The alarm clock's shrill cry cut through the darkness at 4:30 AM, just as it had every morning for the past three months. Neil Hayes rolled over with a grunt, his hand finding the snooze button with practiced ease. Five more minutes. That's all he needed.
The cramped studio apartment felt even smaller in the pre-dawn gloom. Clothes hung over the single chair, empty takeout containers cluttered the small table, and his ancient gaming setup occupied the only corner that could be called organized. The place smelled like instant coffee and regret, but it was home. Sort of.
When the alarm screamed again, Neil forced himself upright. His back protested—yesterday's concrete pour had been particularly brutal—but complaining wouldn't pay the bills. He shuffled to the kitchenette, stepping over a pile of textbooks he'd never quite managed to throw away. *Economics, Third Edition* sat on top, its spine cracked from the semester he'd actually been able to afford attending.
The coffee maker gurgled to life as Neil pulled on yesterday's work clothes. The jeans were stiff with dried concrete dust, and his flannel shirt had seen better decades, but they'd do. Everything would do. It had to.
His phone buzzed with a text from his sister Emma: *Mom's worried about you. Call her.*
Neil stared at the message for a moment, then set the phone aside. What was he supposed to say? That he was fine living paycheck to paycheck? That the construction work was going great, even though his body felt like it belonged to someone twice his age? That he definitely wasn't bitter about dropping out of university because they couldn't afford both his education and keeping the family afloat?
He grabbed his thermos of black coffee and the paper bag containing two peanut butter sandwiches—lunch and dinner sorted. The truck keys jingled as he snatched them from the hook by the door.
Outside, the world was still caught between night and dawn. Streetlights cast weak pools of yellow light on empty sidewalks, and the air carried that peculiar chill that made Neil's joints ache. He climbed into his beat-up Ford pickup, the engine turning over on the third try.
The radio crackled to life as he pulled onto the empty street. "—strange atmospheric readings continue to puzzle scientists worldwide. The aurora activity reported as far south as Mexico has—"
Neil switched it off. He had enough problems without worrying about whatever weirdness was happening in the sky. Bills didn't care about atmospheric anomalies.
The drive to the construction company's depot took twenty minutes through increasingly rural roads. Neil used the time to mentally prepare for another day of physical labor that would leave him too tired to think about anything else. It was almost a blessing, that exhaustion. When his body hurt enough, his mind couldn't dwell on the future he'd given up or the dreams gathering dust in his apartment.
At the depot, other workers were already loading trucks with supplies. Neil recognized most of them—men like himself who'd found themselves in construction not by choice but by necessity. They nodded to each other in the universal language of the bone-tired.
"Hayes!" Frank Kowalski, the site foreman, waved him over. Frank was a mountain of a man with hands like sledgehammers and a voice that could cut through machinery noise. "You're heading to the Cascade site today. Solo run."
Neil raised an eyebrow. "Solo? Thought that was a team job."
"Jimmy called in sick, and Rodriguez is dealing with his mother's funeral." Frank handed him a clipboard and a set of keys. "It's just supply drop-off. Emergency shelter components for the ranger station. GPS coordinates are programmed in."
The keys belonged to a larger truck than Neil usually drove, its bed loaded with prefabricated shelter components, tools, and emergency supplies. The kind of gear designed to save lives when hikers got lost in the wilderness and weather turned deadly.
"Cascade National Park, right?" Neil glanced at the paperwork. The destination was deep in the mountains, nearly two hours of driving on increasingly rough roads.
"That's the one. Ranger station's been requesting this stuff for months. With all the weird weather lately, they want to be prepared." Frank clapped Neil on the shoulder. "Should be straightforward. Drop the gear, get the signature, head home. Easy money."
Neil nodded and climbed into the truck. The engine was newer than his own vehicle, purring with mechanical confidence. As he pulled out of the depot, the first hints of sunrise painted the eastern sky in pale orange.
The first hour of driving was routine—paved roads through small towns, past farms and the occasional gas station. Neil found himself relaxing into the rhythm of the road, letting his mind wander. This was better than being on a crew, dealing with Frank's constant supervision and the unspoken competition between workers desperate to keep their jobs.
But as the roads narrowed and began to climb into the mountains, something felt different. The air itself seemed charged, like the moment before a thunderstorm, though the sky remained clear. Neil's skin prickled with an energy he couldn't name.
The radio, which he'd left off, suddenly crackled to life on its own.
"—emergency broadcast system. This is not a test. Citizens are advised to—"
Static swallowed the words. Neil frowned and reached for the dial, but the radio fell silent again. He tried turning it on manually, but got nothing but white noise across all frequencies.
"Great," he muttered. "Just what I need."
The truck rounded a bend, and Neil got his first clear view of the Cascade Range stretching into the distance. The mountains looked normal enough—pine-covered slopes, rocky peaks, morning mist clinging to the valleys. But something was wrong with the sky above them.
