The Sixth Period Bell
The bleachers behind the Oakridge High School football field smelled of rusted iron, damp wood, and discarded energy drink cans. It was 3:15 PM, right at the tail end of sixth period gym class. The sky was an aggressive, dull grey, matching the cold autumn air that bit at Sophie’s ankles.
“Alright, eyes on me!” Coach Miller barked, pacing the gravel track with a plastic clipboard. “We’ve got twenty minutes left. Girls’ track team, you’re on the upper loops. Boys’ soccer, grab the training pinnies.”
Sophie stood near the chain-link fence, adjusting the strap of her oversized canvas gym bag. Her knuckles were white. Beside her, Parker stood perfectly still, his eyes fixed on the dense tree line just thirty yards past the end zone.
“It’s here,” Parker said, his voice dropping into a low register that only she could hear. The air around him seemed to warp slightly, the ambient temperature dropping. “It’s not just a tracking rift. It’s an extraction unit. The forest wants its apex predator back.”
“They aren’t taking you,” Sophie whispered. She reached into her pocket, her silver-dyed fingernails grazing her Ray-Ban Wayfarers. She slid them onto her face.
Through the custom-polarized lenses of the Nebula Sight, the world instantly transformed. The boring, grey high school field was overlaid with a brilliant, neon-blue geometric grid. Red, jagged warning runes pulsed violently over the tree line. Three massive, distorted tears in space were vibrating right behind the home-team scoreboard.
“Evie,” Sophie muttered into the hidden mic stitched into her collar. “You seeing this?”
From the top row of the bleachers, Evie sat with a notebook on her lap, pretending to do homework. Her eyes, hidden behind her own lenses, flickered with infinite streams of data. “I see it. Three Class-4 Void-Stalkers are trying to phase through. But there’s a problem. The entire varsity football team is doing drills on the thirty-yard line. If they breach, we have a mass casualty event in front of thirty witnesses.”
“Not on my watch,” Leah’s voice crackled through the comms. She was over by the equipment shed, casually unzipping a standard canvas tennis racket bag. Her fingers closed around the rubberized hilts of her Twin Machetes. “Patrick, what’s the temporal status?”
Patrick stood by the water fountain, tapping the face of his modified Casio G-Shock. “I’m locking the local coordinates now. I can give you a strict thirty-second window of isolation before the classmates notice the flash. Wrap your weapons. Don’t let them see the starlight.”
