Three months earlier…

A week before Thanksgiving, on a block in South Philly where the stoops still ran with rainwater, Jane and Kira made a ritual of drinking together at least once a week, sometimes more if the world seemed especially dismal. Tonight was Tuesday, which meant the liquor store was open late and the city trash trucks had already finished their rounds, and neither woman had reason to get up before nine the next morning. Kira lived in a converted rowhouse, three rooms deep, with radiators that clanged at odd intervals and a futon that sagged like a hammock. Jane always brought the gin, and Kira supplied the glasses.

It was that strange, uncertain hour between sunset and night proper, and the city lights outside their window made a soup of the world. Jane had her heels pulled up beneath her, toes almost white against the chill. She scrolled through her phone, thumb flicking in a practiced, almost meditative rhythm, and every third or fourth meme made her exhale through her nose, a brief coronet of sound. Kira, fresh-faced despite the dark that gathered under her eyes, had her hair tied up in a scraggly bun and wore an old Temple University sweatshirt, the sleeves chewed nearly to the wrist from years of nervous gnawing. Instead of scrolling, she alternated between sipping gin and staring into nothing, the kind of focused non-attention Jane recognized from her own nights of stewing.

Muted on the television, the news ticker spat out its endless cycle of election nonsense; both had agreed, without discussion, to avoid the volume, as if sound would lend the news more authority than either of them was willing to grant. The bottle between them was half gone, but the air felt clear, their heads only gently buoyed rather than freighted by the alcohol. Outside, traffic hissed in the wet, and an ambulance’s Doppler wail rippled strange and momentary through the walls.

They talked, but not the way most people do. Their conversations always started on the periphery—what they’d eaten, which coworkers deserved to be set on fire, etc.—and only later drifted toward the core, and the truths that eddied just beneath their practiced sarcasm. Jane, who prided herself on not giving a shit, found herself giving more of a shit than she was comfortable with, but with Kira, it felt permitted. Kira, who had come out the other side of a decade-long depressive spiral, was careful not to take anything for granted, especially not herself.

Tonight, the talk had been light, mostly comprising anecdotes about Jane’s. However, the air between them brimmed with unsaid things, and it was only a matter of time before someone said something slightly uncomfortable.

Jane waited until Kira’s head was on her shoulder and asked,

“So, what’s the verdict on Rob? Is he still a walking red flag, or has he been domesticated by the sheer power of your neuroses?”

“Oh, absolutely not domesticated,” Kira said. “Maybe slightly more… emotionally battered, like a rescue dog that’s learned to accept treats with suspicion.”

“You know, you could always just leave him. Or, like, ghost him for a change.”

“And let him think he’s traumatized me into silence? No thanks. That’s his kink.”

They both giggled, and the world felt miles away. Outside the window, the city lights made a blurry constellation, and from the balcony came the cold smell of impending rain.

Then, for a second, the horizon line went white. The air pressure in the room shifted, and a silent rumble made the glass in the window vibrate. The lights in the building flickered, then went out entirely, leaving them in a darkness that was only broken by the electric blue of Jane’s phone.

“An earthquake?” Jane asked.

Kira shook her head. “I don’t think so.” The room already felt wrong. There was a frequency in the dark, a low-level humming that neither of them could explain.

Jane got up to check the window. “Holy shit!” she exclaimed.

“What?” Kira joined her, pulling the blanket around her shoulders.

From the vantage of Kira’s living room, the city’s usual constellation had been overwritten by a lattice of gold, as if some celestial engineer had decided the world below needed reorganization and begun the process with a ruler and razor blade. The lines traced perfectly straight axes across the sky, not following the curvature of the earth or bowing to any horizon, but imposing their own two-dimensional logic over everything the dark touched. Where each line met another, a bright disk hovered, burning so steadily it seemed immune to the atmosphere, meteorology, and even time itself. The grid didn’t fade with distance; it was as if the entire dome of the sky was now mapped in this new, wholly artificial order. Kira’s first thought was of the Death Star’s targeting system, AND her second a half-remembered episode of Evangelion, but both comparisons felt hollow.

