The lounge TV flickered softly in the background, a low-budget reality show playing to a room that wasn't really watching. It was the kind of white noise that usually made Jessie feel at home, but tonight, the hum of the speakers felt like it was vibrating against his teeth.
Jessie leaned back into the worn fabric of the couch, one arm draped carefully along the side. He was focused on one task: looking normal. It was a simple goal, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to execute.
Across from him, Leo was mid-monologue. He was designing a new cooling system for a lab project, his hands cutting through the air as if he were assembling the hardware out of thin air.
"...and if I reroute the power through a secondary relay—"
"You'll overload it," Victor cut in, his voice flat. He didn't look up from his phone, his thumb rhythmically scrolling through a feed.
Leo paused, his hands frozen. "No, I won't."
"You always do," Victor replied calmly.
Jessie let out a quiet breath through his nose. It was the same script they performed every week. The bickering was a constant, a baseline. It was normal. And right now, normal was the only thing Jessie wanted to hold onto. He focused on the cadence of Leo's voice, letting the familiar sound fill the widening gaps in his own head.
Then, his stomach twisted.
It wasn't a cramp; it was a violent, internal wrench. Jessie's expression tightened for a fraction of a second before he forced his muscles back into a neutral mask. He leaned forward slightly, bracing his elbows on his knees to hide the fact that he was suddenly trembling.
"Yo, you good?" Leo asked, his technical rant dying mid-sentence.
"Yeah," Jessie said, the word coming out a little too fast. "Just... didn't eat much today."
It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't the truth, either.
Victor finally looked up. His eyes, dark and analytical, narrowed just a fraction. Jessie pointedly avoided the gaze, staring instead at a scuff on the coffee table. The pain passed as quickly as it had arrived, but it left behind a hollow, synthetic feeling—as if his body had just performed an update without his permission.
He hated that feeling.
Leo drifted back into his project talk, but Jessie wasn't hearing the words anymore. Something was happening. Not in the room, but inside. His fingers twitched against his knee—a rhythmic, mechanical tap. Jessie stilled them, forcing his hand flat.
A second later, his vision shifted.
It didn't go blurry. It did the opposite. Everything became sharper. Too sharp. He could see the microscopic crack in the drywall near the TV. He could see the individual pixels of the screen refresh. He watched Leo's fingers move, tracking every tiny motion, every minute tap of his knuckles.
Jessie blinked hard. It didn't go away.
"...Jessie?"
He snapped back. Leo was staring at him again.
"Yeah?" Jessie asked.
"You keep zoning out," Leo said, his brow furrowed with genuine concern. "You sure you're not dying or something?"
Jessie managed a small, tired smirk. "If I was, you'd be the last to know."
Leo grinned, the tension breaking for a moment. "That's messed up."
Victor didn't smile. "You should go to the campus clinic," he said, his voice dropping into a serious register.
Jessie groaned softly. "I'm not going to the clinic."
"You look worse than you did earlier," Victor countered.
"I said I'm fine."
A pause followed—not awkward, just heavy. Leo leaned back, raising his hands in a silent truce. "Alright, alright. No clinic."
Victor didn't push further, but Jessie could still feel it: that quiet, predatory attention. Victor was watching for a glitch. The couch suddenly felt wrong—the cushions were too soft, the fabric too uneven. Every sensation was magnified until it was unbearable.
"I'm gonna grab something to eat," Jessie said, standing up abruptly.
Leo nodded. "Bring me something if you love me."
"I don't," Jessie replied, already turning toward the door.
"That hurts!" Leo shouted with a grin, but Jessie was already gone.
The hallway outside the lounge felt colder, the air thin and sterile. Jessie walked with measured steps, not quite trusting his own equilibrium. Halfway down the hall, his foot caught on a seam in the carpet. Just barely—but enough. He stumbled, catching himself against the wall with a sharp, ragged breath.
"—okay," he muttered, his hand pressed flat against the cold paint.
He stood there, waiting. No dizziness followed. No spinning. Just that same quiet, hollow wrongness. He pushed off the wall and kept walking toward the vending machines at the end of the hall. They stood like glowing, buzzing monoliths in the shadows.
Jessie stood before the glass, staring at the rows of chips and candy. Normal choices. A normal life. He reached into his pocket for his card—and froze.
For a split second, he knew which button to press. He didn't decide; he didn't even have a craving. He simply knew the outcome before the action began. Like a pre-written line of code, the answer was already there.
His finger hovered over the keypad. He frowned. "...what?"
He hadn't even looked at the labels. Slowly, he pulled his hand back and shook his head.
"You're just tired," he whispered. That had to be it.
He pressed a random button this time, refusing to let the "knowing" win. The machine whirred, dropping a snack into the tray. Jessie grabbed it quickly, his skin crawling with the sudden urge to hide.
On the way back, it happened again.
A spike of white-hot agony ignited behind his eyes. Jessie stopped mid-step, grabbing the side of his head. "—ah—"
This one was worse. For a heartbeat, everything went quiet. Not silence, but a total loss of signal. His breathing slowed. His body went perfectly still. And then—something moved. Inside him. A faint, electric flicker pulsed across his mind, like a screen turning on in a pitch-black room.
