Ravenwood Forest
10:15 AM
Sheriff Miller was a man who didn't believe in ghosts, aliens, or teenagers being up to anything good. He stepped out of his cruiser, his boots sinking into the soft mud of the logging road.
He adjusted his belt and walked toward the clearing. He had heard a noise. Not a gunshot—it sounded more like a transformer blowing up.
When he pushed through the ferns, he stopped.
"What in the hell..." Miller muttered.
In the middle of the clearing, there was a crater. It was about six feet wide, a perfect bowl scooped out of the earth. The mud was smoking. The trees around it were stripped of their bark on one side, as if a shockwave had hit them.
Miller walked to the edge of the crater. He crouched down and picked up a piece of twisted yellow plastic. It was a fragment of a Sony Walkman.
"Kids," Miller grunted. "Fireworks? Dynamite?"
He stood up, scanning the tree line. The woods were silent. Too silent.
"I know you're out there!" Miller shouted, his voice echoing off the trees. "Come out now, and I won't call your parents! But if I have to hunt you down, you're spending the weekend in a cell!"
Fifty yards away, hidden in a deep drainage ditch covered by blackberry brambles, five teenagers held their breath.
Marco was wincing, clutching his bruised chest. Maya had her hand over her mouth. Kenji was staring at the Sheriff through a gap in the leaves, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Miller waited a full minute. Then, he sighed, pocketed the plastic shard, and walked back to his cruiser.
Crunch. Slam.
The engine started, and the car slowly rolled away back toward town.
"Clear," Kenji whispered.
They scrambled out of the ditch, covered in mud and dead leaves.
"He has the evidence," Aris said, wiping his glasses. "He has my Walkman. If he finds a fingerprint or serial number..."
"He won't," Sarah said sharply. She was limping slightly, favoring her left leg. "Miller is lazy. He thinks we were setting off M-80s. We have bigger problems."
She turned to Kenji. Her face was smeared with dirt, but her eyes were burning with intensity.
"My house," Sarah said. "Now."
"Why?" Marco asked.
"Because that Thing—the Detective—said he knew my grandfather," Sarah said. "He said he ate him. That means my grandpa didn't just die in a lab accident. He was murdered by these things. And if he was working on Project Echo, he must have left something behind."
The Vance Residence
11:30 AM
Sarah's house was a large, creaky Victorian on the edge of town. It smelled like lemon pledge and silence. Her dad was a traveling salesman and was gone for the weekend, which was the only reason they could sneak four muddy friends in without getting caught.
"Upstairs," Sarah commanded.
They followed her up to the attic. It was a dusty, cramped space filled with boxes labeled "Xmas 94" and "Tax Returns."
"My dad keeps all of Grandpa's old junk in the corner," Sarah said, shoving a box of old clothes aside. "He never throws anything away."
She pointed to a stack of heavy, gray metal boxes. They looked like military surplus.
"Help me," she said.
Marco and Kenji grabbed the top box and hauled it to the center of the room. It was locked with a heavy padlock.
"Aris," Kenji said. "Do your thing."
Aris knelt down. He didn't have his scanner anymore, but he still had his ears. He pressed his ear against the lock mechanism. He closed his eyes, listening to the tumblers.
"It's rusted," Aris whispered. "The pins are stuck. I can't hear the sequence."
"Move," Sarah said.
She didn't wait for Aris to get out of the way. She formed a small, concentrated dagger of light in her hand—only about three inches long, but intensely bright.
She jammed the light-dagger into the keyhole.
Hiss.
Smoke rose from the lock. The metal glowed cherry red, then melted. Sarah yanked the lock off and threw it aside. It clattered on the floor, still sizzling.
"Remind me never to make you mad," Marco muttered.
Sarah threw the lid open.
Inside, there was no gold, no money. Just electronic junk. Vacuum tubes, coils of copper wire, schematics drawn on blue graph paper, and strange, bulky devices that looked like half-finished radios.
"It's trash," Sarah said, her shoulders sagging. She kicked the box. "It's just trash."
"No," Kenji said, reaching in. He pulled out a black notebook. "Look at this."
He opened the book. The pages were yellowed and brittle. The handwriting was frantic, scrawled in black ink.
Kenji read the first page aloud.
"October 14, 1984. The signal is not random. It is a language. We have made contact. They call themselves the Void. They promise energy. Infinite energy. But the price... the price is biology."
"The price is biology," Maya whispered, shivering. "Like Mr. Henderson."
Kenji flipped through the pages. There were drawings of the creatures—the dogs, the glitch-shadows, and a sketch of a tall man in a trench coat.
Under the sketch of the Detective, Dr. Vance had written one word in capital letters: OBSERVER.
"He knew him," Sarah said, her voice trembling. "He knew the Detective."
"Keep reading," Aris urged. "Does it say how to stop them?"
Kenji flipped to the end of the journal. The last few pages were torn out. Ripped violently from the binding.
But tucked into the back cover was a cassette tape.
It wasn't a normal music tape. It was a micro-cassette, the kind used in answering machines. It had a label on it: PROTOCOL ZERO.
"We need a player," Aris said. "My Walkman is destroyed."
"My dad has a dictaphone in his office," Sarah said. She ran out of the room and returned a minute later with a small handheld recorder.
She popped the tape in and pressed play.
Click... Hiss...
The voice on the tape was shaky. It was a man's voice. Sarah's grandfather.
"If you are listening to this, the experiment failed. The Echo Gate was opened, but we couldn't close it. We only managed to... jam it. We put a lock on the door."
There was a sound of explosions in the background on the tape. People screaming.
"I have hidden the Key," the voice continued. "Not the person. The physical Key. The Control Unit. Without it, they can only send through small scouts. They cannot bring the Army. They cannot bring the King."
Kenji looked at the others. "The King?"
"I hid it where the signal is strongest," Dr. Vance's voice said. "In the belly of the beast. Beneath the cooling tower. Find the Black Box. Destroy it. Do not let them..."
The tape cut off with a loud screech, followed by the sound of breaking glass and a wet, crunching noise.
Sarah clicked the stop button. Her hands were shaking.
"He died recording that," she whispered.
" Beneath the cooling tower," Kenji repeated. "Where is that?"
"The old power plant," Marco said. "Out by the river. It's been shut down for years."
"That's where the Signal is coming from," Aris realized. "The satellite station was just the receiver. The Power Plant... that's the generator. That's the main Anchor Point."
Kenji stood up. He looked at the notebook, then at his friends.
"The Detective is looking for 'The Key'," Kenji said. "He thinks I'm the Key because I have powers. But he's wrong. Dr. Vance hid a physical key. A control unit."
"If we find it first," Sarah said, her eyes narrowing, "we can lock them out forever."
"Or," Aris swallowed hard, "we can accidentally open the door for the King."
"We have to go," Kenji said. "Tonight. If the Detective is tracking us, he'll figure out the location soon. We need to beat him to the Power Plant."
"Tonight?" Marco looked at his watch. "Kenji, we're beat. I have a bruise the size of a dinner plate. Sarah is limping."
"We don't have a choice," Kenji said grimly. "We rest for a few hours. We eat. Then, when the sun goes down... we break into the Power Plant."
"Great," Marco sighed, leaning back against a box of Christmas decorations. "Breaking and entering. Trespassing. Fighting interdimensional demons. My mom is going to be so disappointed."
Kenji looked out the small attic window. In the distance, rising above the trees, he could see the tall, ominous concrete smokestacks of the Ravenwood Nuclear Power Plant.
It looked like a tombstone against the gray sky.
"Get some sleep," Kenji said. "We move at dusk."