Jane’s phone now looked pale and useless in her hand. Its screen, which not a minute ago pulsed with notifications and memes, abruptly flickered to grayscale and then dark. The room fell into a kind of liminal state, the air clear and cold in a way Kira had never felt indoors. Even the radiator’s clang had gone silent, as if the building itself paused to listen. Kira reached for Jane’s hand without thinking.

The gold lines high above flickered again, and this time the whole apartment shook, as if someone had knocked at the planet’s door. They both ducked instinctively, and then laughed at themselves, but something about the laughter felt forced, a relic from an earlier, less-ordered world, a world that still obeyed the rules of surprise and explanation. From the kitchen, the bottle of gin teetered at the edge of the counter, then fell, its shattering the only sound. Neither moved to clean it up.

“Is this, like, military?” Jane muttered, immediately regretting what she had just said. There was no way to imagine this as being the work of any government; no nation had ever displayed the budget or the imagination for spectacle on this scale.

“I don’t know,” Kira said, hating the smallness of her own voice. She wanted to say something clever, to contextualize the impossible and make the experience narratable, but the words stuck. The news ticker on TV had frozen, the anchors mid-sentence, eyes wide and faces transformed by the gold-blue light.

The grid brightened, then began to move, slowly at first, then in a coordinated ripple, as though it were folding inward. Each disk along the lines pulsed in sequence, growing in diameter and intensity, until they looked almost like the sun itself, replicated dozens of times across the city’s skyline. Then, from the precise center of every disk, a sharp lance of pure white light shot straight downward, so bright and narrow you could almost hear it humming.

Kira and Jane flinched away from the window, but curiosity dragged them back. The white beams cut through the clouds, making the city look flat and exposed. The effect was that of a child’s drawing: straight lines, perfect circles, no shading or ambiguity. At the heart of each shaft, something was descending.

At first, it was just a speck, but as it moved closer to the ground, it resolved itself with unnerving symmetry: a sphere, at least the size of a city bus, perfectly smooth and completely black except for the halo of fire at its edge, where the beam of light kept it suspended above the street. The sphere was moving with intent, slowing and adjusting its route with the subtle course corrections of a precision-guided missile. It ignored the wind and the laws of inertia.

Jane’s hands trembled. “Should we, I don’t know, shelter?” she said. “Under the table? In the hallway?”

Kira shook her head, almost laughing. Where in this city, in this entire world, even! —could you hide from this impossible geometry that had decided to invade your sky? “I think we’re already inside the thing,” she said. “Like, maybe the whole city is.”

They watched as the first orb, guided by its column of light, halted over the intersection near the end of their block, hovering so low that the trees bent away from it. The gold grid overhead flexed to accommodate, as though the entire construct above were elastic, alive, and aware of the orb’s passage. The lines bowed, the disks at the intersections dilating, and then snapped back into place once the orb reached its destination. In the silence that followed, even the distant city sirens fell silent. The orb hung, spinning slowly, and then began to open.

It slid apart along four seams, each segment peeling away from the center. From its newly exposed core, hundreds of smaller bodies emerged, moving with impossible speed and coordination. Initially, they looked like a swarm of insects, but as they spilled over the edge and plummeted toward the street, Jane and Kira could make out the glint of metal and the rigid forms of something mass-produced.

“Drones,” Jane whispered.

Kira said nothing; her mind raced, but all thoughts turned to static in the face of what was happening. She gripped the window frame, watching as the first wave of drones hit the pavement and kept moving, immediately arranging themselves into lines, columns, geometric shapes that echoed the grid above.

Other orbs were landing across the city, each accompanied by its own white pillar of light and its own small army. The grid now looked like the motherboard of a computer, but at a planetary scale; everything connected and moving according to a logic Kira had no hope of deciphering.

