Most people need a calm quiet to sleep. Today's complete lack of sound was enough to wake him up.

  Kaelen lay on the couch with one arm folded under his head and the other hanging off the edge, knuckles brushing the hardwood. Cargo joggers, NASA t-shirt, the remnants of a Tuesday afternoon nap that had gone sideways into something deeper. He blinked once. Twice. Turning mostly onto his back he stared at the ceiling fan which had almost stopped spinning.

  The fan was always moving.

  He sat up and swung his legs off the cushion, feet flat on the floor. The apartment has an uncomfortable stillness. Not the comfortable quiet of a lazy afternoon, the wrong kind, the kind where a sound you've heard every day of your life just stops and the absence presses against your eardrums like a change in cabin pressure. No rumble from the CTA Brown Line two blocks west. No tire noise from Shoreline Drive you can even hear through closed windows. No electrical hum from the building's HVAC system, which had been making a low grinding sound since October that management swore they'd fixed twice. The low throb of the refrigerator fan had even stopped.

  All of it was just gone.

  The phone on the coffee table lit up fine when he grabbed it. Sixty-three percent battery, but the signal bars were empty. No cell, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth. He turned it over in his hand, angled it toward the window as if two inches might find a stray tower. Nothing. The time read 2:47 PM. The date was still correct. Everything else was dead.

  The sliding glass door to the balcony was closed. He crossed the living room in four strides, weaving between the gutted Medieval Madness cabinet and the stack of replacement playfield rails he'd been meaning to catalog and pushed the door open. The track stuck at the halfway point like it always did. He shoved through the gap and gripped the railing with both hands.

  Lake Michigan was still there.

  That was the first thing he checked, and for about three seconds, the tightness in his diaphragm loosened. The water stretched east to the horizon, flat and gray-green under a pale sky, same as it had looked from this balcony every day for two years. Same texture. Same color. Same smell...ish. Kaellen could still pick up the cold freshwater and algae and the faint diesel tinge from the harbor but there was something more.

  Then he looked south along the waterline, and everything seized back up harder.

  The harbor piers ended. Not tapered off, not faded into fog... ended. Jagged concrete stubs jutted out over open water where the marina docks should have continued for another quarter mile. The breakwater was gone. Most of the charter boat slips were gone with only a few of the luxury power cruisers in their slips. Half a dozen sailboats that should have been moored to pilings sat drifting in open water with their lines trailing loose, hulls turning slow circles in a current that shouldn't have existed this close to shore.

  He leaned over the railing and looked straight down. Shoreline Drive was twelve stories below and the cars on it were not moving. Vehicles sat stalled in the Southbound lane frozen mid-commute, doors beginning to open. Tiny figures climbed out and stood on the pavement, looking at each other, looking at their phones, looking at the sky. One woman in a red jacket walked to the edge of the road stopped and just stared at the ground where the asphalt met something else... raw, dark earth that wasn't supposed to be there.

  To his left a little Northwest, Navy Pier should have been visible. The Ferris wheel. The exhibition halls. The parking lots packed with tourist buses. Nothing. Just stone, sand and scrubgrass. A low rocky shoreline extending into the water with nothing on it but wind.

  He inhaled through his nose, mouth slightly open, and explored the new fragrance - something thin and sharp. A metallic undertone that clung to the back of his tongue and didn't match anything in his catalog of Chicago air. Not exhaust, not quite ozone, though that was the closest word. Something under it, something organic, like the air itself had been swapped out for a slightly different blend and his lungs hadn't gotten the memo.

  Kaelen stepped back from the railing. While his hands were steady, his pulse was running about forty beats too fast for that to be true, and the disconnect between what his fingers reported and what the artery in his neck was doing had him cataloging his own vitals like a lab instrument with a bad calibration.

  The phone was useless. The internet was gone. Whatever was happening outside was big and silent and wrong in a way he didn't have a framework for yet. But the camera on his phone worked, and somewhere between that thought and his next breath, his feet were already carrying him across the apartment to the equipment shelf by the bedroom door.

  The Vlogger's Rig sat in its charging cradle... his custom-built camera rig, solar panels folded along the housing, lens cap snapped tight. He'd built it himself over three months of weekends, soldering the charge controller and waterproofing the housing with marine epoxy while Malinda sat on the kitchen counter eating takeout and asking him why he couldn't just buy a GoPro like a normal person. The battery indicator showed full. He pulled it free, popped off the lens cap, and hit record.

  "Okay." He held the rig at chest height and turned toward the balcony. "Okay, not sure where to begin. I don't know what's happening."

