The party at the community hall was supposed to be ordinary: a spring celebration to mark the end of exams, a place where teenagers could forget the weight of the world for a few hours. The hall smelled of fried samosas and cheap cologne, the speakers thumped a beat that made the floor vibrate underfoot, and strings of colored lights made the rafters look like a low, artificial sky. Eli went because his friends insisted, because being with them felt like a small rebellion against the quiet that had lived in his house for years.
He arrived late, the scarf tucked under his jacket, and found Maya leaning against the snack table, talking to Jonah about a transistor he was trying to fix. Asha was already there, hair pulled into a high ponytail, laughing with a group near the doorway. Tomas waved him over with the kind of grin that made Eli feel, for a moment, like the world might still be simple. They crowded into a corner where the lights were dim and the music was loud enough to blur the edges of everything.
The first sign that something was wrong was subtle: a ripple in the air above the dance floor, like heat over asphalt. People thought it was a trick of the lights at first. Then the ceiling split with a sound that felt like a throat clearing the sky. A column of pale light punched through the roof and the music died in a single, strangled note. The hall filled with a smell Eli could not name—metal and ozone and something that tasted like old rain.
Shapes dropped through the light. They were taller than any human, angular and too smooth, their limbs moving with a precision that made Eli's skin prickle. Their eyes were black and reflective, and when they moved they did so with a silence that made the panic around them sound louder. People screamed. Chairs toppled. The lights flickered and went out.
Eli felt the ember in his chest flare into a heat that had nothing to do with fear. It was a single, clear impulse: protect. He moved before he thought, because thinking would have been too slow. His hands found a rhythm he had not known he possessed. When an alien reached for a girl who had frozen under a fallen speaker, Eli shoved his palm forward and the air between them thickened like syrup. The creature staggered as if someone had pulled a string inside its body.
It was not just force. It was a shaping of something that felt older than his bones. The energy that answered him was not light or fire but a pressure that could bend motion and slow time in a narrow cone. He learned, in the span of a heartbeat, that he could push and pull the world in small, precise ways. He pulled the girl clear, then turned and shoved a second attacker into a wall. The hall became a blur of motion and sound and the strange, humming thing that lived in his hands.
His friends reacted the way friends do when the impossible happens: with a mixture of terror and a fierce, immediate loyalty. Maya grabbed a fallen broom and swung it with a precision that surprised her; Jonah yanked a string of lights down and used the wiring to trip an alien; Asha ran like the wind, pulling people out of harm's way with a speed that made Eli's head spin; Tomas shouted directions, his voice cutting through the chaos like a blade. They moved as a unit without having practiced it, because the stakes made practice unnecessary.
By the time the lights came back on, the attackers had retreated. The hall was a ruin of overturned tables and broken glass, and the air smelled of burnt wiring and something else—something like the memory of the column of light that had taken Eli's mother. People were crying and hugging and trying to make sense of what had happened. The police arrived with sirens and questions, and the town's rumor mill began to churn.
The aftermath was a tangle of interviews and whispered theories. The official line was cautious: an isolated incident, perhaps a prank, perhaps a gas leak, perhaps a misfiring generator. The town wanted neat answers and the adults offered them because neat answers are easier to live with. Eli and his friends knew better. They had felt the thing in the hall. They had seen the way the creatures moved. They had felt the ember in Eli's chest flare and become something dangerous and necessary.
Word spread quickly. The party attack was on every phone and in every conversation. Some people were afraid. Others were angry. A few were curious in a way that made Eli's skin crawl. The town's mayor called a meeting and the police increased patrols, but the sky did not care for meetings or patrols. The next week, lights were seen over the river. The week after, a farmer reported a missing herd and a strange residue on the grass that shimmered in the morning sun.
Eli found himself at the center of attention in a way he had never wanted. Reporters called, classmates asked questions, and strangers offered theories that ranged from the plausible to the absurd. He learned to answer with the right amount of distance, to give just enough information to satisfy curiosity without exposing the rawness of what he felt. He kept the scarf close and the ember closer, practicing in secret the things he had done at the party until the motions felt less like miracles and more like tools.
The attacks changed the town's rhythm. Curfews were suggested and then ignored. People installed motion lights and bought radios that could pick up strange frequencies. The Nightwatchers—though they did not yet call themselves that—began to meet more often. They met in basements and on rooftops, in the quiet hours when the town slept and the sky seemed to listen. They trained with a seriousness that made their teenage bodies look older. Jonah scavenged parts and built crude detectors that hummed when the air felt wrong. Maya mapped the sightings and found patterns in the chaos. Asha ran patrols and learned routes that let her reach any part of town in minutes. Tomas read and theorized and kept the group from falling into despair with jokes that were sometimes terrible and sometimes perfect.
Training was not glamorous. It was repetition and bruises and the slow, stubborn accumulation of competence. Eli practiced shaping the pressure he could summon, learning to focus it into a shield or a shove or a narrow thread that could cut through an alien tether. He learned to breathe in a way that steadied the ember instead of letting it flare out of control. The others trained their bodies and their minds. They learned to move as a unit, to cover each other's blind spots, to trust the instincts that had saved them at the party.
The first time one of them changed in a way that could not be explained by training alone, it was small and private. Maya was alone on the roof, tracing a line on a map with her finger, when she felt a tug in her chest and the paper under her hand warmed. The ink bled into a pattern she had not drawn, a map of electromagnetic trails that led to a place outside town. She stared at it until the sun came up and then she called Eli and told him, voice shaking with something like awe.
That was the moment the group understood that abilities could be contagious—not in a disease sense, but in a way that came from proximity to the ember and from the willingness to step into danger. Each fight, each training session, each night spent watching the sky left a residue on them. It was not magic in the way stories told; it was a slow accretion of skill and something else, a change that made their reflexes keener and their senses more attuned to the world's hidden seams.
As the attacks increased, so did their resolve. They were teenagers who had been given a terrible inheritance and had chosen to answer it. They were not heroes in the way the movies promised—there were no capes, no grand speeches—but there was a fierce, practical courage that grew in them like a muscle. They learned to patch wounds and to comfort each other. They learned to argue and then to forgive. They learned that fear could be a tool if you did not let it become the master.
The town watched them with a mixture of suspicion and gratitude. Some parents forbade their children from going out at night. Others left casseroles on the Nightwatchers' doorsteps and whispered thanks. The police kept their distance, unsure whether to treat the group as vigilantes or as witnesses. Eli did not care what the adults thought. He cared about the ember and the scarf and the promise that had started everything. He cared about the friends who had become something like family.
On nights when the sky was clear and the stars were sharp, Eli would stand on the roof with the others and feel the town breathe below them. The ember in his chest would hum, a steady, patient thing. He did not know where the next attack would come from or whether they would be ready when it did. He only knew that they would not be alone. They had each other, and that was enough to begin again.