Below, on the street, people were pouring from buildings and standing in clusters with their phones in hand and faces upturned. An orb landed in the middle of Thirty-Sixth Avenue, crushing a car flat and setting the pavement alight. For a few seconds, nobody moved. Then the orb blossomed open, spilling a fountain of metallic spiders, scuttling out in all directions on jointed legs that moved too fast and menacingly.

Jane was holding Kira’s hand now, squeezing hard enough to hurt. “We really should...,” she began, but then the screaming started.

It was a rising, collective wail, pulled from thousands of throats at once. Kira slammed the window shut, but it made no difference; the sound vibrated through the glass, into her teeth and bones.

On the street, the first drones had reached the crowds. They moved quickly, like greyhounds in a race, and the people at the front vanished on contact. No blood, no impact, simply erased where they stood. The crowd began to run, but more drones poured from the orb, arraying themselves in tidy, lethal formation. They corralled the crowd with brutal efficiency; anyone resisting too much simply vaporized with no ceremony at all.

Kira staggered back from the window, eyes locked open. Jane was still watching, hand over her mouth, frozen.

“Jane,” Kira said, “we have to go. We have to get to the stairwell, the basement... somewhere other than here!”

But the word “basement” sounded idiotic in the face of what was happening. Kira grabbed Jane’s hoodie from the floor and yanked her toward the door. The hallway was already packed with neighbors, all pushing and shouting and holding up useless cell phones.

A direct impact slammed the building. The hallway lurched; Kira and Jane went down together, scraping their palms on the ancient, splintered floor. The lights flickered back on, then stuttered out for good, as a sound like tearing canvas split the entire block.

People screamed and rushed for the stairwell. Someone was trampled. Kira and Jane stayed low, crawling, then running hand in hand through the confusion. They made it to the stairwell just as another tremor shook the building. Down the stairs, two at a time, hearts hammering.

The lobby was a war zone. The glass entrance doors were gone, replaced by an aperture splayed with rebar claws, and the front desk was reduced to a splintered barricade. Acrid smoke rolled through the open wound where the windows had been, swirling with plaster dust that made Kira’s eyes water. Sirens outside wailed in new and more desperate registers. The hum of the gold grid vibrated beneath it all, a reminder that what was happening was both local and global.

Jane, reckless even in terror, broke first from the stairwell, pulling Kira after her with a grip that left bruises. They half-fell, half-crawled over the bodies in the vestibule. The security desk had been blown apart, scattering the flayed intestines of a desktop computer in a single, artless pile. Jane yanked Kira down behind the largest chunk of countertop left standing. For a moment, the two of them were only lungs, gasping in the kind of blind dark reserved for bomb shelters and the backs of closets. Kira’s hands, slick with sweat and blood, shook so hard she nearly dropped her phone, and when she stabbed at the screen to call for help, the display simply blinked and died.

She knew it was futile. Yet even as she cradled the phone’s dead weight, some part of her clung to the logic of emergency: you called for rescue, and stayed where you were until someone in a uniform arrived to coach you through the next steps. But the old social contracts had been shredded along with the safety glass. She looked up at Jane, whose eyes now cut back and forth between the choking gray of the lobby and the strobing blue of the street. Jane mouthed something, but the sound was lost in the chaos.

The first drone entered with an indifference that bordered on contempt. It was huge, larger than Kira had believed possible from their vantage above, and in the close confines of the lobby, it seemed even more monstrous. Its shell was a seamless, obsidian mesh, shot through with thin blue filaments that pulsed like circuit boards. This apparatus moved on four legs, and its face was a blank, convex mirror, reflecting the carnage of the lobby in a way that managed to make it look even more unreal.

