The first warning came two years ago, and Jane Williams had spent every day since quietly preparing for a disaster he couldn't explain to anyone.
He kept that to himself. Mostly because there was no good way to say I touched a glowing rock behind my house when I was thirteen and now I have the memories of an ancient god rattling around in my skull without the conversation going somewhere uncomfortable.
The second bell for third period rang at 9:47, and Jane was late.
He took the hallway at a jog, backpack bouncing against his shoulders, the worn straps threatening to give out on him for the four hundredth time. Maplewood High's east corridor was long and ugly, gray lockers, fluorescent lights that buzzed like dying insects, a motivational poster near the water fountain that read YOU GOT THIS! in aggressive yellow font. Someone had drawn a small frowning face on the exclamation point. It had been there for three weeks. The administration either hadn't noticed or had given up.
"Williams."
He stopped.
Mr. Hargrove was standing in the doorway of Room 114, arms folded, with the particular expression of a man who had been disappointed so many times that disappointment had become his resting state. He was fifty something, thin in the way that suggested he forgot to eat rather than made a choice about it, and he taught AP American History with a passion that his students mostly did not return.
"The Battle of Antietam," Hargrove said, "did not wait for people to finish their breakfast."
"Sorry," Jane said. "Alarm."
"Your alarm has been broken every Tuesday for six weeks."
"It's a recurring issue."
Hargrove stepped aside and let him in.
The classroom settled back into its normal hum as Jane dropped into his seat near the window, third row, second from the left. His chair scraped too loud against the floor and a few heads turned. He pulled out his notebook without looking up. The cover was covered in symbols that were not doodles, though they looked like it from a distance. Tight, looping script that no one at Maplewood High would recognize as anything other than abstract art.
He had filled four notebooks like that. He kept them under a loose floorboard at home.
Two rows ahead and one to the right, Darren Okafor was doing what Darren Okafor did in every class that wasn't gym: drawing an extremely detailed comic in the margins of his history notes while maintaining the focused expression of someone who was absolutely paying attention. He was a junior, technically, taking the class a year late after transferring from a school in Atlanta, and he had the particular energy of someone who had decided that Maplewood was a temporary situation and refused to fully commit to it.
He was good at the comic. Jane had seen it over his shoulder once, a detailed scifi story with consistent character designs and surprisingly dynamic panel composition, drawn entirely in blue ballpoint pen.
"Okafor." Hargrove didn't even look up from the board. "What was Lincoln's primary justification for the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure?"
Darren didn't miss a beat. "Military necessity. Depriving the Confederacy of its labor force and opening the door for Black soldiers to join the Union Army." He added a small explosion in the top corner of his page. "Also moral pressure from abolitionists and international opinion, mostly Britain."
Hargrove paused with his marker in midair. "Correct."
Darren turned the page to a fresh panel.
Jane copied the notes mechanically. His hand moved through the motions, dates, names, causes and consequences, while the older, quieter part of his mind turned over something else entirely.
It was not a premonition in any mystical sense. There was no voice, no vision. Just a pattern of signs that the memories in his head knew how to read, the way a sailor reads weather by the color of the sky at dawn. The qi in the atmosphere had been shifting for three days. Slow, like a tide pulling back before something large came in. The animals in the neighborhood had been restless. The birds were gone from the telephone wires this morning.
Today, the deeper part of him said, with the calm certainty of a man who had watched civilizations rise and fall.
Jane pressed the eraser end of his pencil against his chin and stared at the board.
Today.
He didn't know what to do with that. He had been preparing, his body was stronger than it looked, his qi pathways carved open through two years of predawn practice in his backyard, but preparation and readiness were not the same thing. He knew what was coming in the way you could know the shape of a hurricane from a weather map and still not be fully prepared for the sound it made when it arrived.
He wrote Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862 in his notebook and underlined it twice.
Fifth period was biology, in a room on the second floor that smelled faintly of formaldehyde and old rubber tubing. Mrs. Ellison had the confident energy of a woman who had taught the same curriculum for twenty years and no longer felt she needed to apologize for any part of it. She moved through the room with a clicker in one hand and a coffee mug in the other, stopping beside desks when she wanted to make a point rather than projecting from the front.
Jane sat in the back row. This was not a signal about his engagement, he was, genuinely, fine at bio, but the windows in the back faced south, and from that angle he could see the full width of the sky above the football field.
The clouds had turned darker in the last thirty minutes. Not the gray of a storm building. Something different. A heaviness that sat lower than clouds should.
Mrs. Ellison was talking about cellular respiration.
