2026-08-18 05:24:00Noah
The day after the boiler, running on maybe three hours of sleep, I remember all over again why Deacon Reyes is the one person who can still make me laugh on a day like this. He's been banned from the school cafeteria twice, and both times it was over pudding.
"They're overreacting," he tells me at lunch, like this is a totally reasonable thing to say about a school-wide pudding-cup boycott he organized in ninth grade to protest "portion size discrimination." "I stand by my actions."
"You started a riot over pudding."
"I started a movement, Noah. There's a difference."
I've known Deacon since second grade, since the day he sat down next to me at a lunch table nobody else wanted and asked if I wanted to trade my apple for his fruit snacks, a trade so obviously in my favor that I still bring it up sometimes just to see him get defensive about it. We've been best friends ever since, through elementary school, through his parents' divorce, through the year my dad died and I stopped talking to basically everyone except him for about four months straight. He never asked me to explain that silence. He just kept showing up at my locker every morning with something dumb to say until eventually I started talking again.
His family doesn't have much more than mine does. His mom works two jobs same as mine, though she's around during the day more, teaches part-time at the community college and picks up shifts at a grocery store on weekends. His Aunt Isabel lives further out and never misses his birthday, mails him a card every year with exactly the same amount folded inside, twenty dollars, like clockwork, and Deacon spends it the same way every year too, on something completely impractical.
"What'd you get this year?" I ask him, because his birthday was last week.
"A remote control car shaped like a shark."
"You're eighteen."
"The shark doesn't care how old I am, Noah. The shark just wants to swim."
This is what I love about Deacon. The world could be actively falling apart and he'd find a way to make you laugh about it before finding a way to fix it, usually in that exact order.
"Still thinking about what the Kesslers pulled at the cafe," he says, quieter now, dropping the joke for a second. "Denny ever say anything else about it?"
"Denny sided with them. Obviously."
Deacon's jaw tightens, just slightly, the only sign he ever gives that something actually bothers him. "One day," he says, "and I mean this with my whole chest, one day those two are gonna mess with the wrong person and it's gonna be beautiful to watch."
"Wrong person meaning you?"
"Wrong person meaning karma. I'm just hoping I get front row seats."
We sit in comfortable quiet a minute, the cafeteria noise washing over us, and I think about how different this table feels from every other table in this room. Nobody here is performing. Nobody's calculating who's worth talking to. It's just Deacon eating his sandwich with the crusts torn off because he still hasn't grown out of that from childhood, and me picking at cafeteria fries that taste like cardboard, and somehow it's the best part of my day, every single day, without fail.
"You good?" he asks eventually, out of nowhere, looking at me a little too closely. "Like actually good. Not the fine-I-say-when-I'm-not-fine good."
I think about lying. It's easier, most days, to just say I'm fine and let the conversation move somewhere lighter. But this is Deacon, and Deacon's earned better than the easy lie.
"Tired," I say. "Tired of the Kesslers. Tired of teachers assuming I cheated on a test I didn't cheat on. Tired of watching Serena look at me like she wants to say something and then not saying it."
Deacon nods slowly, chewing, thinking it over with the same seriousness he'd bring to an actual crisis. "Okay. Real talk. You want my honest opinion on Serena?"
"Not really."
"Too bad, here it is anyway. That girl likes you. Actually likes you, not just nice-to-you likes you. But she's scared, and scared people make bad choices, and one day you're gonna have to decide if you're willing to keep waiting around for her to get brave."
I don't have an answer for that. I don't think I want one yet.
"Anyway," Deacon says, mercifully changing the subject, "you seeing this weird stuff on the news? My mom's been glued to it all week. Some kind of lights in the sky thing over in Europe."
"Probably a satellite."
"That's what they said about the last three sightings too."
I shrug it off, because honestly, in a week where I got accused of cheating, had coffee thrown in my face, and fixed a forty-year-old boiler alone at midnight for zero credit, some blurry lights on the news don't even crack my top five concerns.
Deacon pulls out his phone anyway and shows me a shaky video, some grainy clip of a bright line streaking silently across a night sky somewhere outside Berlin, way too slow and way too straight to be a shooting star.
"Weird, right?"
"Weird," I agree, and go back to my fries.
Neither of us thinks much more about it. Why would we. It's just lights in the sky, some far-off blip in a world that's already given us enough to worry about at ground level.
We have no idea, not even a little bit, how wrong that assumption is about to turn out to be.
