What the Light Let In

Chapter 1

The first thing the sun killed was my basil.

I mention this because afterward people wanted there to have been a moment. A flash over the ocean. Animals dropping dead in the street. Something sufficiently biblical to excuse how long we stood around waiting for an explanation before we understood that explanations were not going to save us.

There was no trumpet. There was a plant I had bought with the sincere intention of becoming the kind of woman who kept herbs alive.

At 12:17 on a Friday, I stood barefoot in my kitchen scraping burnt toast over the sink. The basil above the sink had collapsed against its ceramic pot. Its leaves were curled, their edges the color of old paper. When I touched one, it fell apart between my fingers.

“Jesus.”

I wiped it on my shorts and went back to investigating whether a man in Indiana had deliberately sunk his jet ski.

I processed insurance claims from home. Our commercials promised to be there for life's unexpected moments, which would eventually become funny in a way that made my stomach hurt. For now, my Teams status had turned yellow, and I was more concerned about appearing productive than about the dying thing in my kitchen.

Outside, someone was mowing. A delivery truck idled at the curb. Mr. Aster stood in his driveway hosing down the recycling bin he washed every week with a devotion I had never extended to anything I owned.

Sunlight lay across my bare foot.

I shifted my chair. Read the same paragraph twice. Got up for water. When I sat down again, the bright rectangle still occupied precisely the same section of floor.

Eventually my toes began to hurt.

Not badly. A small, persistent sting. The sort of discomfort you tolerate while finishing something until you realize you have been tolerating it for longer than you meant to.

My laptop said 12:17.

So did my phone.

The microwave said 12:17, but that was less persuasive. My microwave had maintained a private relationship with daylight saving time for years.

The oven, however, agreed.

I watched its little green colon. It blinked. The minute did not change.

That was the part I remembered later: something inside the clock was still doing its job. It simply could not arrive anywhere.

I opened a stopwatch on my phone. The circle turned around the number zero. I played a video. A woman demonstrated how to clean grout; her hands moved, her mouth moved, the playback bar advanced. Above it, the phone continued to insist that no time had passed.

I messaged Shianne.

ODETTE: weird question what time is it

SHIANNE: 12:17?

ODETTE: no like actually

SHIANNE: girl what

ODETTE: my clocks froze

The typing bubble appeared, vanished, appeared again.

SHIANNE: wait

Then:

SHIANNE: oh what the fuck

That was how the end began. Two women who were supposed to be answering emails discovered that the universe had developed a problem neither of us could forward to IT.

Chapter 2

The internet made it funny first.

Someone posted a skeleton at an office desk: waiting for my 12:30 lunch break. Someone else announced that God had abolished time to prevent them from clocking out. We laughed. There are probably people who laughed longer than I did and survived, so I try not to assign moral significance to it. We were frightened animals using the tools we had.

Then the posts began arriving from other countries.

London was stuck at 5:17. Tokyo at 1:17 the following morning. Places with half-hour or quarter-hour offsets had preserved those differences too. Every clock had arrested at the same instant, preserving its own last answer.

Some analog second hands trembled. Some kept completing the same little fraction of their sweep without moving forward. A man filmed a grandfather clock whose pendulum swung beautifully while all three hands remained still.

At first people blamed synchronization servers. Then someone found a windup watch in a drawer, and the comfort went out of that explanation.

Computers still processed data. Calls connected. Engines ran. We could count breaths, footsteps, video frames. None of those counts converted reliably into seconds anymore. A clip that ought to have contained a minute sometimes played longer than a cup of boiling water took to cool, sometimes shorter. Mechanical devices that existed only to measure duration had become useless; machines that happened to need duration continued doing their work.

A physicist on television said there was no known way for reality to distinguish between those categories.

He looked offended. I liked him for that.

My mother called while he was still talking.

“Are you seeing this?”

“No, Mom. Somehow you're the only person on Earth experiencing it.”

“Odette.”

“Yes. I'm seeing it.”

“Your father says it's probably solar.”

Dad believed most disasters could be traced to the sun because he had watched several documentaries about coronal mass ejections. It was reassuring to have a father who could locate blame ninety-three million miles away.

“Tell him the sun doesn't wind a pocket watch.”

“He says electromagnetic—”

“Mom.”

