Julian finished reading the article, the blue light of the cracked screen casting long, jagged shadows across his tired face. The horrific descriptions of the astronauts—the tentacles, the extra eyes, the literal dissolution of human anatomy—swirled in his mind, mixing with the exhaustion of his double shift. He let out a long, heavy sigh that seemed to carry the weight of his entire day.
"Would that change the unfairness of the world?" he murmured to the empty air. Even if the stars were falling, even if monsters were crawling out of the moon, he still had to wake up tomorrow. He still had to pay the rent. To Julian, space invasion felt less like a global catastrophe and more like just another reason for his boss to deduct pay for "unforeseen delays."
He scrolled down further, the "Static" of the news report blurring before his eyes, when the vibration of his phone jolted him. The screen flickered, struggling to display the caller ID through the spiderweb of cracks.
Mom.
Julian cleared his throat, trying to wipe the "ordinary" exhaustion from his voice, and pressed the receiver to his ear. "I'm on my way back home, Mom. Just passed the Dock District boundary."
"Jules? Oh, thank God," Sophia Stevenson's voice burst through the line, thin and frantic. "Get straight back home, okay? Don't stop for anything. Did you see the reports? The news is saying... they're saying things are coming from the sky, Jules. Space creatures. Real ones."
Julian leaned his head back against the bus window, watching the streetlights flicker past like dying stars. "I saw the news, Mom. It's probably just sensationalism to keep people inside. You know how the UKA media loves a good panic."
"This isn't just panic!" Sophia's voice rose, vibrating with a raw, jagged anxiety. "Be careful. Please. Don't talk to anyone. If someone looks strange... if they aren't acting right... you just run, you hear me?"
Julian felt a pang of guilt. His mother had been high-strung ever since his father had passed, her world shrinking until Julian was the only thing left in the center of it. To her, a headline wasn't just information; it was a personal threat to her son.
"Mom, listen to me," Julian said, "I'm not a child anymore. I'm eighteen. I spend my days moving heavy steel at the docks and my nights navigating this city. I'm working now. You don't need to be this worried. I can protect myself."
"Protect yourself?" Sophia let out a wet, panicked laugh. "Jules, they're talking about creatures with six eyes! Things that turn people into... into skeleton-monsters! How are you going to protect yourself from a space attack with your bare hands?"
Julian smiled weakly, his eyes landing on his own reflection in the bus glass—ordinary, tired, and entirely un-heroic. He decided to use the only weapon that ever worked on his mother: humor.
"I'll think of a way, Mom. As you know, your son is a genius at solving problems," he joked, though his heart wasn't quite in it. "I'll probably just bore them to death by explaining the logistics of shipping manifests. No creature can survive a lecture on inventory management."
There was a long pause on the other end, followed by the sound of Sophia taking a shaky, grounding breath. The mention of his 'smartness' was a long-standing private joke between them, a relic of his high school days when he'd fix her broken appliances with nothing but a paperclip and stubbornness.
"You and your mouth," she sighed, the panic receding just enough to let her motherly instincts take over. "Fine. Just... don't be late. I'm in the kitchen now. I managed to get some good beef from the market. I'm making meat rolls for you."
Julian's stomach gave an audible growl. The thought of her meat rolls—savory, seasoned, and warm—felt like the first real thing he'd encountered all day. The cosmic horror of the news suddenly felt very far away compared to the promise of a home-cooked meal.
"Meat rolls? The ones with the spicy glaze?" Julian asked, his voice lighting up with genuine anticipation. "Okay, Mom. I'm coming home ASAP. Don't let them get cold."
"Ha! Now he finds his motivation," Sophia laughed, the relief evident in her tone. "I'll be waiting for you. I love you, Jules."
"Love you too, Mom."
Julian ended the call and slid the phone back into his pocket. The brief connection to his "normal" life acted as a balm, soothing the jagged edges of the fear the news report had instilled in him. He looked out the window, watching the silhouette of the Rustia treeline against the night sky.
For a moment, everything felt peaceful. The bus was nearly empty, the driver was silent, and the low hum of the engine was almost hypnotic. He let his head rest against the cool glass, admiring the deep, velvet purple of the twilight.
But as he stared upward, the sky began to... change.
It wasn't a physical shift, but a perceptual one. It was as if a veil was being pulled back from his retinas. The stars didn't move, but between them, glowing with a cold, translucent silver light, massive mysterious symbols began to manifest. They were gargantuan, spanning miles of the upper atmosphere, etched into the very fabric of reality.