Where there should have been clear blue, strange colors danced and swirled. Not quite aurora, not quite clouds, but something that made Neil's eyes water when he tried to focus on it. The phenomenon stretched across the entire horizon, pulsing with an rhythm that seemed almost alive.
Neil pulled over and stepped out of the truck. The morning air was crisp and clean, filled with the scent of pine and mountain streams. But underneath that familiar smell was something else—something that reminded him of the moments after lightning strikes, sharp and electric.
His phone had no signal. The GPS unit in the truck showed his location accurately, but the destination marker kept flickering, as if it couldn't decide where it was supposed to be.
For a moment, Neil considered turning back. Every instinct told him something was fundamentally wrong. But Frank's words echoed in his mind: *Easy money.* And he needed the money. His family needed the money.
He climbed back into the truck and continued up the mountain road.
The path grew rougher, switching back and forth up steep grades. Pine trees pressed close on both sides, their branches sometimes scraping against the truck's sides. Neil had to focus on navigating the increasingly treacherous route, but he couldn't shake the feeling that the strange sky was getting closer, pressing down on him like a weight.
When he finally reached the designated coordinates, there was no ranger station.
Neil checked the GPS again, then the paperwork. This was definitely the right location. But instead of buildings and people, he found only a small clearing surrounded by ancient pines. A hiking trail marker indicated he was on the Cascade Ridge Trail, but there was no sign of any emergency shelter construction site.
He grabbed his phone and tried calling Frank, but still had no signal. The strange colors in the sky were more intense now, close enough that he could see individual streams of light flowing like liquid aurora. They cast shifting shadows through the trees, and the air hummed with a frequency he felt in his bones.
Neil sat in the truck's cab, trying to figure out what to do. Drive back and report the GPS error? Try to find the actual ranger station? The sensible thing would be to head home, but something about the situation felt bigger than a simple navigation mistake.
That's when he saw the light.
Not the strange aurora above, but something else—a golden glow emanating from deeper in the forest. It pulsed gently, like a heartbeat, and seemed to call to something deep in his chest.
Neil had never considered himself particularly curious or adventurous. He was practical, careful, analytical. But something about that light drew him forward. Maybe it was the ranger station after all, just built in a different location than the GPS indicated.
He grabbed a flashlight from the truck's emergency kit and locked the vehicle. The hiking trail was well-maintained, clearly marked, and the golden light wasn't far—maybe a quarter-mile through the trees.
As he walked, the humming in the air grew stronger. The normal sounds of the forest—birds, wind in the branches, the distant whisper of a stream—all seemed muffled, as if the world was holding its breath.
The light came from a depression in the forest floor, a natural bowl surrounded by trees so old they might have been standing when the first humans crossed these mountains. And in the center of that bowl, half-buried in decades of fallen leaves, was something that definitely wasn't a ranger station.
It looked like metal, but not any metal Neil had ever seen. The surface was smooth as glass but warm to the touch, and patterns of light ran across it like veins carrying liquid starlight. The object was roughly rectangular, about the size of a small building, but its edges seemed to blur and shift when he wasn't looking directly at them.
Neil approached slowly, his practical mind trying to process what he was seeing. This had to be some kind of military installation, maybe experimental technology. The government was always testing new equipment in remote locations. That would explain the GPS confusion and the strange atmospheric effects.
But as he got closer, the humming grew louder, and the patterns of light began to pulse in sync with his heartbeat. The air around the object shimmered like heat waves, and Neil could taste something metallic on his tongue.
He was reaching for his phone to try documenting the find when the world exploded into light.
Not the gentle golden glow he'd been following, but a brilliance that seemed to come from everywhere at once. The humming became a roar that filled his skull, and the ground beneath his feet began to vibrate like a struck drum.
Neil stumbled backward, but the light followed him, surrounded him, passed through him. He felt a sensation like falling, though his feet remained on solid ground. The trees, the sky, the very air seemed to be dissolving around him.
His last coherent thought before consciousness fled was that Frank had been wrong.
This definitely wasn't easy money.
The forest fell silent. The strange metal object pulsed once more, then went dark. And Neil Hayes, construction worker and university dropout, vanished from the world he'd known for twenty-five years.
Above the mountains, the aurora-like phenomenon began to fade, leaving only normal sky and the whisper of wind through ancient pines. By the time the first rescue teams arrived to investigate reports of strange lights, there was nothing to find but an abandoned truck and a set of footprints leading into the deep woods.
The footprints stopped at the edge of a clearing where the ground was disturbed but empty. Whatever had been there was gone, leaving only the faint scent of ozone and the lingering feeling that something fundamental had changed.
Neil Hayes had simply disappeared, as if the earth itself had swallowed him whole.
But in another place, impossibly far away, a young man was about to wake up in a world where the sky held three moons and the air itself thrummed with power.
His real story was just beginning.