The gym was exactly as it had been. The smell of floor wax and damp wool coats. The rhythmic, rattling drum of the rain against the metal roof. The
low murmur of anxious parents huddled on blue crash mats.
Lila stared at Tyler’s watch. The green numbers glowed in the dim, orange emergency light.
1:01 AM.
“That’s impossible,” Emma whispered. She was still clutching her binder to her chest, her knuckles white. “We were just... we were just in a room. A white room. With machines.”
“And a guy in a lab coat,” Jack added, his voice lacking its usual sarcastic bite. He was sitting on the floor, staring at his hands as if he expected them to disappear. “He dropped a tablet. It broke.”
Marcus stood up, his chair scraping loudly against the floor. He looked around the gym, his eyes darting from the parents to the high windows, then back to the group. “Did anyone else see that? Did anyone else feel that?”
Lila looked down at her mother. Mrs. Santiago was still deep in conversation with the arts committee head, gesturing animatedly about budget cuts. She hadn’t moved an inch. She hadn’t screamed. She hadn’t noticed the blinding green light or the fact that
her daughter had just vanished and reappeared.
“They didn’t see it,” Lila said, her voice barely above a whisper. “None of them saw it.”
“Because it didn’t happen,” Marcus said firmly. He ran a hand through his hair, pacing a tight circle in front of the bleachers. “It was a hallucination. Mass hysteria. The storm, the static electricity... it messed with our heads.”
“Mass hysteria requires a psychological contagion,” Emma said, clipped, the words coming fast the way they did when she was scared and refusing to admit
it. “It doesn’t cause five unconnected individuals to experience the exact same highly detailed, multi- sensory hallucination simultaneously.”
“Then what was it, Wikipedia?” Marcus snapped. “You tell me.”
“I don’t know!” Emma cried, her voice cracking. “I don’t know what it was!”
“Hey,” Tyler said quietly.
They all turned to look at him. He was still sitting in the shadows, his hood pulled up, but he was holding something out toward them.
It was a small, jagged piece of white material. It looked like glass, but it caught the dim orange light with a strange, iridescent sheen.
“What is that?” Jack asked, leaning closer.
“When the guy dropped the tablet,” Tyler said, his voice perfectly steady, “a piece of it shattered near my foot. I picked it up right before the green light hit us again.”
Lila felt the blood drain from her face. She reached out and took the shard from Tyler’s hand.
It was cold. Freezing cold, like ice, but it didn’t melt. The edges were razor-sharp, and deep inside the material, tiny, microscopic lines of silver light pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat.
“It’s real,” Lila whispered. She looked up at Marcus. “It wasn’t a hallucination. We were really there.”
Marcus stared at the shard, his jaw working. He looked like he wanted to punch something, but there was nothing to hit. “This is insane. This is actually insane.”
“He said we were watchers,” Jack said, standing up slowly. He brushed the dust off his jeans, his eyes fixed on the shard in Lila’s hand. “Five watchers. And he said... what did he say about the hour?”
“He said, ‘Don’t break the hour,’” Tyler replied.
“What does that even mean?” Emma asked, her panic rising again. “Break what hour? It’s 1:01 AM. The hour is already broken. It’s past midnight.”
“Maybe he meant the duration,” Lila said, her mind racing. She looked at Tyler’s watch again. The colon was still blinking steadily. “He said we didn’t have much time. The tether was unstable.”
“Tether,” Marcus repeated, tasting the word. “Like a rope. Like we were tied to something.”
“Or tied to here,” Jack suggested. “Like a rubber band. We got stretched out to that white room, and then we snapped back.”
“But why us?” Emma asked, looking at the four of them. “We don’t even know each other. I’ve never spoken to any of you before tonight.”
“Maybe it was proximity,” Tyler said. “We were all sitting in this section of the bleachers. The light hit here first.”
Lila looked at the empty space between the bleachers where the green lightning had struck. There was no scorch mark. No smell of ozone anymore. Just the scuffed hardwood floor of the gym.
“Okay,” Marcus said, taking a deep breath and forcing his shoulders to drop. “Okay. Let’s think about this logically. We experienced a... an event. We have physical proof.” He pointed at the shard in Lila’s hand. “We need to tell someone. We need to show this to Principal Higgins.”
“Are you crazy?” Jack asked, staring at Marcus like he had grown a second head. “Tell Higgins? What are you going to say? ‘Excuse me, sir, but me and these four random kids just teleported to a sci-fi laboratory and brought back a piece of a glowing iPad. Can we go home now?’”
“He’ll lock us in the nurse’s office and call a psychiatrist,” Emma agreed, nodding frantically. “Statistically, adults do not respond well to claims of spontaneous teleportation.”
“So what do we do?” Marcus demanded, his voice rising. “Just sit here and pretend it didn’t happen?”
“Yes,” Jack said immediately. “That is exactly what we do. We sit here, we wait for the storm to pass, and we never, ever talk about this again.”
Lila looked down at the shard in her hand. The tiny silver lines were still pulsing. It felt heavy, heavier than a piece of glass should feel.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Lila said quietly. “What do you mean?” Marcus asked.
Lila looked up, meeting their eyes one by one. “The guy in the white room. He was terrified. He said it actually happened. Like he was waiting for us. Like this was supposed to happen.”
“So?” Jack asked, crossing his arms.
“So,” Lila said, her voice steadying. “If he was waiting for us, and the tether snapped us back... what happens if it snaps us somewhere else?”
The gym was silent except for the rain.
“Look at the watch,” Tyler said. Lila looked down.
The green numbers on Tyler’s wrist were changing. 1:01:57.
1:01:58.
1:01:59.
“Oh no,” Emma whispered, backing away. “No, no, no.”
The air in the gym vanished. The heavy humidity was sucked away in an instant, replaced by the sharp, freezing smell of ozone and burning copper.
The hair on Lila’s arms stood straight up.
“Brace yourselves!” Marcus yelled, throwing his arms over his head. CRACK.
The green lightning struck the floor again, blinding and silent. The wave of static rushed outward, swallowing the bleachers, swallowing the gym, swallowing the five of them whole.
Lila was falling again.
But this time, she didn’t hit a metal floor. She hit dirt. Wet, freezing mud.
The roaring of the rain was gone, replaced by the howling of a bitter, icy wind.
Lila gasped, pushing herself up out of the mud. It was pitch black, the sky obscured by thick, churning clouds. The air was so cold it burned her lungs.
“Where are we?” Jack’s voice came from the darkness, panicked and breathless.
“I don’t know,” Marcus said, the words coming out clipped and short.
Then, the clouds broke for a fraction of a second, allowing a sliver of pale moonlight to illuminate the landscape.
Lila’s breath caught in her throat.
They weren’t in a white room. They weren’t in the gym.
They were standing in the middle of a sprawling, muddy field, surrounded by deep trenches carved into the earth. Barbed wire stretched across the mud in tangled, rusted coils.
And in the distance, the sky lit up with the sudden, gut-dropping flash of artillery fire.
“Oh my god,” Emma whispered, her voice barely audible over the wind.
They had broken the hour. And the clock was ticking.