In Aurora, beneath a glass dome and a restless sky, four friends confront the emotions they have been hiding just as an impossible moon appears overhead.
Aurora glittered beneath its vast glass dome, a sub-polar city sealed against the knife-edge wind and the endless frost beyond. In June, the night never felt entirely like night here; blue light bled through the towers, mist curled along the walkways, and the vertical gardens glowed with a cold, artificial green. On a high terrace beside those hanging walls of leaves, four friends had gathered to breathe for a moment without the city listening.
Lena stood closest to the railing, her hands locked together so tightly her knuckles had gone pale. Tomorrow she was due to give her first public lecture on the art of emotions, and the thought of it had hollowed her out from the inside. Igor, usually the calmest of them, had not slept properly in a week. He kept saying the walls were changing, that something in the dome had begun to hum wrong. Dorian looked as composed as ever, with his quiet gaze and measured breathing, but that only made the sadness in him harder to read. Milena had just secured the internship she had wanted for years at the Aurora Management Centre, and instead of feeling only triumph, she was furious at herself for being so frightened too.
They came there because the terrace was one of the few places where the sky still felt close enough to touch. Because saying the hard things aloud sometimes made them smaller. Because each of them was tired of pretending that adulthood had arrived neatly, with all the right answers folded inside it.
Lena broke the silence first. "I'm scared," she said, her voice thinner than she meant it to be. "Not of speaking. Of what happens after. Of you looking at me differently."
Igor let out a short, bitter breath. "For a week I've been waking up before dawn," he said. "The building keeps vibrating. Not enough for anyone else to notice. Enough for me."
Dorian's fingers tightened around the railing until the metal creaked softly. He stared out through the dome before speaking. "I don't know what this is," he murmured. "I keep feeling empty, like something in me has shifted and I missed the moment it happened."
Milena laughed once, sharply, then looked almost ashamed of it. "I got the internship, and all I can feel is panic," she said. "Is that normal? To be happy and terrified at the same time?"
No one had an answer. The city held still around them, as if it were listening.
Then the sky changed.
A blue-white flare broke open above the dome, so sudden and bright that all four of them flinched back at once. The light pulsed once, twice, and for a heartbeat the glass overhead seemed to disappear. Suspended beyond it was a moon none of them had ever seen before: cold, immense, and the colour of deep ice. It did not hang in the sky so much as watch from it.
The terrace fell into a strange, breathless silence. Light moved over the walls, over the leaves, over their faces, turning every expression into something sharp and unfamiliar. Lena's hand found Milena's. Dorian went rigid. Igor began to shake.
And from somewhere outside the dome came a sound so soft they almost doubted it was real, a low, distant singing that did not belong to any human voice.