Book 1: The T-Factor
CHAPTER 3: THE FREQUENCY
One week before the sky tore open, the radio in Quinn's repair shop sang a song of invasion.
It was an old Zenith Trans-Oceanic, a beautiful relic of brushed aluminum and glowing vacuum tubes that Quinn kept on a high shelf for atmosphere, perpetually tuned to a fuzzy jazz station. Leo was sorting a bin of capacitors when the music dissolved into static, then reformed into something else entirely.
Boom-boom-boom-bzzzt.
A rhythmic, pulsing tone, mechanical and cold. It drilled into Leo's skull. He froze, a ceramic capacitor slipping from his fingers to shatter on the concrete floor.
The sound wasn't just noise. His Technopathy flared awake, translating the pulse into meaning. It was a scanning signal. A mapping signal. And it was alien.
Origin: Upper Atmosphere. Vector: Geosynchronous Orbit. Bandwidth: 7.83 Hz (Earth's resonant frequency). Purpose: Terrain Assimilation.
The knowledge appeared in his mind fully formed, a cold download. Chitauri. Or something like them. They were painting the city in frequencies, learning its bones.
"Damn capacitors," Quinn muttered from the workbench, not looking up. "Fragile as eggshells."
Leo didn't hear him. He was moving, climbing onto a stool, reaching for the radio's power cord. His fingers closed around the warm rubber just as the signal changed—the pulse quickened, sharpened, became a targeting beacon.
BZZT-BZZT-BZZT-KRSSSHHH.
He yanked the cord from the wall. The radio died mid-pulse, leaving a ringing silence that felt heavier than the sound.
Quinn looked over, eyebrows raised behind his thick glasses. "Everything okay, Leo? You're white as a sheet."
"The radio," Leo managed, his voice tight. "It's… busted. Really, really busted."
Quinn ambled over, took the radio, and peered inside. "Weird. No power, but the tubes are still warm. Almost like it was drawing from somewhere else." He tapped a glowing tube. "Atmospheric induction, maybe. Never seen it this strong."
The air, Leo thought, his blood running cold. It's drawing from the charged air. The air is becoming a conductor.
He spent the rest of his shift jumpy, his Technopathy buzzing like a live wire under his skin. Every device in the shop seemed louder, their electronic whispers amplified to a psychic clamor. The cash register's chime sounded like a distant alarm. The neon "OPEN" sign in the window flickered in perfect time with his racing heartbeat.
When Molly came to pick up her repaired Walkman, he barely registered her thanks.
"Leo?" she said, her voice cutting through the static in his head. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Just tired," he mumbled, handing her the yellow plastic player. Their fingers brushed. A flash—her anxiety had deepened, fermented into a sharper, vinegary fear. Her father's layoff was now permanent. The bills were a tidal wave. The world felt like a shaky table.
He watched her leave, the taste of her fear sour on his mental palate. The city was a tapestry of such fears now, threads of dread weaving through the populace, a collective, unconscious bracing for impact. His Telepathy, usually a faint murmur, was picking up the background hum of a civilization holding its breath.
---
Friday. The Last Normal Day.
Marcus cornered him by the lockers before first period, his eyes gleaming with conspiratorial fervor. "Check this out." He shoved his phone into Leo's hands.
On screen was a forum thread titled "The Singing Sky: Audio Anomalies Over NYC - MAPPING LIVE." User-uploaded spectrograms showed the same pulsing frequency Leo had heard in the radio, recorded by ham radio operators from Inwood to Bay Ridge. The lines on the graphs were sharp, aggressive, and growing more frequent.
"Some of these nerds are triangulating the source," Marcus whispered, despite the hallway's roar. "They think it's a cloaked satellite in high orbit. Or a spaceship holding station over the Atlantic."
"That's stupid," Leo said, but his throat was tight. The scans were no longer sporadic. They were constant. The mapping phase was nearly complete. What came next was incursion. He knew the sequence. He'd seen it in Thera.
"Maybe," Marcus said, lowering his voice further. "But my cousin works for a Stark subcontractor. He said all non-essential R&D has been suspended. The entire Applied Sciences division is on standby. And there are guys in dark suits crawling all over the Damage Control offices. Not FBI. Not Homeland. They don't show badges. They just… flash a symbol and everyone gets quiet."
