The hum vanished as abruptly as it had begun.

  Erika snapped her eyes open.

  She was still standing on the slope.

  Frozen soil beneath her boots. The same jagged rocks. The same merciless night sky stretched overhead, stars sharp and indifferent.

  For a split second, she wondered if everything she’d just experienced—the blue light, the weightlessness—had been nothing more than hypoxia-induced hallucination.

  Then her lungs burned.

  Her breath came fast and shallow, her heart pounding so hard it hurt. Heat still lingered in her palm, and beneath her jacket, the jade pendant throbbed faintly, as if cooling down after exertion.

  She glanced down at her scanner.

  The screen was dead.

  Not frozen. Not glitching.

  Dead.

  A faint smell of overheated circuitry rose from the casing.

  Her fingers tightened around the device. That shouldn’t have been possible—not from ambient magnetic interference alone.

  Before she could think further, her phone vibrated sharply in her pocket.

  The sudden sound felt obscenely loud against the plateau’s silence.

  She pulled it out.

  Unknown Number.

  There was no signal bar. No carrier information.

  Just the number.

  She hesitated for barely a second before answering.

  “Hello?”

  The wind roared faintly through the receiver.

  Then a man’s voice cut through it—low, controlled, carrying a clear Nordic accent.

  “Erika Li.”

  Her spine stiffened.

  “Yes,” she said cautiously. “Who is this?”

  “My name is Lucas White,” the voice replied. “I’m a physicist at the University of Troms?, Norway.”

  The answer came too quickly, too smoothly—like something rehearsed.

  “And,” he added, “you were standing near an anomalous energy spike approximately ninety seconds ago.”

  Erika stopped breathing.

  “What did you just say?”

  “I’m assuming your instruments failed immediately afterward,” Lucas continued, unfazed. “Magnetic overload, power collapse. Likely irreversible.”

  Her grip on the phone tightened. “How do you know that?”

  A brief pause.

  “Because the exact same thing happened to me.”

  The wind howled louder in her ears.

  “You’re going to need to tell me how you got this number,” she said, forcing calm into her voice.

  “Later,” Lucas replied. “First, answer this: three nights ago, did you dream of a fractured sky?”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Erika’s heart skipped.

  “In the dream,” he went on, “the sky breaks like glass. Blue symbols float where the stars should be. And there’s a structure—stone, circular, older than anything you’ve ever studied.”

  Her throat went dry.

  She hadn’t told anyone about that dream. Not her colleagues. Not her advisor. Not even herself, really—she’d dismissed it as stress and altitude.

  “You’re listening,” Lucas said quietly. “That’s good.”

  “Who are you really?” she demanded.

  “Someone who noticed the aurora behaving incorrectly,” he replied. “Three nights ago, the northern lights spiked far beyond historical norms. Same frequency pattern appeared in South America’s upper atmosphere, the African savanna, and the Tibetan Plateau.”

  Erika felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold.

  “These aren’t random events,” Lucas said. “They form a synchronized pattern. A global one.”

  Her gaze drifted across the dark slope.

  The stone slab was gone.

  In its place, the ground looked untouched—as if nothing had ever been there.

  “Why call me?” she asked.

  “Because whatever triggered this phenomenon,” Lucas said, “responds to people, not places.”

  Another pause—shorter this time.

  “And because you weren’t the only one.”

  A high-pitched screech tore through the line.

  Static exploded in her ear, sharp enough to make her wince. The signal warped, the voice stretching unnaturally.

  “—there’s a third—”

  The call cut off.

  The screen went black.

  No signal.

  No error message.

  Just silence.

  Erika stood there, phone still pressed to her ear, the cold finally seeping back into her fingers.

  Then she saw it.

  Far downslope—fifty, maybe sixty meters away—the frozen ground rippled.

  A ring of pale blue light spread outward like a wave across water, then collapsed inward again, pulsing slowly.

  Breathing.

  Her jade pendant flared hot against her chest, far more violently than before.

  This time, it didn’t feel like a reaction.

  It felt like an invitation.

  —or a summons.

  Erika swallowed and started walking.

  Behind her, the wind fell unnaturally quiet.

  Ahead, the blue light pulsed once more, brighter than before.

  And somewhere in the back of her mind, Lucas’s unfinished sentence echoed, sharp and unresolved:

  There’s a third—