The science lab smelled of dust, cleaning solvent, and old paper—the kind of stale, heavy scent that suggested nothing of real importance had happened within these walls in a long time. It was a graveyard for mid-century microscopes and boxed equipment stamped with faded inventory labels from a dozen school boards ago. The air was stagnant, untouched by the ventilation system that rattled through the rest of Redwood Academy.
Logan liked it for that very reason. In a world that felt increasingly loud and unpredictable, the silence of the lab was a sanctuary.
The room sat at the far eastern end of the second floor, a half-forgotten cul-de-sac of academia. It was stocked with aging microscopes that hadn't been recalibrated since the Carter administration and glass beakers that held the residue of long-forgotten experiments. Nothing hummed. Nothing blinked. The only sound was the distant, muffled echo of lockers slamming somewhere down the hallway—a reminder of the world they were temporarily avoiding.
The four of them—Logan, Jamie, Lyra, and Adison—stood around the central lab table like acolytes around an altar. No one touched anything. The black, scarred surface of the table was a map of past boredom; decades of students had carved their initials, their frustrations, and their secrets into the wood. Logan rested his palms on the cold surface, feeling the grooves beneath his skin.
He took a breath, the dust tickling his throat.
"I didn't imagine it," Logan said quietly, his voice barely rising above a whisper. "Briggs showed it to me. Just for a minute. In his kitchen, before he got all official and weird."
Jamie leaned against a row of cabinets, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. His posture was defensive, his skepticism a physical barrier. "You've said that, Logan. Five times now."
"Because you keep acting like I dreamed it," Logan snapped, a flash of irritation breaking through his exhaustion. He softened his tone, seeing the concern in Jamie's eyes. "I didn't. It was real. The weight of the recorder, the way the plastic felt warm even though it had been off... it was real."
Lyra, ever the analyst, studied Logan's face instead of the room. She was looking for the micro-expressions of a lie, but she found only the frantic, wide-eyed sincerity of a true believer. "You didn't touch it?"
"No," Logan said. "He didn't let me get that close. He just... turned it on. Let me hear a snippet. He's terrified that Freddy Alliston is going to find it, but he's even more terrified of what's on it."
Adison closed his notebook halfway, his pen poised like a weapon. "And you're sure it wasn't just interference? Atmospheric skip? Redwood Town is a valley; we get radio bleed from three counties away when the weather is right."
Logan shook his head firmly. "It wasn't noise. It wasn't the random crackle of a thunderstorm or a cross-channel bleed. It felt... deliberate. It had a cadence."
Jamie scoffed lightly, though there was no malice in it. "That's how brains work, Logan. It's called pareidolia. You stare at static long enough, your head fills in the blanks. You see faces in clouds, you hear voices in the wind. Your brain is a pattern-matching machine; it hates chaos, so it invents meaning."
Lyra's eyes flicked to Jamie, her brow furrowing. "Except Logan described timing. That's not a hallucination of meaning. That's data."
Jamie frowned. "What timing?"
"Eleven point three seconds," Logan said, his voice steady now. "Between the pulses. It wasn't a steady hum. It was a heartbeat. Thump-thump... wait... thump-thump. Eleven point three seconds. Exactly."
That gave Adison pause. He opened his notebook again, his eyes scanning his previous jottings on the Aurora Engine's technical specs. "You counted?" he asked, his voice dropping an octave.
"More than once," Logan replied.
Silence settled over the room, heavy and uncomfortable. It was the kind of silence that preceded a storm—the air feeling thick with static charge. The eleven-point-three-second interval wasn't just a number; it was a signature. In the world of high-energy physics, intervals that precise didn't happen by accident.
Jamie shifted his weight, the floorboards groaning beneath his boots. "Okay. Let's say you're right. Let's say it is something—something from the Engine, something not of this world. What do you want to do about it? We're four kids in a town that doesn't even have a functioning movie theater. We don't have a lab. We don't have sensors."
Logan opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. The weight of their helplessness hit him. "I don't know," he admitted, his shoulders slumping. "I just know Briggs is scared. And if a man like Thomas Briggs is losing sleep over a sound, we should be paying attention."
Lyra glanced at the wall clock, its second hand ticking with a rhythmic, mechanical snap. "We should go. It's time for Mr. Albert's class. We're already pushing it."
No one argued. The mystery would have to wait for the bell. They left the lab exactly as they'd found it—a tomb of old science. Behind them, the room stayed quiet. Too quiet. As the door clicked shut, a janitor pushed his cart past the open doorway. A small, battery-operated radio clipped to his belt crackled faintly, the sound buried beneath the squeak of his wheels. None of them noticed the way the static on the radio pulsed, just for a second, in a rhythm that matched Logan's count.
Mr. Albert's classroom was a different world. While the rest of the school felt like it was stuck in a loop of 1980s architecture and 1950s social hierarchies, Mr. Albert's room felt alive.
Mr. Albert didn't look like the kind of man students ignored. He was in his early forties, tall but slightly stooped, as if the sheer weight of the theories in his head had gently bent his spine. His dark brown hair, peppered with silver at the temples, was perpetually messy, as if he spent his lunch breaks standing in a wind tunnel. His eyes were hazel—golden and observant—and they seemed to see right through the teenage posturing of his students.
When he spoke, his voice was a calm, fluent stream. It wasn't a voice that demanded attention; it was a voice that invited curiosity.