Leo thought of his father's late-night muttering about the power grid's strange load fluctuations, the "unexplained capacitance" in certain nodes. He thought of his mother's clients—nurses, bus drivers, sanitation workers—all reporting the same thing: a sense of impending doom so vivid it felt like a memory.
The city was a nervous system, and something had pressed a needle against its main nerve.
---
That night, the dreams weren't fragments. They were full-color, surround-sound memories.
He stood on the Aurora Balcony of Thera's Citadel, the wind singing through the crystalline spires. Below, the city pulsed with peaceful life. He was Taren, Guardian Prime, the T-Factor a harmonious chord within him. He could feel the heartbeat of the planet through his feet, a steady, warm rhythm. He could hear the thoughts of the city—not as words, but as colors, melodies, a tapestry of conscious light.
Then—the shriek. A psychic blade severing the mental harmony. The violet sky didn't crack; it unzipped. A tear of absolute blackness, silent and hungry. Through it poured the Devourers. Their ships were angular voids, absorbing light and sound. They didn't fire lasers; they fired silence, waves of nullification that erased everything they touched—sound, light, memory.
"CONTAIN THE SURGE!" Taren's voice was multiplied by a thousand echoes. The other Guardians rallied. Pyra, who wove flame. Geode, who spoke to stone. Kismet, who bent probability. They fought with the fury of a world betrayed. They lost.
The final memory: the Resonance Chamber, deep underground. The lead scientist, her face etched with desperation, monitors showing the tear widening like a bleeding wound. "The rupture is eating reality! Only a sympathetic resonance can seal it—a feedback loop of the same energy that made it!"
Taren understood. The tear was made of distorted T-Factor energy. To close it, they had to flood it with pure T-Factor energy. A suicide bomb made of their own souls.
"Do it," Taren said, his voice calm.
They joined hands. Time, Thought, Technology, Force, Earth—they channeled everything they were into the rupture. The world screamed. Taren felt his body unraveling, his consciousness fraying at the edges, scattering across the bleeding dimensional wound.
The last thing he saw before the white consumed everything: the scientist's face, not in triumph, but in horrific realization. "It's not sealing! It's—it's anchoring! The resonance is creating a permanent bridge!"
Then nothing.
Leo woke sitting bolt upright, drenched in sweat, shouting words in Thera's flowing, liquid tongue. "Keth'var en'dral!" Seal the breach!
His parents burst into the room. "Leo! Sweetie, what's wrong?"
"Nightmare," he gasped, trembling so hard his teeth chattered. "Just a nightmare."
David and Maya exchanged a look over his head—a silent conversation of worry. Maya sat on the edge of his bed, her cool hand on his forehead. "That was more than a nightmare. You were screaming." Her voice was gentle but firm. "This is the fourth time this month. Dreams that vivid… they can be a sign of extreme stress. Or trauma."
"I'm not traumatized," he said, the lie brittle.
"Did something happen?" David asked, his engineer's mind seeking a cause. "At school? On the walk home?"
"No. Nothing." Leo pulled his knees to his chest. "It's just… the news. All that talk about threats and signals. It got into my head."
Maya studied him, her therapist's gaze missing nothing. She didn't believe him, but she saw the wall he'd built. "Okay," she said softly, smoothing his hair. "But I'm making an appointment with Dr. Alvez on Monday. Just a check-in. No pressure. We just need to make sure you're okay."
Leo nodded, defeated. An appointment. One more person who might look too closely.
After they left, he sat in the dark, the harmonic frequency from Stark Tower a drill in his skull. It wasn't a bridge. It was a beacon. And it was almost ready.
---
Saturday. The world held its breath.
The sky was a perfect, cloudless blue. A mockery.
During lunch in the cafeteria, Leo's Time Tap fired without warning. Not seconds. Minutes.
The vision hit him like a physical blow:
Fire in the main hallway. Not a fire—an inferno. Metal lockers running like molten wax. Molly trapped under a collapsed ceiling panel, her hand reaching out from the dust. Jake, face bloody, trying to pull her free. And outside the shattered wall of windows—the sky full of ships. Not Chitauri. Sleeker. Deadlier. Descending in a silent, deadly swarm toward Midtown High.