"The key distinction," she said, clicking to a diagram of the mitochondrial membrane, "is between aerobic and anaerobic pathways. Your body doesn't prefer one over the other out of some aesthetic choice, it uses what's available. Oxygen present, you run the efficient process. Oxygen absent, you run the expensive backup." She clicked again. "Evolution is pragmatic. It keeps the options open."
In the row ahead of Jane, a boy named Colt Mercer was leaning back in his chair at an angle that should have been structurally unsound. He had his arms crossed, his eyes half, open, and the expression of a man who was very close to sleep but was maintaining a thin veneer of consciousness out of social obligation.
Colt was the kind of person Jane found genuinely hard to read, not unfriendly, not particularly interested in anything at school, but occasionally said something that suggested a lot more going on behind the half, closed eyes than he let on. He had transferred in from somewhere in Wyoming at the start of the year. He wore the same brown jacket most days and had the build of someone who had done physical labor as a teenager and it had stuck.
"Mercer." Mrs. Ellison didn't slow her pace. "What happens to pyruvate in the absence of oxygen?"
Colt opened his eyes fully. "Gets converted to lactate. Regenerates NAD+ so glycolysis can keep running." He closed his eyes again. "Temporarily."
"And the consequence?"
"You get the burn. Muscles seize up. System telling you it's out of efficient options."
"Correct." She moved on.
Colt's eyes drifted closed again.
In the hallway outside, a door banged open and someone laughed, the specific laugh of a teenager who had found something alarming and defaulted to humor. Then a second voice, higher, less certain. Then nothing.
Jane was already standing.
"Williams," Mrs. Ellison said, with the reflexive authority of a teacher whose students were leaving their seats without permission, but her voice came out softer than usual, uncertain at the edges.
He moved to the window and looked out.
The football field was still there. The bleachers were still there. The parking lot beyond it, the line of trees at the edge of school property, the road, all still there. But above all of it, the sky had become something else. The red pulse was stronger now, rhythmic, casting everything below it in a color that had no business being in the afternoon sky over a high school in the Midwest.
And at the tree line, something moving.
Not an animal. Not a person. Something that moved the way neither of those things moved, with too many joints bending in the wrong directions, at a height that didn't match anything Jane had a normal, world word for.
There it is, the ancient part of him said. Calm. Patient. Like a man who had been waiting and was no longer surprised to see the thing he'd been waiting for.
Behind him, he heard a sound he had never heard in a classroom before: a short, sharp gasp, and then a body hitting the floor.
He turned.
Priya Nair, who had Bio sixth period, not fifth, Jane's mind registered uselessly, no, not Priya, a girl he didn't know, front row, dark hair, had slid out of her chair and was on the tile, eyes closed, breathing, but down.
Then a boy in the second row. The same way. No warning, no stumble, just there and then not there, like a puppet with its strings cut.
Mrs. Ellison was at her phone, dialing. "Everyone stay calm, stay in your seats."
Another student went down. Then another.
Colt Mercer was standing now, back against his desk, watching the room with an expression that was not panic. It was something closer to assessment. His eyes moved from each fallen student to the window and back again with a deliberateness that Jane clocked without having time to think about.
They're not dying, the old voice in Jane's head said, with absolute certainty. They're opening.
The red pulse in the sky deepened.
Outside, distantly, something screamed, not a person, not any sound that belonged to anything Jane had a name for, and then the parking lot lights all came on at once, blazing white against the red, stained afternoon, as if the building itself was trying to argue with what the sky had become.
Jane's hand went to his chest, to the place where two years of cultivation had carved something out of him that no one at this school knew existed. He could feel it now, the qi in the air, suddenly dense and wild and present in a way it never had been before outside of his backyard, flooding in through every crack and window.
Not just me, he realized.
Everyone.
He looked at the students on the floor. Four now. Five. Their breathing was steady, their faces slack and inward, turned, like people dreaming hard about something they could not name.
The world was giving everyone its first lesson, all at once, whether they had signed up for it or not.
From somewhere in the building, an alarm began to wail, the ordinary fire alarm, ridiculous and insufficient, and Jane was already moving for the door, because whatever was at the tree line was no longer at the tree line.
Colt Mercer's voice came from directly behind him.
"Hey." Steady. Unhurried. "You know what's happening, don't you."
It was not a question.
Jane looked back at him for exactly one second.
"Yeah," he said.
He pushed through the classroom door into the hallway, and the red light pouring through every window above was the same shade as the sky in a memory that wasn't his, the memory of a man who had stood at the beginning of a different world and watched it learn what it was.