The darkness in the Haven turned liquid, heavy.

  Tony felt his throat close, as if the oxygen in the room had suddenly been sucked out.

  Down there, in the black vastness of the auditorium, there was no other sound. No footsteps. No breath. Only silence.

  ?Then, the air changed.

  It wasn't a smell. It was a texture.

  A metallic taste invaded Tony's mouth, like he had just licked a nine-volt battery. It smelled of pure ozone, superheated copper, and static dust burning from the inside out.

  It was the smell of a short circuit in the fabric of reality.

  ?Tony reached for Cristy’s arm in the dark. He felt her trembling, a fine, continuous vibration.

  "Don't look," he whispered, but his voice was swallowed by the dense air.

  ?Then it began.

  It wasn't a sound. It was pressure.

  The walls of the Haven seemed to flex inward.

  The glass of the slit began to vibrate. Softly at first, then with a violence that made Tony's teeth sizzle in his gums.

  ?Zzzzzzzzzzt.

  ?A hum. Low. Seismic.

  They didn't hear it with their ears. They felt it in their spinal cords.

  Tony's eyes widened in the dark, paralyzed by terror. He knew that sensation.

  His blood froze in his veins.

  It was the exact same frequency that had tried to kill them in the clinic. He remembered the terror in Billy's eyes, the way the sound had hit everyone, bullies and victims alike, until he had shut it off by pure instinct.

  ?But here, in the acoustic silence of the cinema, the frequency was naked. Obscene.

  ?From the slit, in the abyss of the hall, something pulsed.

  Not a shape. Just a light.

  Two points of milky white, cold, heatless, lit up in the darkness of the first row.

  They were spaced apart. Too far apart to be human eyes.

  They were staring at the projection booth.

  They were staring at them.

  ?The white light moved. It snapped upward with unnatural speed, leaving a trail on the retina like a video glitch.

  It was climbing.

  It wasn't using the stairs. It was crawling up the vertical wall of the auditorium like a heavy metal spider, defying gravity.

  ?The hum became a psychic scream.

  Tony and Cristy huddled against the projector, trying to make themselves small, to disappear into the floor.

  But Alex moved.

  Not to run.

  Against all logic of survival, driven by that damned scientific curiosity that was his blessing and his curse, Alex pushed himself off the ground.

  "The oscillation..." he mumbled, voice distorted by effort, eyes wide and mad fixed on the rising light. "I need to identify the source. I need to see."

  ?"Alex, no!" Cristy screamed, grabbing his ankle with both hands.

  "Down! Stay down, dammit!" Tony yelled, trying to pull him by his belt.

  But Alex was in a trance. The need to rationalize the horror was stronger than fear. With a violent jerk, he broke free from his friends' grip.

  He stood up, staggering, a dark silhouette against the glow coming through the glass.

  ?He stood in front of the slit.

  For an instant, the reckless boy and the thing looked at each other.

  "Visual contact confirm..."

  ?The sentence died in a wet, horrible sound.

  The white light hit him square in the chest.

  It wasn't a physical blow. Alex arched backward as if hooked to a ten-thousand-volt line. His body lifted four inches off the ground, levitating in the static grip.

  His mouth opened in a silent scream, while the capillaries in his eyes exploded, coloring the sclera blood red.

  From his ears and nose, a dark stream spurted out, staining the glass of the slit.

  The creature wasn't just hitting him. It was switching him off.

  ?Alex collapsed to the ground like a sack of stones, hitting his head with a dull thud that shook the floor. He remained motionless.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  "ALEX!" Cristy screamed.

  ?Tony's mind began to fragment.

  And then, in the chaos of pain, he heard the voices.

  They weren't in the room. They were inside his head, like a badly tuned radio interference.

  ...static hisses...

  "It's okay..."

  The voice was Caleb Thompson's. Distorted, metallic, slowed down like a record playing backward.

  "...they were just joking... Billy's like that..."

  Tony screamed, pressing his palms to his temples. The bullied kid's words looped, overlapping the killer hum.

  ?Suddenly, a different sound tore through the static agony.

  A rhythmic thump-thump. Dirty.

  On the shelf, the forgotten dock station lit up.

  The air was so saturated with electromagnetic energy that the stereo circuits had bridged themselves.

  ?I'm waking up to ash and dust...

  Dan Reynolds' voice, distorted and cavernous, exploded in the Haven.

  I wipe my brow and I sweat my rust...

  ?It was Radioactive.

  The song filled the room, but it sounded wrong. Sped up, then slowed down, fighting against the hum that was liquefying their brains.

  ?But the music did something.

  The sound waves created interference. A hole in the cage of paralysis.

  Tony gasped. He managed to move a finger. Then his hand.

  He saw the pendant.

  It was there, on the Victoria 5 projector, inches from Cristy's distraught face.

  The quartz shone with an internal, furious light, pulsing in time with the song's distorted drums.

  ?Tony understood.

  That thing out there was pure energy. And the quartz was a tuning fork.

  He just had to change the note.

  ?He dragged himself forward, crawling over Alex's motionless legs. Blood covered his lips. Caleb's voices continued to echo in his skull.

  The glass of the slit exploded inward, a rain of sharp diamonds.

  The white light was there. Beyond the broken glass. Very close.

  Tony didn't look.

  ?He reached out.

  Trembling fingers brushed the cold metal of the projector.

  With a scream of primal rage that tore his throat, Tony slammed his open palm onto the quartz pendant, pressing it with all his might against the cast iron of the machine.

  ?"ENOUGH!"

  ?The contact wasn't electrical.

  It was absolute.