  The red recording light blinked. Back on the balcony, he swept the camera in a slow arc, left to right. The truncated harbor piers. The drifting boats. The dead cars on Shoreline Drive. The baren Navy Pier peninsula.

  "The roads are cut. Like, physically cut, I'm not being dramatic, the asphalt just stops as if sheared off and then there's dirt. The pier is gone. The whole pier. There's nothing there. And the air..." He paused, licked his lips. "The air tastes wrong. I don't know how else to describe it. Something metallic. I don't know."

  He was narrating to no one. No upload. No audience. No algorithm to catch his cadence and push it to the front page. He knew that. He kept talking anyway, because the alternative was standing on a balcony in total silence.

  A shadow passed over his hands.

  He lowered the camera and glanced up, squinting against the pale sky. A silhouette banked above the building, large, maybe six-foot wingspan, moving in a tight descending spiral. His first thought was a hawk as it was clearly larger than a seagull. His second thought was that hawks didn't have tails that long, and his third thought didn't finish forming because the shape dropped below the roofline and he saw what it actually was.

  Not a bird.

  Leathery wings. A body covered in overlapping scales the color of wet slate, catching the light in some goopy mucus or something. A long, whip-thin tail trailing behind it with a barbed tip. A head that was all jaw and elongated, angular, with nostrils that flared open. Seeking. Kaelen didn't like the look as it turned toward him and found his scent.

  The thing pulled up hard, wings flaring to brake, and landed on the balcony railing three feet from where his hands had been gripping ten seconds ago. The metal groaned under its weight. Its body was the size of a large dog, compact and muscular, and it stared at him with vertical-slit pupils set in eyes the color of bile.

  Kaelen backed through the sliding door gap. The creature's head tracked him, nostrils working, jaw cracking open to reveal teeth that were not designed for plants.

  It launched off the railing.

  The sliding glass door exploded inward. Kaelen threw himself behind the couch as the creature came through in a kinetic spray of tempered glass and thrashing wings, talons raking the hardwood where he'd been standing a half-second earlier. Large shards of glass scattered across the floor in every direction, on his arms, into his hair, pinging off the steel legs of the Medieval Madness cabinet. The camera flew out of his hand and hit the floor, sliding into the corner lens-down, the red recording light still blinking.

  He scrambled to his feet on the far side of the couch. The creature was between him and the hallway. Between him and the destroyed balcony door. Its wings folded tight against its body as it swung its head left and right, pupils contracting, and then it focused on him and hissed... Made him think of a quarter being dragged across a pane of glass.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  No weapons. No combat training. No experience with anything more dangerous than a soldering iron and that one time he'd gotten too close to a belt sander. The hallway was eight feet behind the creature. It had covered six in a single lunge. Math didn't favor running.

  Okay. Okay. What did he have? Three machines, one in reach. The Addams Family cabinet sat against the wall to his right. He'd pulled the playfield out last week to replace a cracked lane guide, and he'd left the ball shooter mechanism exposed... the solenoid, the plunger rod, the coiled spring, the steel ball still seated in the launch channel. A solenoid was just an electromagnet. Feed it current and the plunger fired forward with enough force to send a three-ounce steel ball the length of a four-foot playfield at roughly thirty miles an hour. He'd left it plugged into the wall, or he thought he had. The power was dead. But the backup battery he'd wired into the control board for testing was a twelve-volt lithium pack, and it was still connected.

  The creature took a step toward him, claws clicking on hardwood.

  Kaelen dropped behind the Addams Family cabinet, grabbed the exposed solenoid housing with both hands, and ripped it free from the mounting bracket. Wires tore loose. He held the solenoid in his left hand, the plunger rod pointing forward, and with his right he grabbed the battery lead and touched it to the contact terminal.

  Nothing happened.

  Wrong polarity. He had the leads backward. ARGH!

  The creature lunged. He threw himself sideways, hit the floor, rolled, and came up with his back against the wall and the solenoid still in his hands. Blood ran from a cut on his forearm where a glass shard had caught him. The creature overshot, crashed into the Medieval Madness cabinet, and spun back toward him with its jaw wide open, a guttural shriek tearing out of its throat.

  He swapped the leads.

  The solenoid fired. The steel pinball punched out of the launch channel and crossed the six feet between him and the creature in a fraction of a second. It hit the back of the thing's open mouth with a sound like a hammer striking wet stone.

  The creature's head snapped back. Its shriek cut off into a strangled gurgle. It stumbled sideways, wings flailing, talons scratching furrows into the hardwood, and Kaelen was on his feet before he'd decided to stand, grabbing a length of playfield glass from the disassembled Medieval Madness... a thick, tempered panel about two feet long. Holding his makeshift and flimsy shield in font of him he started to advance.

