The alarm went off at 6:47 a.m., same as always. Kael Draven silenced it with the back of his hand, a motion so practiced he didn't even open his eyes. He lay there for a moment in the grey morning light filtering through the half-broken blinds, listening to the sounds of the city waking up below his window.
Traffic. Pigeons. The clang of a delivery truck somewhere down on Meridian Street. Normal things. Ordinary sounds. The kind that filled a life so completely you forgot to notice them until they were gone.
He was twenty-two years old and had nothing to show for it, which was fine. He had a job — moving inventory at the Caldwell Distribution Warehouse on the east side of Crestfall City. He had a small apartment, mostly empty. He had exactly one friend who called him more than once a month, a mechanic named Torres who lived three floors down and smelled permanently of motor oil.
Kael showered, ate a protein bar over the sink, and laced his boots at the door. He didn't look in the mirror. He never did, much. There was a face there — angular jaw, dark eyes that people sometimes said looked like they were always watching something just behind you — but it didn't tell him anything useful.
Outside, the city hummed. Crestfall was mid-sized, middle-of-the-country, the kind of place geography textbooks might call "unremarkable." It had two universities, a river that flooded every few years, a waterfront district that the local government kept trying to gentrify, and a population of about four hundred thousand people living their four hundred thousand versions of the same basic life.
Kael took the bus to work. He always took the bus. He stood in the aisle holding the overhead rail and watched the city pass through smudged windows — a woman walking a enormous dog, a food cart operator cranking open his awning, two teenagers arguing over headphones — and felt the low, steady weight of routine settle over him like something comfortable and suffocating at once.
At the warehouse, his supervisor Marsh waved at him from behind a clipboard. "You're on the west floor today. New shipment."
"Same as yesterday?"
"Same as every day."
Kael nodded and got to work.
He moved boxes for six hours. He ate lunch — a sandwich from the machine in the break room, a bag of chips, an apple he'd brought from home — at a folding table next to a man named Petyr who was sixty years old and had worked there for thirty-one of them. Petyr talked about his daughter's school play. Kael listened. He was good at listening.
On the way home that afternoon, he noticed something in the sky.
He wouldn't remember later exactly what first caught his eye. The angle of the light, maybe, or the quality of the blue, which had gone a shade too saturated, too vivid, like someone had reached into the atmosphere and turned up the contrast. He stood at the bus stop and looked up and felt — for the first time in a long time — like the world was holding its breath.
Then the bus came. He got on. He forgot about it by the time he reached his stop.
Torres knocked on his door around seven that evening with two beers and a story about a transmission job gone sideways. They sat on Kael's fire escape and drank and talked about nothing in particular, and the city settled into night around them, and the stars came out, and in the sky to the northeast, very faint and very far away, something burned.
"You see that?" Torres said, pointing.
Kael looked. A streak of light, slow-moving by the standards of shooting stars, crossing from upper right to lower left with a kind of deliberate patience.
"Meteor," Kael said.
"Big one."
"Yeah."
They watched it until it faded below the horizon. Then they finished their beers and Torres went home, and Kael sat alone in his empty apartment looking at the ceiling and thinking nothing in particular, which was what he did most evenings.
He fell asleep at ten-fifteen. He did not dream.
It was the last normal day.