  The quartz sucked the static energy from the room, the music, the phantom voices, the terror, and vomited them out in a single reverse pulse.

  ?BOOM.

  ?The sound died.

  The music cut out. Caleb's voices vanished into nothing.

  The dock station smoked and went silent.

  The hum ceased abruptly, like a stopped heart.

  ?From the void of the auditorium, beyond the broken wall, came a horrible noise.

  The sound of something heavy and disjointed losing its grip on the vertical wall. Metal screeching on concrete.

  Then a thud.

  Distant. Down below.

  Dull and definitive.

  ?Tony remained motionless, hand glued to the projector, breath coming in painful hiccups.

  Silence had returned. But now it smelled of fried circuits and blood.

  ?"Alex..." Cristy whispered.

  Her voice was broken, terrified.

  Cristy crawled toward her friend lying on the floor. She rolled him onto his back.

  Alex was gray. His lips were bluish, eyes open but rolled back, showing only white. Blood still trickled from his nose and ears, black in the dim light of the outside neon filtering through the broken window.

  ?Cristy put her ear to Alex's chest.

  She stayed like that for a second that felt like a year.

  Then she raised her head to Tony. Her face was a mask of pure horror.

  "He's not breathing," she whispered. "Tony... his heart isn't beating. It stopped."

  ?Tony felt the world tilt.

  He dragged himself toward them, knees scraping on broken glass without feeling pain.

  He grabbed Alex's wrist. Cold. Inert.

  No pulse. That discharge had turned him off like a light bulb.

  "No... no, no, no," Tony muttered, starting to shake him. "Alex, wake up! Don't pull this shit on me, you asshole! WAKE UP!"

  ?"He's dead, Tony!" Cristy screamed, starting a desperate, clumsy chest massage. "It killed him! That thing killed him!"

  ?Tony looked at his friend's face. The boy who counted raindrops. The boy who built the closed system.

  Dying in an abandoned cinema. Like this.

  Despair closed his throat, but then, a memory hit him like a slap.

  ?The woods.

  The fall from the bike. The searing pain in his leg. And then the quartz.

  He remembered the heat. He remembered how the pain had vanished when he gripped the stone, as if the crystal had drunk the trauma to return energy to him.

  If it could absorb pain... could it absorb death too?

  Or could it give energy?

  ?Tony turned to the projector. The pendant was there, dim, gray.

  He grabbed it. It was freezing, heavy as lead.

  "Move," he ordered Cristy, pushing her away with a violence he didn't know he had.

  ?"What are you doing?" she sobbed.

  ?Tony didn't answer. He opened Alex's limp hand, forcing the stiff fingers.

  He placed the quartz on his friend's cold palm.

  Then he put his own hand over it, clasping Alex's hand and the stone in a two-person fist.

  He closed his eyes.

  He didn't pray. He didn't know how to pray.

  He sought that sensation. That vibration he had felt in the elevator, that connection that made him a node in the system.

  ?Give him some, he thought ferociously. Don't take. Give. Give him everything I have.

  ?For a second, nothing happened.

  Then, Tony felt a stab in his heart.

  It wasn't physical pain. It was as if someone had inserted a syringe into his chest and pulled the plunger, sucking out his life.

  He felt his strength leaving him, a sudden cold rising from his arm, crossing his shoulder and pouring into his hand, into the stone, into Alex.

  His vision blurred. He felt his legs turn to jelly.

  Take it, he thought, as darkness crept into the edges of his vision. Take it all, you bastard.

  ?The quartz between their hands lit up.

  It wasn't the blue light of the elevator.

  It was a red light. Violent. Arterial.

  ZZZAK.

  ?A visible discharge, a crimson voltaic arc, exploded from Tony's hand and shot through Alex's arm to his chest.

  Alex's body arched off the floor with a brutal snap, back lifting eight inches off the ground, as if hit by a defibrillator.

  ?"AAAAAH!"

  Alex opened his mouth in a scream that wasn't human. It was the scream of someone torn from the void and shoved back into flesh by force.

  He collapsed back to the floor, gasping, mouthing like a fish out of water.

  ?Tony fell backward, exhausted, tasting copper in his mouth.

  Cristy covered her mouth with her hands, trembling.

  ?Alex coughed violently, spitting black blood onto the floor. Then he inhaled. A raspy, deep, desperate breath.

  His eyes snapped open.

  The pupils were fully dilated, black, enormous, but the iris around them shone with a feverish, electric light.

  He sat up abruptly, with unnatural speed, without a trace of fatigue or trauma.

  He looked at his hands. He turned them over and over, moving his fingers frantically as if playing an invisible piano at double speed.

  ?"Alex?" Cristy whispered, terrified.

  ?Alex looked up at them.

  There was no fear in his eyes. There was... too much life. Too much current.

  "I feel everything," he said. His voice was fast, snappy, devoid of pauses. "I feel the hum of the neon outside. I feel a car engine three blocks away. I feel your hearts."

  He touched his chest.

  "It's like I swallowed lightning."

  ?Tony looked at the quartz in Alex's hand.

  The stone wasn't gray anymore. It had a red vein in the center, pulsing faintly, synchronized with his friend's accelerated heartbeat.

  Tony realized he hadn't just saved him.

  He had changed him.

  He had filled Alex with something that didn't belong in a human body.

  ?"We have to go," Alex said, springing to his feet with a fluid jump, not even using his hands. He grabbed his backpack. "Now. Immediately. Before it comes back. I can feel it... it's getting up down in the hall."

  ?Tony and Cristy exchanged a glance. Alex was alive.

  But the person looking at them with those electric eyes wasn't just their friend anymore. He had become part of the circuit.

  Author’s Note ??