Beacon City learned to live with sirens the way other places lived with rain.
They threaded between the gull cries along the waterfront and the electric buzz of billboards on Harborline. They slid over the glass skin of towers and vanished into the alleys behind noodle shops and pawn stores. If you kept your head down, you could pretend the sound meant nothing. If you looked up, you remembered why the city built floodlights that pointed at the sky.
Ryan Pierce kept his head down.
He rode the 6:40 bus home with a backpack that dug into one shoulder and a notebook he didn't use much anymore. Senior year, last semester, eight stops between West Beacon High and the apartment he shared with his parents on Ellery Street. He took the rear aisle seat, knees in, hood up. The people around him decompressed from their days—construction dust on boots, a bouquet in a paper cone, a drone courier's helmet tucked under one arm. Outside the window, the harbor flashed with the last slice of sun, and beyond it the old Beacon—the massive lighthouse that gave the city its name—stood like a needle in the ocean, banded with light.
A trio of freshmen in varsity jackets got on and laughed too loudly about nothing. One of them said, "If the Lume hits Friday, I'm sleeping all day. Gonna wake up shooting lasers." Another added, "I'd take flight. Get out of this place."
Someone near the front said, "You think it works like a vending machine, idiot?" Everybody laughed again.
Ryan stared at his own reflection in the window and tried not to think of light.
At school, in third period, Mr. Grant had wheeled in an old display screen and pulled up footage from eight years ago—the first time the sky broke over Beacon. The room went quiet before the audio clicked on. It always did. You didn't joke over that kind of thing.
Black clouds, then color that had no right to exist. A roof camera wobbled, caught the crosshatch of searchlights and a river of headlights frozen on the freeway. People would swear they'd heard a voice in those clips—something threaded through the static—but the official transcript said atmospheric interference. The word "Manifest" scrolled under a reporter's face while weathermap arrows pointed to nothing.
"If you were alive in '21," Mr. Grant said, palms braced on the desk, "you remember this night. You remember where you were. Not because of power. Because of fear." His eyes flicked to the back row. "Histories don't start with heroes. They start with events."
Someone snorted. "Events that give heroes powers."
Mr. Grant didn't smile. "Power doesn't change who you are. It reveals it."
Laughter from the varsity jackets. The class split down its usual fault lines: the hopeful, the cynics, and the ones who didn't care. Two rows behind Ryan, a girl he didn't know well—copper hair, chipped black nail polish—raised a hand without looking away from the footage.
"If it's coming back," she said, "why do we pretend we're ready this time?"
"Because pretending," Mr. Grant said, "is cheaper than admitting we aren't."
On the bus, the memory of her voice stuck. It wasn't what she'd asked, exactly; it was the way she'd said we. Like she had a stake in the answer and knew no one would give her one.
At the sixth stop, the bus jolted, the driver cursed under his breath, and a billboard on the corner switched from sneaker ad to BREAKING NEWS in red. The anchor's voice bled through the open doors: "…the Office of Planetary Risk Assessment expects elevated Lume activity late this week. City officials urge citizens to remain calm. The Aegis Order has activated a level-three readiness posture—"
The doors hissed shut. The bus rolled. Someone clapped. Someone else booed.
Ryan's phone buzzed. Mom: Off tonight. Cook or order?
He typed back: Order. You pick. Then pocketed the phone and watched the lighthouse fall behind them, its beam sweeping the horizon like it was looking for something it had lost.
Their apartment smelled like cardamom and floor cleaner and ocean air that snuck in from the cracked kitchen window. Evelyn Pierce—scrubs, hair in a messy bun, eyes the color of coffee—stood at the stove warming flatbread. News droned from the counter TV: an Aegis rep in a navy suit with a white insignia—shield inside a ring of stars—said words that meant stay calm and keep buying groceries.
"You're late," his mom said, not accusing, just taking inventory.
"Bus was slow," Ryan said, dropping his backpack by the coat rack. "You didn't have to cook."
"I heated bread, chopped some greens, pressed a button on the rice cooker. Heroics." She flicked him a smile, the tired kind people wear when they've spent all day on their feet. "How was school?"
"We watched a disaster reel and no one learned anything."
"That bad?"
"Someone said they wanted to get powers so they could skip math."
"Ambition," she said dryly. She plated food. "Eat. Your dad's at the port for the late shift. He'll microwave whatever's left."