Julian's eyes dilated, the pupils swallowing the brownish-black of his irises. A violent chill, colder than any winter wind, raced down his spine, locking his muscles in place.
They vibrated in the back of his throat. And to his horror, he realized he could understand one of the mysterious symbols.
A symbol that felt like a deep, lightless well. "Tranquility."
Julian's breath came in ragged gasps. "What are those? Why... why are they in the sky?" he whispered, his hands beginning to shake. "Space creatures? Is this what the news meant? But wait... how am I able to understand?"
The symbols began to pulse in time with his heartbeat. The silver light grew brighter, blindingly so, until the entire world was a white, silent vacuum. The bus, the road, the sky—everything vanished.
Suddenly, a wave of intense dizziness washed over him. His equilibrium shattered, and a high-pitched ringing filled his ears. Amidst the noise, a voice pierced through—sharp, female, and vibrating directly against his right eardrum.
"Wak... e... Julian..."
It was a whisper, but it had the weight of a mountain.
"W...ke ...p!"
"Wake up!!! WAKE UP!!!"
Julian jolted upright, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. His hands flew out, grasping at air, before his fingers met the familiar, rough texture of his cotton bedsheets.
He gasped for air, his lungs burning as if he'd been underwater for hours. Every breath was a struggle, a jagged intake of oxygen that felt insufficient against the lingering terror of the dream. He looked around wildly, his eyes darting to the corners of the room. There was no bus. There was no girl with a voice like an angel. There were no gargantuan symbols burned into the ceiling.
The ceiling was just a slab of water-stained drywall, peeling at the edges. There was only the soft, indifferent gray light of a Saturday morning filtering through the slats of his cheap plastic blinds, casting long, dusty bars across his floor. He was in his bedroom—a cramped, six-by-ten space. The air here was still and stagnant, smelling faintly of the detergent his mother used and the vanilla-rot scent of the old, secondhand books stacked precariously in the corner.
Julian's gaze swung toward the nightstand, landing on the digital clock. It was an old piece of plastic, the casing cracked from a fall years ago, and the red LED numbers flickered with an unsteady pulse, as if the device itself was struggling to stay conscious.
7:19 AM.
The red glow seemed to mock him. It was a mundane time. A safe time.
With a hollow groan, Julian collapsed back onto his deflated pillow. The impact sent a small puff of dust into the air, but he didn't care. He lay there motionless, his sweat-dampened hair sticking to his forehead in messy, dark clumps. His skin felt clammy, a cold film of perspiration cooling rapidly in the morning draft.
Then, a jolt of pure panic shot through his spine. "Wait—7:19? I'm late! I'm dead!" The image of his supervisor's purple, shouting face flashed in his mind. But then, his brain finally caught up to his heartbeat.
The monthly day off.
It was the one fragile mercy the dock authorities allowed because of UKA's Law of Labour. A single, twenty-four-hour reprieve is given every thirty days to keep the workers from snapping. He let out a breath, the tension draining out of his limbs.
He stayed like that for a long time, listening to the mundane sounds of the neighborhood. Down the street, an old, crappy car coughed and sputtered to life, its engine whining with the mechanical equivalent of a heavy smoker's lung. A solitary bird chirped somewhere near his window, a sharp, cheerful sound that felt entirely out of place. From the kitchen, he could hear the distant, rhythmic hum of the crappy refrigerator, a low-frequency buzz that usually annoyed him but now served as a comforting proof of life.
"This was a dream," he sighed, rubbing his eyes. "Just a dream."
He tried to convince himself that the symbols were just his brain's way of processing the stress of the news reports. The girl was just a manifestation of his loneliness, and the voice in his ear was just a trick of his subconscious.
He turned his head toward the left wall. From the other side of the thin wall, a new set of sounds began to drift in.
His mother was awake. She was in the kitchen, and the unmistakable scent of browning butter and toasted bread began to waft under the door crack, cutting through the smell of old books.
Julian sat up again, much slower this time. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, his feet hitting the cold hardwood floor. He stayed there for a moment, staring at his hands. They looked ordinary. His brownish-black eyes reflected in the darkened screen of his broken phone looked ordinary.
He stood up and head toward the cramped bathroom. He wanted to believe the nightmare was over, but as he reached out his left hand to turn the half broken doorknob.
He froze.
At his left palm, a symbol appeared for a second and disappeared beneath the skin. It was the symbol that he saw in his dream.