It paused at the threshold, scanning the room in a slow, deliberate sweep. Its head rotated on a gimbal, clicking softly as it found points of interest. For a hopeful fraction of a second, Kira believed the desk was enough to hide them, that they could become just another shape in the catastrophe, overlooked and passed by. But the drone’s faceplate flicked to ultraviolet, and Kira saw herself outlined in a blue heatmap on its mirrored surface.

Jane’s face was wet, but her jawline was set in a stubborn refusal to die first. She shook her head once, as if to say: Don’t even think about running. But then the drone was on them, and the option was moot.

It reached over the countertop with a limb that terminated in a pincer. The pincer snapped at empty air once, then snared Jane’s ankle, yanking her from cover. Jane didn’t scream at first, but when the drone began dragging her into the lobby’s open, she did: a single, primal sound that sliced through the noise like a clarion for the end of the world.

Kira launched herself after Jane, reaching for her hands, her hips, anything. The drone noticed, and in a move so fast it was almost invisible, flicked Kira away with the back of its limb, as if swatting a fly. She landed in a heap against the desk, vision going black for a second. When it returned, Jane was already at the feet of the thing, her legs kicking at the smooth metal, her fists thudding uselessly against its armored hide.

Another drone joined the first, smaller and shaped like a predatory beetle, its wings flickering as it hovered a meter above the floor. This one carried a set of specialized tools, each deployed from a sheath under its belly. It selected a needle, impossibly fine but at least six inches long, and jabbed it into the side of Jane’s neck. Jane’s face crumpled, lips blanched to the color of old wax, and then her body went slack, the fight gone all at once. The beetle-drone retracted its syringe, scanned Jane’s face for a full two seconds, then released her to collapse in a heap beside the door.

Kira scrambled to her, ignoring the pain in her wrist and side. Jane’s eyes fluttered, half-open but glazed, as if she’d been sedated past the point of panic. Her chest rose and fell in quick, shallow pulses. “Jane?” Kira whispered, terrified to raise her voice. “Jane, can you hear me?”

“You have to run,” Jane managed, the words slurred and distant, as if spoken from under a hundred feet of water. “Don’t let them...” The rest was lost as Jane’s back arched in a sudden, violent convulsion, heels drumming against the tile. The blue filaments running through the drone’s shell pulsed in synchrony with Jane’s spasms, as if the drone was not just the cause of her agony but the conductor of it.

Smoke continued to billow into the lobby, thicker now, and studded through with the particulate filth of burning plastic and insulation. The drone had already moved on, methodically harvesting bodies from behind the stairwell, from the shadowed corners where the earlier stampede had driven them. Each time it found someone, it repeated the same process: seize, immobilize, inject, discard. The smaller drone scurried after, performing fine work, sometimes a second injection, sometimes a quick scan with a red laser, sometimes a surgical snip or slice that made Kira’s stomach turn. It was all so efficient, so stripped of ceremony or intent, that Kira felt less like a witness to violence than a bystander in a vast, unfeeling experiment.

“Jane!” Kira yelled, but the lobby was filling with smoke, and more drones were outside, emptying the building with systematic, pitiless precision.

A thermal laser, silent and instantaneous, sliced through the ceiling and hit the lobby floor. The marble melted, the glass exploded, and the world went blinding white.

When Kira came to, she was alone. The lobby was a crater, the furniture and people inside reduced to carbon shapes on the floor. She could barely breathe, her lungs filling with dust and ash. She staggered to her feet, eyes stinging, and crawled out the ruined entryway, into the chaos of the street.

She never saw Jane again, not in that body. Not until the assimilation day, when the invasion showed its true endgame.

From that night until the present, the days and weeks blurred together. Kira lived in a half-fugue, always running, always hiding, always trying to believe there was some way out. She thought of Jane in every empty hour, every time she ducked a patrol or scavenged for food in a burnt-out supermarket. She told herself Jane was still alive, out there somewhere, waiting for rescue or revenge or something in between.

Unfortunately, she was wrong.

((to be concluded))