His father worked nights three times a week moving containers the size of houses onto ships that rowed out into the dark. The pay kept up with rent and the small things that made a place home: a rug no one tripped on, a plant that refused to die, a kettle that whistled. Ryan pictured him under sodium lamps, the cranes like giant skeletons against the bay.
On TV, the anchor traded to a segment with shaky footage of a man lifting a car with hands that glowed like glass. The chyron read: MANIFEST INCIDENT, LOWER EAST. NO FATALITIES. A witness described it like a dream he couldn't wake from. The Aegis rep repeated that everything was under control.
"Do you believe them?" his mother asked.
"No."
"You didn't even think about it."
"I don't have to." He forked food into his mouth and chewed like it could keep words from getting out. It didn't. "You remember '21. They said under control then, too."
She slid onto the stool across from him. "I remember '21," she said softly. "I remember working forty-eight hours straight and washing ash out of my hair in the hospital sink. I remember people thanking me like I'd stopped the sky from breaking. I also remember that we got through it. Not because of them"—she nodded at the screen—"but because of people standing in front of other people."
He stared at the countertop. The laminate had a crosshatch pattern that caught crumbs, and if you looked too long it made your eyes ache.
"I'm not asking you to be brave, Ry," she added. "I'm asking you to be honest. Are you scared?"
"Of what?"
"Of what happens when the lights come."
He set the fork down. The TV switched again: a montage of celebrities joking about what power they'd want, a talking head from a think tank arguing for curfews, a chart with lines that went up and slanted into question marks.
"Everyone acts like it's a lottery," he said. "Like if you dream hard enough, the universe gives you a prize."
"And you?"
"I think if the universe gives you something, it sends the bill later."
Her smile angled, not unkind. "Cynic."
"Student of history." He pushed back from the counter. "I'm going to do some homework."
"You have homework?"
"No." He grabbed his bag and retreated before she could make him say more.
His room was small, walls the color of old paper, a desk that wobbled if you kicked it, a window with a view of the neighbors' laundry line and a wedge of sky. He dropped onto the bed and let the spring squeak settle. The quiet felt like a lie. Somewhere downtown, a siren test whined and cut. On the wall above his desk, a calendar with a beach on it held the days in neat squares: Wednesday had a circle around it now. He hadn't drawn it. The news had.
Projected Lume Storm: 72 hours.
The announcer had said it like a weather report. Wear a light jacket; expect a chance of cosmic interference; do not panic.
Ryan stared at the circle until his eyes watered.
He wasn't there for the worst of '21. He was eight, in pajamas with tiny rockets on the legs, when the sky changed color and his father carried him into the hallway because the apartment windows shivered. He remembered a neighbor screaming. He remembered his mother's hands shaking as she pulled a sweatshirt over his head. He remembered a smell like burned sugar and the taste of metal when the lights came back on. Days later, he watched a clip of a man trying to help at a car fire, only to erupt into something that wasn't flame and wasn't light and left nothing but a black mark and a story everyone told wrong.
He didn't tell people what he remembered. Memory made you slow. Slow got you noticed. Noticed got you asked questions you weren't interested in answering. He learned to be invisible in rooms full of people and to leave before someone needed him for more than a head to count.
He looked at the circle again. Wednesday.
If the forecasts held, the Lume would spill across the planet sometime after midnight. Most of the world had turned the phenomenon into ritual. Some treated it like a secular holiday; others locked themselves in churches or gyms; a cottage industry of apps coached you on "dream cultivation" to maximize your chance of waking with a Manifest. Because that's what the word meant now: not a theory in a physics paper, not an esoteric chant in a forum. It meant people who had gone to sleep one way and gotten up another.
When he was little, he wanted to fly. When he got older, he wanted to stop wanting things he couldn't have.
His phone buzzed again. A school group chat vomited out memes and darelists: no sleep challenge, dream playlist, best power tier list. He muted it and opened a notes app.
Wednesday: don't sleep.
He typed it like a grocery item. Then he added, stay awake Tuesday too because the news kept getting it wrong, and he didn't trust schedules for cosmic events. He set three alarms not to wake him up, but to make sure he never fell in. Coffee. Cold shower. Walk the block. If that failed, he'd stand on the fire escape and count the ships queuing into the harbor until his eyes burned.
At nine, his mother knocked. "I'm going to bed," she said through the door. "Call me if the planet ends."
"I'll text," he said.
"Funny."
