The morning moved around Jack like a river parting around a stone. He stood in the bathroom doorway watching his reflection — same short brown hair, same green eyes, same thin frame in the same wrinkled T-shirt he had apparently slept in. The bruise on his shoulder had deepened overnight from purple to a mottled blue-black that spread from his collarbone halfway to his bicep. He pressed it with two fingers and sucked air through his teeth. Real. Still real.
Downstairs, the house hummed with the ordinary chaos of a weekday morning. Dishes clinked. The coffee maker gurgled. Lily's voice carried from the kitchen, talking fast about something — a project, a test, something that belonged to a world where people worried about grades instead of survival.
Jack pulled on a clean shirt, grabbed his backpack from beside his desk, and went downstairs.
Elena stood at the counter pouring coffee into her travel mug, already dressed in her pale blue scrubs. Her hair was pulled back in a loose bun, the gray streaks catching the light from the window over the sink. She looked tired in the way she always looked tired — the permanent kind, layered deep, the kind that sleep never quite reached.
"Morning," she said without turning around. "There's toast."
Lily sat at the table with her phone propped against a glass of orange juice, scrolling with one hand and eating a piece of peanut butter toast with the other. Her hoodie — oversized, forest green, the one she practically lived in — was zipped to her chin. She glanced up at Jack and something flickered across her face, quick as a blink. Concern, maybe. Recognition. Then it was gone, replaced by her usual expression of mild teenage indifference.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Thanks."
A car horn honked twice from the street. Lily grabbed her backpack and shoved the last bite of toast into her mouth. "That's Mara. Gotta go." She kissed Elena on the cheek, waved vaguely at Jack, and was out the front door in a blur of green hoodie and brown hair.
Jack watched her climb into a silver sedan with two other girls. The car pulled away, and the street settled back into its quiet morning rhythm. Sprinklers hissed. Mr. Fredericks across the street walked his terrier. A delivery truck rumbled past. Everything so aggressively normal that it made Jack's teeth ache.
He turned to his mother. "Can I take the truck to school today?"
Elena paused mid-sip, the travel mug hovering near her lips. She studied him over the rim. Jack braced for the refusal, for the careful explanation about insurance rates and gas money and the hundred small practical reasons she kept the old Ford parked in the garage most days.
But something shifted behind her eyes. She set the mug down and looked at him — really looked, the way she sometimes did when she thought he wasn't paying attention. Taking his measure. Cataloging the ways he had changed since that first terrible morning two years ago when she had sat him and Lily down at this same kitchen table and told them their father wasn't waking up. That his heart had simply stopped in the night, quiet as a light going out.
Jack had been sixteen then. He had not cried in front of them. He had gone to his room and sat on his bed and stared at the wall for three hours, and when he came out he had asked his mother if she needed help with dinner. He had been doing versions of that ever since — filling gaps, carrying weight, shrinking himself down to fit into whatever shape the family needed.
Elena reached into her purse and held out the key. "Be careful with her. She pulls to the right when you brake."
"I know."
"And fill the tank if it drops below a quarter."
"I will."
She held the key a moment longer, her fingers not quite releasing it. "You are so much like him," she said, and her voice carried something fragile that she quickly folded away behind a smile. "Go. You'll be late."
Jack took the key and headed for the garage. The truck waited where it always waited — faded red paint, rust creeping along the wheel wells, a crack in the windshield that had been there since before Jack was born. He climbed in and the seat smelled like old leather and motor oil, his father's ghost captured in upholstery.
He backed out of the driveway and turned onto Maple Crescent. The Garcia house slid into view on his left. White siding. Blue shutters. The porch with its wooden railing and the three steps leading up to a front door that was perfectly intact, closed, painted red. Mr. Garcia's car sat in the driveway. A wind chime turned lazily near the eaves.
Jack's hands tightened on the wheel.
The porch looked fine. Normal. And then the air above the railing rippled.
It was subtle — a heat-shimmer distortion, the kind you see rising off asphalt in August, except it was fifty degrees outside and the shimmer wasn't rising from anything. It hung in the air like a wrinkle in a bedsheet, and through it Jack saw something else layered over the ordinary porch like a transparency on an overhead projector. A body draped across a broken railing. A wooden spindle jutting upward through a ruined skull. Dark stains spreading across white-painted wood.
Mr. Garcia. Dead. Impaled. Exactly where Jack had left him in the dream.
The shimmer flickered and collapsed, and the porch was just a porch again — cheerful, undamaged, the wind chime tinkling softly in the breeze.
Jack realized he had stopped the truck in the middle of the street. His foot had simply come off the gas, his body reacting before his mind caught up. He forced himself to press the accelerator and the truck rolled forward.