Screams. A symphony of them.
Leo gasped, his can of soda slipping from his hand to smash on the linoleum. Brown liquid fizzed around his shoes.
"Leo?" Molly was at his side in an instant. "You okay? You're white as a ghost."
"Something's coming," he whispered, his eyes fixed on the windows, on that perfect, terrible blue sky.
"What?"
The bell rang, shrill and absolute. The vision shattered. The present rushed back in—the smell of pizza, the deafening chatter, the sunlight pooling on the tables. But the fear remained, a block of ice in his gut.
He floated through the afternoon in a haze. In Chemistry, he nearly mixed nitric acid and glycerin, saved only by a last-second Time Tap flash of the beaker exploding and taking half the lab with it. In English, Mr. Haskins' lecture on sonnets was drowned out by his Terrain Sense tracking three separate tremor sources moving in concert toward Manhattan from the harbor. Deep, rhythmic thumps through the bedrock.
The city was a clock, and the second hand was sweeping toward midnight.
---
After school, he took the long way home through the park. His Terrain Sense was a riot of unwanted information—the vibration of every footstep, the rustle of every leaf, the distant thunder of a jet from LaGuardia. And beneath it all, the harmonic convergence of the alien frequencies. They had locked. The mapping was done. The target was acquired.
New York. Manhattan. Midtown.
He stopped at a payphone on Queens Boulevard, a relic in an age of cells. He didn't know why. He lifted the heavy receiver, the plastic cool and solid, and dialed his home number.
Maya answered on the second ring. "Hello?"
"Hey," Leo said, his voice thick. "Just… wanted to hear your voice."
"Leo?" Her voice sharpened with instant concern. "Sweetie, are you okay? Where are you?"
"Walking home. Everything's fine. I just… love you."
A pause. He could hear the worry in her silence, could picture her face, the slight crease between her brows. "I love you too, honey. So much. Come straight home, okay? Your dad's attempting his famous burnt… I mean, stir-fry."
Leo almost smiled. "Okay."
He hung up, the receiver suddenly heavy in his hand. He stood there for a long moment, the city swirling around him—people rushing home, cars honking, a siren wailing in the distance. A normal Saturday afternoon in a world that had hours left to live.
---
Night. The gathering storm.
The news at dinner was grim. "Unprecedented atmospheric ionization over Manhattan," the anchor said, a handsome man trying to mask his confusion with professionalism. "Authorities assure the public there is no cause for alarm, but advise citizens to report any unusual energy phenomena."
David muted the TV. "Atmospheric ionization on that scale…" he murmured, his mind already racing. "That's what's causing the grid instability. Something is charging the air like a giant capacitor."
"Or someone is," Maya said softly, her eyes drifting to Leo before she could stop herself. She looked away, but the glance had landed.
Leo kept his head down, pushing stir-fry around his plate. The food tasted like dust. The harmonic frequency was a constant, high-pitched whine in the center of his skull now. He could feel it in his teeth, his bones, the metal fillings in his molars.
After dinner, he went to his room but didn't try to sleep. He sat at the window, watching the sky. One by one, the stars were blotted out—not by clouds, but by vast, silent shapes sliding into position between the Earth and heaven. Cloaked ships. A fleet, moving into formation.
He opened his journal. Not to draw symbols. To write.
"I remember my name there. It was Taren. I saved them all. And then I died. I don't want to die again. I don't want to save anyone. I'm tired. I've done my time.
But today, in the cafeteria, I saw Molly trapped. I saw Jake bleeding. I saw my school burning.
If it comes… if it really comes… I don't think I can just watch.
The T-Factor is waking up. And I'm starting to remember how to use it. Not to be a hero. Not to be Taren. Just to be quiet. Just to be a ghost in the machine."
He closed the journal. Outside, the humming reached a crescendo, a single, unified frequency that vibrated in the glass of the window, in the springs of his bed, in the marrow of his bones.
In the north, over Stark Tower, the charged air began to glow.
END OF CHAPTER 3