  The creature was choking. The steel ball was lodged somewhere in its throat and it couldn't get air. Kaelen shoved the glass panel forward, pushing the thing backward step by step, its claws skidding on the glass-covered floor, its wings beating against the walls and knocking a framed photo of Lake Michigan off its hook. Three steps. Four. The balcony doorframe. He drove the panel forward one final time and the creature tumbled backward over the railing and dropped.

  He didn't watch it fall.

  He stood in the doorframe, glass panel still raised, arms locked, and waited. Wind came through the shattered door and moved over his skin. The silence outside was total.

  Thirty seconds. A minute. Nothing came back up.

  He lowered the glass and it slipped from his fingers and cracked on the floor. Blood was running from cuts on both forearms and across his palms, welling up in thin lines where the shards had bitten in. His hands were shaking, not a little, a lot, the kind of tremor that started in the fingers and worked its way up into the shoulders and jaw. He braced both palms on his knees and bent forward and breathed through his teeth until the shaking dialed down from violent to merely constant.

  The camera had settled in the corner by the couch, face-down in a scatter of glass. The red light was still on.

  He crossed the room, picked it up, wiped a smear of blood off the lens with the hem of his shirt, and held it at face level. His reflection in the dark glass around the lens was a stranger... panting, bleeding, a piece of glass caught in his hair.

  "Okay, so, fun fact..." His voice cracked. He swallowed. Started again. "Fun fact. That is not a bird."

  He stared into the lens for a long moment. The humor landed nowhere. There was no audience to laugh, no comment section to dissect the footage, no algorithm to reward the hook. Just the camera, and his face, and the wrecked apartment behind him with the wind coming through where a wall of glass used to be.

  He lowered the rig to his side.

  The living room was destroyed. Glass everywhere. Claw marks in the hardwood. The Medieval Madness cabinet knocked sideways, its backbox cracked. A third machine in the corner, still under its dust cover, untouched by the chaos as if the universe had run out of things to break before it got that far. The Addams Family machine gutted where he'd ripped the solenoid free, wires hanging loose, the control board dark. Malinda's machine. She never admitted it, but she'd play it for an hour on Saturday mornings while he slept in, the flipper clatter and the sound effects bleeding through the bedroom wall. On the kitchen counter, past the overturned bar stool and the scattered mail, her stethoscope hung from the back of a chair where she'd draped it this morning before leaving for the clinic.

  This morning. Was it still the same day?

  He looked at the stethoscope and something moved in his chest that had nothing to do with adrenaline. Malinda was at work. Had been at work. She was supposed to be fifteen minutes away by train, at the clinic on Armitage, seeing patients and charting vitals and texting him reminders to eat something that wasn't cereal. Fifteen minutes by train, in a city that had a train, in a world that still had cell towers and roads that didn't end in dirt.

  He didn't know where she was. He didn't know if the city she was in still existed outside this window. He didn't know what the boundary was between here and there, or if there was a there at all, or if Malinda was standing in a parking lot somewhere looking at the sky and wondering why his number wasn't connecting.

  The stethoscope hung motionless in the still air.

  He stepped into the bedroom and looked out that window instead. The forest to the southwest stretched to the horizon... dense, dark, old-growth canopy in greens that were wrong. Not Chicago greens, no dusty park elms and ornamental maples in Grant Park. These were deeper and a bit more blue. The kind of green that said this forest had been growing for a very long time without anyone asking it to stop. Unfamiliar insect sounds rose from it, clicks and drones pitched at frequencies he couldn't place, layered over each other in patterns that sounded almost organized. And underneath all of it, that taste in the air. That metallic sharpness, thin and persistent, coating the back of his throat.

  The light was going. The sun, if it was the same sun, sat low behind the treeline, painting the canopy in amber and deep orange. The shadows between the trunks were already black.

  He lifted the camera one more time. Held it at face level, pointed at himself, the darkening forest visible over his shoulder through the shattered door.

  "I don't know what comes next." His voice was flat. Steady, but flat. No performance. Just the words. "Malinda, if you can see this... I don't know how but I'm okay. I'm in the apartment. Something happened and I don't know what, but I'm okay."

  He looked into the lens for another breath. Then he lowered it, thumbed the record button, and killed the red light.

  The forest darkened. The silence pressed. Kaelen stood in the wreckage of his living room, alone, bleeding, twelve stories above a road that went nowhere, and watched the last of the light slowly drain out of a sky he didn't recognize.