"You're seeing things. You barely slept. You're stressed. It wasn't real."
He said it to himself three times on the drive to school, and by the third time the words had the hollow ring of a prayer nobody believed in.
School was a blur. He sat through classes without hearing them, his pen moving across notebook pages in patterns that weren't notes. In chemistry, Mr. Ballard called on him twice and both times Jack had to ask him to repeat the question. At lunch he sat alone at his usual table near the windows and stared at the tree line beyond the athletic fields, the dark band of forest that ran along the eastern edge of town.
The same forest.
The thought circled him all day like a current. By the time the final bell rang, it had pulled him under.
He drove east instead of west. Away from home, away from Maple Crescent, toward Harrow Road and the stretch where the trees crowded close on both sides. The afternoon light was golden and warm, the kind of light that made the world look safe. Jack didn't trust it.
He parked the truck on the shoulder where the road curved and the forest pressed in thickest. He sat for a long minute with the engine idling, staring through the windshield at the wall of oaks and pines. Then he killed the engine, pocketed the key, and got out.
The tree line swallowed him within twenty steps. Leaves crunched under his sneakers. Branches arched overhead, filtering the sunlight into shifting coins of gold on the forest floor. He walked without a clear destination, following some instinct he couldn't name, letting his feet carry him along a path that felt familiar in his bones even though he had never walked it in this version of the world.
The ground sloped upward. The trees grew denser. And then he was standing in a small depression between two mossy boulders, and he knew this place — knew it the way you know the geography of a nightmare. This was where he had woken up. Flat on his back, staring at a canopy of leaves with no memory and no phone, in a world that had already ended.
Jack turned in a slow circle. Birds sang. Squirrels chattered. The ordinary forest doing ordinary things.
"I'm losing it," he muttered. "I'm actually losing my mind."
He almost laughed. He had driven out here chasing a bruise and a shimmer, looking for proof that a dream was real, and now he was standing in the woods talking to himself like every cautionary tale about isolation he had ever heard.
He turned to leave.
The air tore open.
Twenty feet ahead, between two pale birch trees, the shimmer appeared again — but this time it wasn't subtle. It was a vertical scar in the atmosphere, roughly the height of a man, its edges rippling like disturbed water. Through it, Jack could see the same forest but wrong — the colors muted, the leaves gray-brown and curling, the light flat and sickly. The other version. The dead one.
And through the shimmer, something moved.
It came fast. A shape lurching out of the dead trees on the other side, arms outstretched, mouth gaping open around a moan that Jack felt in his sternum before he heard it. Gray skin. Black veins crawling up its neck. Milky eyes locked on him with animal hunger. A zombie, tearing through the rift between worlds, its fingers already reaching for the boundary.
Jack stumbled backward and threw his hands up — a reflex, pure instinct, the desperate gesture of someone bracing for impact.
The world shifted.
He felt it in his chest first, a pulling sensation, as if something deep inside him had grabbed hold of the air itself and, pushed. The feeling radiated outward through his arms, through his palms, and the space between him and the zombie, bent. Not visually — he couldn't see anything change — but the zombie, mid-lunge, was caught by an invisible force and hurled backward as if struck by a wrecking ball. It flew through the shimmer, limbs flailing, and crashed into a dead tree on the other side with a sound like snapping timber. The rift pulsed once, twice, and then sealed shut with a sound like a whispered gasp.
Jack stood with his hands still raised, shaking, staring at the empty space between the birch trees where reality had just ripped itself open and closed again.
His palms tingled. The pulling sensation faded slowly, leaving behind a hollow ache in his ribs, as if he had sprinted a mile without warming up. He lowered his hands and looked at them. They were trembling but unmarked.
"What did I just do?"
He didn't stay to find an answer. He turned and ran, crashing through the undergrowth the way he had in the dream, branches whipping his face, roots catching at his feet. He burst out of the tree line and onto the road shoulder and threw himself into the truck and locked the doors and sat there with his forehead against the steering wheel, breathing in ragged gasps that fogged the windshield.
The drive home passed in fragments. Red light — stop. Green light — go. Turn signal. Brake. The mechanical rituals of driving kept his hands occupied while his mind spun in circles that refused to close. He had pushed something without touching it. He had bent the air, bent gravity itself, and thrown a creature backward through a hole in reality. And that creature had been real — not a memory, not a hallucination, but a physical thing from the dream world attempting to cross into his.
He parked in the driveway and sat in the truck until his breathing steadied. Then he went inside.
Lily was at the kitchen table doing homework, her pen moving in quick, precise strokes across a worksheet. She looked up when Jack walked in, and her expression changed immediately. The practiced indifference dropped away and what remained underneath was sharp and alert.
"What happened to you?"
"Nothing. Long day."
