Static
Chapter 1: Static
Viktor’s laptop screen went black. Not sleep mode—dead black. He checked the power cord, hit the reset, waited. Nothing.
Around him, the WeWork space buzzed with the usual Tuesday morning noise. Startup founders making pitch calls. Freelancers clicking away at their MacBooks. The espresso machine hissing in the kitchen area.
His phone vibrated. Text from the data center in Boston: Cooling systems failing. Servers shutting down to prevent damage.
Another buzz. ConEd reporting rolling blackouts across tri-state area.
Viktor stood up, closing the dead laptop with a sharp snap. “The Eastern seaboard’s power grid is collapsing.”
The woman at the corner desk looked up from her color-coded spreadsheet. Maya something—ran some nonprofit, always looked like she was preparing for disasters. “What?”
“Cascade failure. Started about forty minutes ago.” Viktor shouldered his bag. “It’s going to spread.”
“But what should we—”
He was already walking toward the exit.
Behind him, Maya’s voice cut through the coffee shop chatter: “Everyone needs to get home. Now.”
Maya watched Viktor disappear through the glass doors, her chest tight with recognition. She’d felt this before—the electric moment when everything ordinary revealed itself as fragile.
Her phone was already buzzing. Three texts from her building manager about power fluctuations. Two missed calls from the community center. An automated alert from the city’s emergency notification system that cut off mid-sentence.
She closed her laptop and looked around the workspace. The startup founder was still making his pitch call, gesturing enthusiastically at his screen. The graphic designer had headphones on, lost in her work. Only the elderly man reading newspapers by the window seemed to be paying attention, his eyes sharp and worried.
Maya’s hands moved automatically, gathering her things while her mind shifted into crisis management mode. Contact lists. Supply chains. Vulnerable populations in her district who’d need help if this got worse.
She was halfway to the door when something made her look back.
A young woman had entered from the stairwell, wild dark hair escaping from a messy bun, carrying a canvas that was too large for the narrow space. She moved with the restless energy of someone running on pure caffeine and inspiration.
Priya. Maya had seen her around Federal Hill—always with different art supplies, always looking like she was late for something urgent.
Priya’s eyes swept the room and locked onto Maya’s with startling intensity. “You feel it too.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Feel what?”
“The breaking.” Priya’s grip on her canvas shifted, revealing a corner of the painting—dark spaces shot through with veins of light that seemed to pulse even in the static image. “I’ve been painting these underground spaces for days. Dreaming about them. And now—”
Her phone buzzed. Then Maya’s. Then every phone in the room.
Emergency alert: POWER GRID INSTABILITY ACROSS NORTHEAST. SHELTER IN PLACE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
The startup founder’s call cut out. The WiFi died. The espresso machine went silent.
In the sudden quiet, Maya heard something she hadn’t noticed before—a low humming that seemed to come from the building itself, from the ground beneath them.
“We need to leave,” Maya said.
Priya nodded like she’d been waiting for someone to say it. “I know somewhere we can go.”
“Where?”
“The library. Elena’s been tracking something in the archives. Power failures, seismic activity, historical patterns that don’t make sense.” Priya’s words came fast, like she was translating thoughts that moved faster than speech. “She sent word through the artist network this morning. People who pay attention to the right things.”
Maya felt the click of recognition—the same instinct that made her stockpile emergency supplies was now telling her this scattered artist was essential to whatever was unfolding.
“Lead the way.”
They moved through the emptying building, Priya’s canvas awkward in the narrow stairwell, Maya’s mind already cataloging what they’d need: contact lists, supply routes, safe spaces for when the ordinary world stopped working.
Outside, the morning looked deceptively normal. Traffic moved along Westminster Street. People waited at bus stops, checking phones that no longer connected to anything.
But Maya could feel it now—the thing Priya had named. The breaking. Like fault lines spreading through everything they’d assumed was solid.
“How long do we have?” Maya asked.
Priya’s laugh was sharp with something that wasn’t quite fear. “I don’t think we have long at all.”
The Providence Athenaeum sat like a granite fortress on Benefit Street, its nineteenth-century facade unchanged while the world rewired itself around it. Maya and Priya climbed the steps, Priya’s canvas banging against the heavy doors.
Inside, the silence felt different—not the dead quiet of failed electronics, but the living quiet of old books and accumulated knowledge.
Elena Vasquez emerged from the stacks like she’d been waiting for them. Head librarian, maybe fifty, with the kind of quiet authority that made people confess things they hadn’t meant to say.
“You got my message,” she said to Priya, then looked at Maya. “And you brought the organizer.”
“You know me?”
“I know everyone who pays attention.” Elena’s eyes were sharp behind wire-rimmed glasses. “The question is whether we’re paying attention to the right things.”
She led them deeper into the library, past reading rooms where a few patrons sat with actual books, past computer terminals that displayed only error messages.
“Power grid failures,” Elena said as they walked. “But not random ones. There’s a pattern. Same geological coordinates that showed unusual seismic activity in 1871, 1923, 1967. Always preceded by electromagnetic anomalies.”
“Preceded by how long?” Maya asked.
“Days. Sometimes hours.”
They reached Elena’s office—a cramped space behind the reference desk, walls lined with filing cabinets and maps marked with colored pins.
“Show them the rest,” Elena said to Priya.
Priya propped her canvas against the desk. The painting was even stranger up close—not just underground spaces but figures moving through them with a grace that seemed impossible. Faces that looked human but carried something else, something that made Maya’s chest tighten with recognition she couldn’t name.
“I’ve been dreaming about them,” Priya said. “They’re not dreams. They’re… invitations.”
Elena pulled out a manila folder thick with photocopied articles, historical reports, geological surveys. “Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote about a subterranean race in 1871. Called them the Vril-ya. Most people dismissed it as science fiction.”
“Most people,” Maya said.
“Some people knew better.” Elena’s finger traced a line on one of the maps. “Power grid failures always happen along the same fault systems. The same places where people report unusual dreams, visions, encounters with…” She gestured at Priya’s painting. “People who move differently.”
Maya felt pieces clicking together with the sharp precision of a puzzle solving itself. “You think they’re real.”
“I think,” Elena said, “they’re coming up.”
Outside, a siren began to wail. Then another. The sound of a city discovering that its infrastructure had been more fragile than anyone had imagined.
Maya looked at Priya’s painting, at Elena’s maps, at the accumulating evidence of something vast stirring beneath the surface of everything they’d thought was solid.
“So what do we do?”
Elena’s smile was sharp as a blade. “We get ready to meet them.”