"Everyone expects physics to explain what happens," Mr. Albert said, pacing slowly in front of a chalkboard covered in overlapping sine waves. "But physics is really about why things can happen at all. It is the study of the permission of the universe."
Logan leaned forward, his chin resting on his hand. Beside him, Adison's pen was already a blur of motion.
Mr. Albert drew two overlapping waves on the board. "Consider the concept of superposition," he said, tapping the chalk against the slate with a sharp clack. "Two systems can occupy the exact same space without touching. Same location. Different states of being. They coexist in a state of mutual ignorance until something—an observer, a surge of energy, a 'leak'—forces them to acknowledge one another."
Adison's breathing hitched. Lyra's jaw tightened.
"That doesn't make sense," Jamie interrupted, leaning back in his chair. "If two things are in the same spot, they crash. That's how the world works."
Mr. Albert smiled slightly, a glint of genuine delight in his eyes. "It doesn't have to make sense, Jamie. Nature doesn't owe us intuition. Interference isn't always destructive. Sometimes it's quiet. Subtle. Sometimes systems don't collide—they misalign. They create a 'beat' frequency, a phantom sound that exists only because two worlds are slightly out of sync."
Something cold, like a drop of ice water, slid down Logan's spine. A beat frequency.
The bell rang, the harsh electronic buzz cutting through the lecture like a knife.
"For tomorrow," Mr. Albert called out over the sound of chairs scraping and backpacks zipping, "think about what happens when the observer becomes part of the experiment. Think about what happens when the universe looks back."
The four of them packed up in a daze, stepping into the hallway as a group. The normal noise of the school—the shouting, the laughter, the mundane drama—swelled around them, but it felt thin. Transparent.
At the front steps of the school, they paused as the afternoon sun dipped low, casting long, orange shadows across the parking lot.
"Same time tomorrow?" Jamie asked, looking at Logan.
Lyra nodded. "Yeah. Tomorrow."
Adison adjusted his backpack, his face set in a grim mask of thought. "We'll talk later. I want to run some numbers on that eleven-point-three interval."
They separated at the corner, each heading toward their own streets, their own houses, and their own mounting silence.
Logan reached home just as the sun dipped behind the jagged line of the Redwoods. Dinner was a quiet affair. His mother asked about his day; he answered automatically. His father mentioned a project at the town council; Logan nodded when expected. He laughed at his brother's jokes when it seemed appropriate. He was a ghost at his own table, his mind tethered to a black recorder and a physics lecture that felt too much like a warning.
Later, in his room, he sat on the edge of his bed with a book on celestial navigation open in his hands. He wasn't reading the words. His thoughts kept circling back to the moment Briggs had shown him the device—the way the air in the kitchen had felt heavy, the way the sound hadn't come from the speaker so much as it had come from the space around the speaker.
Eventually, he gave up on the book and lay down, staring at the ceiling. Sleep came fast. Too fast. It wasn't the slow drift into unconsciousness; it was a sudden, violent plunge.
In the dream, the room layered itself.
It wasn't a different place; it was the same room, but stacked like transparent sheets of film. He could see his desk, but through it, he could see another desk made of shadow. The walls overlapped, vibrating with a frequency that made his teeth ache. Sound lagged behind motion; when he moved his hand, the sound of the air swishing followed seconds later. Time was bending inward, a whirlpool of seconds.
At the center of the room, five shapes hovered.
They weren't objects. They weren't people. They were cores—nodes of pure, vibrating energy that pulsed with a rhythmic light. He couldn't see them clearly; they blurred whenever he tried to focus.
A voice slid through the noise—a voice that was his own, yet ancient.
"Be careful."
Logan jolted awake.
His heart was racing, a frantic hammer against his ribs. He was drenched in a cold, oily sweat. He reached for the glass of water on his desk, his hand trembling so badly the water slopped over the rim. He drank deeply, the coldness grounding him. He set the glass down carefully, staring at the digital clock.
4:04.
Without knowing why, he grabbed his notebook from the floor and wrote the time in large, shaky numbers. It felt important. It felt like a coordinate.
To calm his nerves, he reached for his favorite LEGO spaceship from the shelf—a complex, half-built craft that he'd been working on for months. It was imperfect, a work in progress, but the tactile feel of the plastic bricks helped slow his breathing. He held it against his chest until the world stopped vibrating.
He eventually fell back into a shallow, fitful sleep.
Across town, in a small house that smelled of stale tobacco and floor wax, Thomas Briggs sat at his kitchen table. A cigarette pack sat beside a mug of dregs-filled coffee. The Sheriff wasn't sleeping. He hadn't slept since the fire.
He stared at the recorder, which sat in the center of the table like a cursed idol.
"Why does this thing fuck with me?" he muttered, his voice gravelly. "And what are those voices? I know those voices."
He rubbed his temples, feeling the onset of a massive migraine. He lit a cigarette, the smoke curling into the air in slow, lazy spirals. He watched the smoke. It didn't drift randomly; it seemed to break apart and reform in geometric patterns, reacting to a vibration he couldn't hear.
He crushed the cigarette out in a crowded ashtray and stood up. He went to bed, but as he lay down, the silence of the house pressed in on him. It wasn't a void; it was a pressure.
Somewhere—far away in the heart of the forest, or perhaps right beneath the floorboards—a frequency pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
Right on time.
The eleven-point-three-second heartbeat of a world that was no longer overlapping, but beginning to collide.