On the remote colony of Orpheon, Sara and her friends uncover a repeating signal that twists the city’s systems and points beyond their world. When the lights fail, something unknown appears in the sky.
The sky above Orpheon was wrong. Not storm-dark or moonless, but heavy and motionless, as if the clouds had been pinned in place and the whole planet was waiting for permission to move again.
Sara stood at the edge of the upper transit platform and stared down at the city. Below her, the biotic streets glowed in slow, breathing pulses, their light rising and falling in time with the planet’s core. It should have felt beautiful. Tonight it felt like a warning.
Orpheon had been the kind of colony Earth advertised in glossy broadcasts: clean, advanced, self-sustaining, the future made real for the lucky families sent here. Sara had believed that when she arrived a year ago. She still wanted to believe it now, even with the comms glitching, the holograms breaking into jagged shapes, and half the western sectors cutting out without explanation.
Leo was already at the top of the transmission tower, leaning against a support beam with the restless impatience of someone who hated waiting for bad news. Joon stood beside the maintenance console, her portable analyser open in her hands, the display flickering with lines of code that kept shifting before Sara could focus on them.
"It’s happening again," Joon said.
Leo pushed off the beam. "Then it’s not a glitch. Not anymore."
Sara glanced at the dead horizon. "We should report it."
Leo gave her a sharp look. They all knew what that meant: isolation, questions, adults pretending calm while the Consortium locked everything down.
Joon’s fingers moved fast over the holopad. A new pattern spilled across the screen, clean and precise in the middle of all the static.
"I found the source," she said quietly. "Or part of it. It’s coming from outside our space. It repeats every one hundred and thirty-seven minutes. Exactly."
Sara leaned in. The signal pulsed in a rhythm that made no sense, too regular to be noise, too patient to be accidental.
Then a metallic groan rolled through the tower.
The lights across the city went out.
For one frozen second, Orpheon was nothing but dark glass and silent streets. Then a streak of light tore across the horizon, and something vast lifted out of the black sky above them, hanging there as if it had been waiting for Sara to look up.