Jessie's eyes widened. For that one second, he wasn't a person in a hallway. He was a system being pinged.
Then it was gone. Sound rushed back in—the hum of the lights, the distant chatter from the lounge. Jessie staggered, catching himself against the wall again. His heart started racing, hammering against his ribs with terrifying speed.
He looked around frantically. No one was there. No one had seen him break.
"I'm good," he whispered to the empty hallway. He took a slow breath, then another. "...I'm good."
When he returned to the lounge, Leo looked up immediately. "Finally. What'd you get me?"
Jessie tossed the snack toward him without a word. Leo caught it with a lopsided grin. "W friend."
Jessie sat down, moving with the careful precision of someone made of glass. Victor watched him, his gaze lingering a second too long, but Jessie ignored it. For now, the world felt stable again. Not normal, but stable. Like whatever was happening had paused to catch its breath.
Jessie leaned back, staring at the TV without seeing it. That flicker stayed in his mind, burned there like a bright spot on a damaged sensor. He wasn't just uncomfortable anymore.
For the first time in his life, Jessie was starting to get scared.
Getting Leo out was the easy part. The building, however, was done holding itself together. It groaned—a deep, strained creak that ran through the floor like something massive was shifting out of place. Jessie felt it through his hands before the sound even registered.
"...you feel that?" he whispered.
Victor didn't answer; he was already looking up. "Yeah," he muttered. "That's not good."
A sharp crack split the air. A long fracture ripped across the ceiling, shedding dust in a steady stream.
"We need to move. Now," Leo said, eyes snapped upward.
Then, the world shook. Harder. A section of the ceiling dropped in heavy, concrete slabs where they had been standing seconds ago. The sound was deafening—a violent collision of breaking stone and twisting metal.
"MOVE!" Victor shouted.
Jessie ran. His shoes slipped on the debris as he followed Victor through the ruins of an aisle. Leo was right behind him, clutching his arm as if checking if it still worked. They reached the hallway—or the flickering, red-drenched remains of it. Lockers were punched inward. Wires sparked overhead.
And then, the screaming started. Not one voice. Dozens.
The Choice
They turned a corner and slammed into a wall of panic. Students were pushing, crying, and yelling over each other.
"It's blocked!"
"The stairs are gone!"
"There's fire!"
"We make a new way," Victor said. He shoved into the crowd with purpose. "Move! Don't stop!"
They reached the stairwell, but it was a graveyard of twisted metal and rising smoke.
"Plan B?" Jessie asked, swallowing hard.
"Other side of the building," Victor met his eyes. "Near the labs."
"That's across the whole floor."
"Then we run across the whole floor."
They sprinted back into the chaos. The building was failing faster now. A metallic groan echoed above, and a section of the ceiling collapsed ahead, blooming a wall of dust. Victor didn't hesitate; he climbed over the jagged edges with brute force. Leo followed. Jessie scrambled up last, his hands scraping raw against the concrete. Pain flared, but there was no time to feel it.
The Falling Sky
They burst through the exit into the daylight—and Jessie's heart stopped.
The campus was a war zone. Buildings were torn apart, and thick black smoke choked the sky. But above the fires, the sky itself was breaking. Streaks of fire tore through the atmosphere like a planetary bombardment.
"...nah," Victor said quietly, turning in a circle. "This is crazy."
Leo wasn't looking at the fire. He was looking at the patterns. "They're not falling everywhere," he muttered. "They're coming in... like—"
He didn't finish. A low, rhythmic roar cut through the sirens. It wasn't an explosion. It was controlled. Jessie tracked a shape cutting through the smoke. It was sharp. Metallic. Wrong.
"...that's not a rock," Victor whispered.
The object slowed. It didn't drift; it adjusted. It was lining up a trajectory.
The Hunt
"RUN." Victor didn't shout; he commanded.
They sprinted across the open quad, but the sound behind them grew sharper, like metal slicing air. Jessie risked a glance. The thing was sleek, angular, and tracking their every move.
"Split!" Victor yelled. "It can't track all of us!"
Victor broke right. Leo veered left. Jessie hesitated for a heartbeat—and the thing in the sky locked onto him.
...nah, he thought.
He ran until his lungs burned. A stabbing pain spiked behind his eyes, a headache so violent his vision flickered to black at the edges. He stumbled.
IMPACT.
The ground in front of him exploded. Concrete blasted upward, and the shockwave tossed Jessie backward like a ragdoll. He hit the pavement hard, the world dissolving into a high-pitched ring.
The Encounter
Through the blur, Jessie saw it. The object hadn't crashed; it had landed. It unfolded, its metallic surface shifting and reconfiguring into something tall, angular, and lethal. It had no face—only a narrow, glowing line of light.
It tilted its head, studying him. It didn't feel like a machine; it felt like a hunter that had finally found its prize.
"JESSIE!"
Victor was charging back, Leo close behind.
"GET AWAY FROM HIM!" Victor roared.
The thing turned away from Jessie, focusing on the new threat. Jessie tried to move his fingers, but his body was a lead weight. As his vision began to fade into the dark, one thought echoed in his mind:
It didn't come for the school. It came for me.
The world went black.