"Jack." She set her pen down. "You look like you saw a ghost. And you're shaking."
He opened his mouth to deflect, to say something dismissive, to do what he always did — handle it alone, carry it quietly, keep the weight off everyone else. But Lily was watching him with those green eyes that were the same shade as his own, and something in her expression told him that she already knew. Not the details. But the shape of it. The wrongness.
He sat down across from her. "I went to the forest. The one from — " He stopped. "Lily, I had a dream last night. Except it wasn't a dream."
"I know," she said.
The two words landed between them like stones dropped into still water.
"What do you mean, you know?"
"I mean I know. Because it's happening to me too."
"Zombies?"
She pulled up the sleeve of her hoodie. Along the inside of her forearm, faint lines of gold traced patterns just beneath the skin — not tattoos, not veins, but something luminous and intricate that pulsed faintly when Jack leaned closer, like circuitry made of warm light.
"I've been dreaming too," Lily said. Her voice was steady but her eyes were bright, the way they got when she was trying very hard not to be afraid. "Not zombies. Something else. Somewhere else." She paused, searching for words. "It was — beautiful. And terrifying. There were beings there, Jack. Tall, made of light, with wings that sounded like music when they moved. They called it the Divine Realm."
Jack stared at the golden threads beneath her skin.
"They taught me things," she continued. "How to channel energy. How to heal. I thought I was going crazy until I woke up and these were still there." She traced the lines with her fingertip. "Give me your hand."
"Lily — "
"Just trust me."
He extended his hand across the table. Lily took it in both of hers, closed her eyes, and breathed out slowly. The golden lines beneath her skin brightened, and warmth spread from her palms into his — not heat, exactly, but something deeper, something that moved through his blood and into his bones and settled in the places where he hurt. The bruise on his shoulder stopped throbbing. The tension in his neck unwound. The frantic buzzing in his skull, the low-grade panic that had been running like a motor since he woke up, simply quieted, as if someone had placed a gentle hand over a wound and held it there.
Jack exhaled, and the breath shuddered out of him carrying weight he hadn't known he was holding.
"How," he whispered.
"Divine energy. That's what they called it." Lily opened her eyes. The gold faded back to faint traces. "I've been doing it to Mom's headaches for two days. She thinks she switched to a better brand of ibuprofen."
Despite everything, Jack almost smiled.
Jack told her everything. The zombie world. Mr. Garcia. The shotgun. The shimmer on the porch that morning. The rift in the forest. The force that had erupted from his hands and thrown the creature back. He spoke quietly, leaning across the table, both of them aware of the sounds of their mother moving around upstairs, getting ready for her evening shift.
Lily listened without interrupting. When he finished, she said, "The dreams are real... Both of ours. And whatever is happening — the shimmers, the things crossing over — it's only getting started. I can feel it." Lily paused and looked at Jack with determination before saying, "We need answers."
"I don't even know what questions to ask."
"Then we start with the obvious one." She held his gaze. "What happens when you go back?"
Jack looked toward the stairs, then back at his sister. The warmth from her healing still moved through him, golden and steady, a quiet flame behind his ribs. He felt calmer than he had all day. Calmer than he had any right to feel.
"I think I have to go back," he said. "Tonight. When I sleep. It's the only place where any of this makes sense."
Lily nodded. "Then I'll be here when you wake up. We figure this out together, Jack. No more doing everything alone."
He wanted to argue. The old reflex was strong — protect her, shield her, carry it himself. But the golden warmth pulsing through him was proof that he couldn't do this by himself. Whatever was happening, it had chosen both of them.
"Together," he said.
That night, Jack lay in bed staring at the ceiling. The house was quiet. Elena had left for her shift, kissing them both on the forehead, reminding Lily to lock the door. Lily was in her room down the hall, and Jack could see the faint glow of golden light under her door — practicing, he guessed. Learning the edges of what she could do.
The divine energy still hummed softly in his chest, warm and constant, as if Lily's healing had left behind a residue that his body had absorbed. He held his hands above his face in the dark and flexed his fingers, remembering the feeling of the air bending around them, the invisible force that had launched a creature backward through a tear in the world.
'Gravitokinesis.' The word surfaced in his mind as if placed there, clinical and precise. The ability to manipulate gravitational force. He had no idea where the term came from — some buried memory of a physics class, maybe, or something deeper. Something the dream world had etched into him the way Lily's realm had traced those golden lines beneath her skin.
He closed his eyes. The warmth in his chest spread outward, loosening his muscles, slowing his heartbeat, pulling him down toward sleep like a gentle tide.
The last thing he thought before the darkness took him was that he was not afraid. Not because the fear was gone, but because for the first time since waking in that forest, he was not carrying it alone.