He was woken at 3:42 a.m. by a sound he had no word for.
It wasn't an explosion — he'd heard those on the news, the flat compressed bang of something structural giving way. This was deeper. A vibration that started in the soles of his feet and traveled upward through the mattress springs, through the building's bones, through the air itself, until it arrived in his chest as something between a sound and a feeling.
Then the light.
Even through the curtains it was extraordinary. A white-blue brilliance that erased shadows, that came from everywhere at once and nowhere in particular, that lasted approximately two and a half seconds and in those two and a half seconds was somehow the brightest thing he had ever seen.
Kael was on his feet before he was fully conscious. He crossed to the window and pulled back the curtain and looked northeast, toward where the light seemed to have come from, and what he saw made him understand, in a slow and reluctant way, that the world he had woken up in yesterday no longer existed.
The sky was split.
Not metaphorically. Not in the poetic sense that sometimes shows up in disaster movies when a spaceship breaks the cloud cover. The sky was literally split — a fracture running from horizon to horizon, dark on one side and burning on the other, as if someone had drawn a line across the atmosphere with a blade of impossible heat. Through the fracture, something pulsed. Not light exactly. Not fire exactly. Something that had no color he could name and made his eyes water trying to focus on it.
His phone buzzed. An emergency alert, the kind with the terrible shrieking sound:
EMERGENCY ALERT — IMPACT EVENT DETECTED — SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY — THIS IS NOT A TEST
Below, Crestfall was waking up. He could hear it — voices, car alarms, somewhere the distant wail of fire trucks setting out in a direction they hadn't been trained for. He heard doors opening in the hallway. He heard Torres across the floor saying something that started with "Holy—" and didn't finish.
Kael stood at his window and watched the sky bleed.
The fracture was spreading. Or rather it was — pulsing. Breathing. With each pulse the light that wasn't quite light spilled further into the normal atmosphere, and where it touched things, those things became briefly visible in a way they'd never been before. The buildings. The trees along Meridian Street. His own hands on the windowsill. All of it outlined in something that looked like energy made physical, like the edge of everything had been traced by a hand that knew what matter really was at its most fundamental level.
And then the pulse reached him.
He felt it like a wave of warm water — except not warm, exactly, and not water. It washed through the window glass as if the glass wasn't there. It passed through the wall, through the curtains, through the air and the space between atoms and arrived inside him with the gentlest possible touch, the way a key arrives in a lock.
For one moment — half a second, maybe less — he felt every cell in his body light up. Not painfully. Like recognition.
Then it was gone, and he was standing at his window again, heart hammering, palms damp, watching the fractured sky.
In the distance, where the meteor had fallen, a column of dust and fire rose thirty thousand feet into the atmosphere and kept going.
The world had ended.
Or perhaps — though he wouldn't understand this for weeks yet — it had simply changed.