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Chapter Fourteen: First Day
Noah Zenith Integration Academy doesn't look like a school. It looks like something built to be photographed, all glass and pale stone rising up out of what used to be three city blocks of ordinary buildings, bulldozed flat and rebuilt in under two months with technology no human contractor on Earth has access to.Deacon whistles low beside me as we walk up the front steps together, both of us in the required new uniform, stiff gray fabric that feels wrong on my shoulders, nothing like the worn t-shirts I actually own."They really wanted to make sure we knew who's in charge," he mutters, eyeing the massive Dominion crest carved into the archway above the entrance, all sweeping lines and sharp angles that somehow manage to look both beautiful and threatening at the same time.Inside, the lobby's even more overwhelming, ceilings three stories high, some kind of shifting light display overhead that pulses slow and hypnotic like it's breath
Chapter Thirteen: The Announcement
NoahThe letter arrives on a Tuesday, official Dominion seal stamped in the corner, and Mom's hands shake reading it at our kitchen table."Zenith Integration Academy," she reads aloud, slow, like saying it slower might change what it says. "Mandatory attendance for all human residents ages sixteen through nineteen, beginning next semester. Failure to comply will result in." She stops. Sets the letter down. Doesn't finish the sentence."Will result in what?"She turns the letter around so I can read it myself. Failure to comply will result in reduced ration tier classification and revoked movement privileges for the registered household. Not just for me. For both of us."They're threatening our food," I say, flat, because saying it any other way makes the anger underneath it too loud to control."They're threatening everything," Mom says quietly. "That's the whole point, Noah. Compliance isn't optional anymore. It never real
Chapter Twelve: What Occupation Looks Like
Noah Two weeks into occupation, and the Kesslers already own half the neighborhood.The big ships never actually land, I've learned by now, just hang there in high orbit where they look like a new, permanent kind of star if you don't know better. What comes down are smaller transports and personnel craft, ferrying Korrathi officials and soldiers to towers they've either built fast with tech no human contractor understands or simply claimed outright from whatever government building used to stand there. Word around the neighborhood is the ranking Korrathi don't even bother with human housing, they've got their own structures going up in the better parts of every major city, something between a barracks and a palace, gated off, humans not permitted past the checkpoint without a reason somebody higher up approves first. The soldiers posted at street level, the ones checking papers and running curfew sweeps, apparently rotate back up to orbit every so often too, like even they don't want
Chapter Eleven: Day Three
NoahThe surrender happens on live television while I'm eating cereal at our kitchen table, which feels like the wrong way for the end of the world to arrive.Mom's standing at the counter, dish towel forgotten in one hand, both of us staring at the cracked screen where the President stands at a podium looking older than I've ever seen him look, flanked by generals whose faces have gone the specific gray color of men watching their entire careers become irrelevant in real time."Effective immediately," he says, and his voice does something strange on the word immediately, cracks just slightly before he steadies it, "the United States, in coordination with the United Nations and remaining global military command, has agreed to the terms set forth by Dominion representatives."Terms. Like this is a business deal. Like three days of ships hanging silent over every major city on the planet, of beams cutting through delivery trucks and city blocks, of a death toll nobody's even finished co
Chapter Ten: Day Two
NoahBy morning, half the city's already gone quiet in a way that feels worse than the sirens.No traffic outside our window. No garbage trucks, no delivery vans, none of the normal background noise of a city waking up. Just an eerie stillness broken every so often by a distant boom that makes the whole building shudder, followed by silence that somehow feels louder than the boom itself.Mom decides we need supplies before things get worse, so around ten we make a run to the corner store two blocks over, moving fast, sticking close to the buildings, both of us flinching at every shadow that crosses overhead.The store's already half-picked-over, shelves stripped of bottled water and canned goods, a line of nervous neighbors arguing quietly over the last bag of rice. We grab what we can, batteries, a few cans of beans, a jug of water that's probably overpriced now but nobody's checking receipts today, and we're halfway back to our building when the ground shudders under us hard enough
Chapter Nine: Day One
Noah Mom's waiting at the door before I even get my key in the lock, and she pulls me inside so hard I stumble."Thank God," she breathes into my hair, arms locked around me tight enough to hurt, and for a second neither of us says anything else, just stand there in our tiny hallway holding on like letting go might undo the fact that I made it home at all.The TV's on in the living room, muted chaos flickering across the cracked screen, split-screen footage from six different cities all showing the same thing, ships hanging silent and enormous over skylines that suddenly look small underneath them. The news anchors have stopped pretending to have answers. One of them is just repeating "please remain calm and stay indoors" over and over like a broken recording, her hands visibly shaking even through the low-quality feed."We should board the windows," Mom says, already moving toward the kitchen, pulling out the roll of duct tape we usually use for the leaky pipe under the sink. "Just
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