At 3:17 a.m the town woke under a sky that looked bruised, as if something enormous had pressed its thumb into the heavens and left the mark there to ache. The air tasted metallic, like a storm that refused to break.
People said it looked like rain at first, something pale drifting down through the black.
But rain doesn't hit the ground with a sound that cracks bone.
A body landed in the center of town square, limbs arranged in a position no living thing could imitate without screaming. There was no blood, only a faint smear of ash, like the corpse had been burned by something colder than fire.
The impact shattered two cobblestones.
A dog three streets away began howling and didn't stop for forty minutes.
By the time the first police car arrived, the ash had spread, thin black lines radiating outward from the body like a blast pattern, like something had pulled the darkness out of the corpse and let it stain the ground.
Officer Marcus Chen was the first to approach.
He'd been on the force for eleven years. He'd seen overdoses, suicides, domestic violence scenes that made him vomit in gas station bathrooms on the way home. He thought he was prepared.
He wasn't.
The body was a man, maybe forty, wearing pajamas. His eyes were open. His mouth was open. But the expression wasn't fear or pain, it was pure interruption.
A look like someone had cut his final thought in half.
His pupils were blown wide, too wide, as if he'd seen something that didn't belong in a human world. A faint line of dried moisture clung to one eye, not tears, more like the eye's last reflex before shutting down.
His jaw hung in an odd angle, not broken, just slack in a way that suggested speech had been forming... and then erased.
A thin frost clung to the front of his shirt, the kind that forms when a room drops ten degrees in a breath.
And beneath his fingernails, packed tight, was a dust so black it reflected no light. Not dirt. Not ash. Something finer, like he'd been scraping at a shadow with substance.
Chen knelt beside him, pressed two fingers to the man's throat out of habit, knowing there'd be nothing.
The skin was cold.
Not corpse-cold. Not room-temperature cold.
The kind of cold that shouldn't exist in living tissue. The kind of cold that made Chen pull his hand back fast and wipe it on his pants like he'd touched something infectious.
"Dispatch, this is Unit 7," he said into his radio, voice steadier than he felt. "Confirming one DB in the town square. No signs of trauma. Appears to have... fallen."
"Fallen from where?"
Chen looked up.
The sky was empty. No buildings tall enough. No planes. No bridges.
Just empty black sky and stars that suddenly seemed too far away.
"I don't know," he said quietly.
By sunrise, the square was cordoned off with yellow tape that snapped in the wind like something alive and angry.
By sunrise, two more bodies had fallen.
Leah Stonewoke at 3:17 a.m. to the taste of copper in her mouth.
Not blood. She checked, ran her tongue over her teeth, swallowed, tasted again.
Still copper. Still wrong.
She sat up in bed, heart racing for no reason she could name, and looked at her hands in the darkness.
They were shaking.
No... not shaking. Vibrating. Like she was touching something electric, except she wasn't touching anything at all.
The sensation crawled up her arms, settled behind her eyes, and pressed.
She knew this feeling.
She'd felt it forty-three times before.
Leah grabbed her phone from the nightstand 3:18 a.m. now and opened the notebook app where she kept her list. The one she'd never shown anyone. The one that would make her sound insane if she tried to explain.
She created a new entry:
November 2nd, 3:17 AM. Pressure event. Copper taste. Hands vibrating. Duration: ongoing.
Then she sat there in the dark, waiting.
Waiting for the news. Waiting for the sirens. Waiting for confirmation that someone, somewhere nearby, had just died.
It always happened within seventy-two hours.
Always.
She'd tested it. Tracked it. Documented it obsessively for three years, trying to find a pattern, trying to find a reason, trying to find anything that would make it make sense.
But there was no pattern. No warning. Just the symptoms, the copper taste, the vibration, the pressure behind her eyes, and then, inevitably, death.
Not her death.
Never her.
Always someone else.
Someone who'd been near her recently.
Someone who'd passed her on the street, sat near her at the DMV, brushed past her in a grocery store aisle.
People she didn't know.
People whose names she only learned from obituaries.
Downstairs, her mother's voice rose in panic, muffled through the floorboards but unmistakable.
Leah closed her eyes.
Here we go.
By the time she came downstairs, her mother was pacing the kitchen with her phone pressed to her ear, her free hand clutching the edge of the counter like it was the only thing keeping her upright.
"--I don't know, I don't know, they're not saying anything except that people should stay inside-"
Leah stood in the doorway, waiting.
Her mother turned, saw her, and something in her face flinched.
It was subtle. Quick. The kind of microexpression most people wouldn't notice.
But Leah had been watching for it for years.
Her mother was afraid of her.
Not obviously. Not cruelly. But somewhere deep down, in a place her mother would never admit to, there was fear. The kind you feel toward things you can't explain. Things that break the rules.
"Leah," her mother said, forcing brightness into her voice. "Did the sirens wake you?"
"No."
"Oh. Well. There's been some kind of... accident. In town. They're asking people to stay home until-"
"Someone died."
It wasn't a question.
Her mother's hand tightened on the phone. "They didn't say that. They just said there was an incident-"
"How many?"
"Leah-"
"How many, Mom?"
Silence.
Then, quietly: "Three."
Leah felt the pressure behind her eyes spike... just for a second, just enough to make her vision blur-and then it was gone.
Confirmation.
The mark had been placed.
Whatever had happened at 3:17 a.m.,
whatever had killed those three people, it had started with her.
She didn't cause it.
She never caused it.
But somehow... in a way she still didn't understand... she announced it.
Like thunder before lightning.
Like the smell of ozone before the strike.
"I'm going back to bed," Leah said.
Her mother opened her mouth, closed it, nodded.
As Leah turned to leave, she heard her mother whisper into the phone:
"She knew. I don't know how, but she knew."
Leah didn't go back to bed.
She sat on her bedroom floor with her notebook open, pen in hand, and added to the list:
November 2nd, 3:17 AM - Three deaths. Location: town square. Details unknown.
Forty-six names now.
Forty-six people dead in three years.
And she was starting to suspect it wasn't going to stop at forty-six.
Outside her window, the first red and blue lights began to pulse through the darkness, painting her walls in alternating colors.
She watched them for a long time.
Then she stood, walked to her closet, and pulled out the black jacket she hadn't worn in four months not since the last time she'd left the house, not since Mrs. Chen from two streets over had smiled at her in the post office and died of an aneurysm five days later.
Leah put the jacket on.
Pulled her hair back.
Looked at herself in the mirror.
The girl staring back looked tired. Hollowed out. Like something had been slowly eating her from the inside for years and was finally starting to show.
But her eyes-
Her eyes looked different.
Not scared.
Not sad.
Just... waiting.
Like she'd been expecting this moment her entire life.
Leah turned away from the mirror, opened her bedroom door, and walked downstairs as quietly as she could.
Her mother was still on the phone in the kitchen, crying now.
Her father's car wasn't in the driveway. It hadn't been for six weeks.
No one stopped her as she slipped out the front door and started walking toward town.
Toward the sirens.
Toward the bodies.
Toward whatever was waiting for her at 3:17 a.m.
[To be continued]