrated in bones more than ears.
Arin felt it in his teeth.
Selene saw it in her graphs.
Kael felt it in his chest like a second heartbeat.
Streetlights flickered in synchronized patterns.
Traffic signals paused half a beat longer than normal.
Public transit slowed by 0.3 seconds across all lines.
Tiny inconsistencies.
System-wide.
Then, for the first time, the city's central network broadcast something unscheduled.
Every screen.
Every phone.
Every digital surface.
White background.
Black text.
No logo.
No signature.
Just one line.
STABILITY TEST: PHASE ONE COMPLETE
The message disappeared after two seconds.
People blinked.
Looked around.
"Did you see that?" someone asked on a crowded tram.
"See what?" another replied.
Memory lag.
The message hadn't stuck.
Except for a few.
Arin's hands trembled slightly.
Selene stared at her darkened monitors.
Kael stepped into the street and looked up.
The sky was perfectly blue.
But for a fraction of a second—
Just at the edge of perception—
It looked like glass.
And something on the other side was looking back.
End of Chapter One