"You started it."
"Love you."
"Love you."
He listened to her footsteps cross the hall, the soft click of their bedroom door. The apartment exhaled into a stillness that used to mean safety. He shut his light and pulled up the blinds. Outside, Beacon hummed—not loud, just constant, a hive's worth of small lives vibrating against a city built to pretend nothing could shatter it.
From here, he could see the lighthouse beam rake the water and the way the clouds on the horizon held a color that wasn't on the weather palette. Maybe it was the sodium lights from the port. Maybe it was nothing. He pressed his forehead to the glass until a circle of fog bloomed and vanished.
There was a knock on his window.
Not from the outside; from the stairwell door next to the kitchen window. Someone opening it and letting in alley noise. He should've ignored it. Habit made him look.
A couple stood on the metal stairs, voices low. The guy in a hoodie said, "It's just hype. The Aegis wants funding." The girl—a laugh messy and brave—said, "If the universe is handing out new chances, I'll take one." They kissed like people who needed to believe a story about themselves. Ryan pulled the blinds back down. It wasn't anger that rose up in him; it wasn't envy. It was the feeling you get when everyone in the room decides to run the same direction and you know the exit's the other way.
He lay back on the bed and stared at the hairline crack in the plaster above him. He named the points where it forked—lighthouse, harbor, school—like a map of a place he might have to leave. Sleep waited like a mugger at the edges of the block. He sat up, swung his feet to the floor, and forced himself to stand.
Kitchen. Kettle. Water roaring. He set two mugs on the counter and poured into both, then stood, holding one in each hand so the heat bit his palms and made him feel present. He didn't drink. He breathed. On the TV, a talking head he recognized from other emergencies said, "I have full confidence in the Aegis Order's ability to manage any unusual activity. We have eyes on the sky."
Footage of Aegis jets cutting white scars over the bay. Footage of caped silhouettes—no capes, he corrected himself; that was from movies—of armored figures launching from the Tower hub on Riverfront, gold insignia catching the floodlights. The city loved them. It needed them. He didn't blame anyone for it. But you could respect a thing and still not want to be inside it.
He killed the TV. The apartment went honest again.
His phone buzzed with one last text, a number he didn't know: you don't smile much, do you?
He frowned. Who is this?
Three dots. Maya. From history. Sorry if that's weird. I just… you looked like you were at a funeral during the Lume video.
He typed, erased, typed again. Maybe we were.
She didn't reply right away. When she did: Do you believe in miracles?
He stared at the question until the screen dimmed. Then: I believe in people. Sometimes.
No dots appeared. He set the phone face down and tried not to imagine that she'd rolled her eyes.
He took one of the mugs to the window and cracked the blinds again. The sky over the ocean had changed while he wasn't watching. Not much—just a faint smear of violet deep in the cloud layer, the kind of color you only saw in the seconds after a bulb blew. He checked the time: 10:13. Wednesday was still two nights away. The forecast said so. The forecast said a lot of things.
He didn't believe forecasts.
Ryan closed his eyes and counted to five, then opened them and whispered to no one, "I won't sleep."
The word left his mouth with a weight he felt in his bones, like saying it carved a groove he'd have to walk in later. He leaned his forehead to the cool glass and let the city sound fill up the quiet spaces: a distant horn, a dog barking, the elevator cable whining as someone on the second floor came home late. He listened until his heartbeat matched the lighthouse's slow pulse.
He let the coffee go cold in his hands.
At 11:02, the apartment light flickered. Once. Twice. He looked up, waited for the power to die. It held. Somewhere in the building, a baby cried and then was comforted. Somewhere downtown, a drone's red eye traced a slow arc above a rooftop, part of a grid that would turn into a net if the sky decided to misbehave.
He set the mug down and pulled a chair to the window, the kind of chair you take to a little league game and forget in the trunk for six months. He sat, knees pulled up, and watched the horizon.
When the first thread of strange color curled across the clouds—faint as a bruise—he didn't tell himself it was nothing. He didn't tell himself it was a trick of the port lights. He didn't tell himself anything.
He just said it again, softer this time, like a prayer he didn't believe in.
"I won't sleep."
And far out over the water, the lighthouse beam swung, caught the face of the sea, and for one heartbeat the bay looked like glass with stars trapped underneath. Then the light moved on. The stars stayed where they were.
Ryan watched, awake, as Beacon City breathed in and held it.