She stopped. Behind her, a cupboard shut. I could picture the kitchen without seeing it: the chipped bowl of keys, Dad's reading glasses beside the fruit, the little square of flooring they had never replaced after moving the dishwasher. Their house was twenty miles away. That distance had never seemed capable of becoming permanent.

“You should come here,” she said.

“I'm fine.”

“You haven't eaten lunch.”

“How would you know?”

“Because I know you.”

I looked at the abandoned toast on the counter, its scraped edges cooling beside a knife I had not bothered to put away.

“That's an invasive relationship with my privacy.”

“Come anyway.”

I told her I would if the roads stayed clear. It was a promise intended to close the conversation pleasantly, which is a terrible category of promise to remember afterward.

Chapter 3

The first sun video I saw came from Australia. The girl who posted it had propped her phone against a windowsill and recorded the garden while her father ate, washed up, argued with someone on the phone, and finally brought out a ladder.

Clouds crossed the sky. A towel lifted from the clothesline and settled. The sun remained in the same place.

The girl's caption was guys i don't think it's the clocks.

Then came footage from a city where it had been night at the moment of the failure. An ordinary dark street became bright between two frames. The streetlights stayed on beneath a blue sky.

My neighborhood had begun gathering outside.

Someone brought folding chairs. Someone else offered beer. Children ran through sprinklers while adults stood with their heads tilted back, attempting to look casual about a thing none of us could afford to understand.

Mr. Aster waved me over.

“Finally broke it,” he said.

“Broke what?”

He gestured at everything.

His recycling bin stood upside down, water draining from its handles. A little stream moved toward the gutter. I watched it for reassurance. Gravity, at least, still seemed willing to participate.

The sun hung high and slightly west of the position I thought it ought to occupy at lunch. The sky looked almost artificially beautiful. Clouds had edges as clean as torn cotton. Every leaf of the maple across the street seemed separately visible, as though the light were making a point of accounting for all of them.

I raised my hand to shield my eyes.

My shadow did not.

It was so brief that the mind could refuse it. My arm went up; the dark arm on the driveway stayed beside the dark waist. Then it lifted.

I lowered my hand. It lowered its hand.

“Odette?”

“Sorry.”

I raised my arm again. This time it followed perfectly.

“You need a hat,” Mr. Aster said. “You'll burn.”

He had spent years warning me about sunscreen, unlocked doors, and the way I pulled out of my driveway. I sometimes found him irritating, which afterward felt like another small betrayal of someone I had loved without naming it.

“I'll get one.”

Inside, I tested my shadow beneath the kitchen light. Raised both arms. Turned. Jumped once, feeling stupid.

It behaved.

So I decided the driveway had behaved too.

Chapter 4

The emergency coverage gradually stopped mentioning when the next update would occur.

Anchors said after the next assessment. Hospitals counted medication intervals by routines and monitored patients continuously when they could. People set improvised schedules by meals, by fatigue, by the battery indicators on phones that kept working until they did not.

Everyone still said hours. We needed the word. We used it the way people on a sinking ship use shore.

Unlike the clocks on the ground, instruments aboard the orbital stations still registered elapsed time. Their crews reported that Earth was turning. Observers above the atmosphere could see a normal boundary between day and night moving across the planet. On the ground, every region reported the same high, stationary disk, regardless of latitude or the local time its clocks had preserved.

The observations didn't agree because they weren't observing the same sky.

That was how one scientist put it. She refused to explain further when the interviewer asked what it meant. There was a long pause before she said, “I don't know.”

I trusted her more than the people who had already named it.

For most of what should have been our first evening, neighbors still knocked on one another's doors. Someone checked on the widow at the corner. Mr. Aster left me two bottles of water and a broad straw hat.

“You'll use both,” he said.

His shadow reached the step before he did.

I looked from his feet to the dark shape and back. He noticed.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

The thing settled into the position it belonged in.

I should have told him. There are dozens of sentences I should have said during those days, and afterward they developed an unbearable fluency. At the time all I could manage was thank you.

I shut the door and locked it.

Chapter 5

Sleeping required negotiation.

I pinned blankets over the bedroom windows. Light slipped around the edges in thin, white seams. I put on an eye mask, took it off to check my phone, put it on again. Somewhere outside a bird kept calling. At first its repetition had been soothing. Eventually the call became a desperate little insistence that the world respond correctly.

When I finally slept, I dreamed I was reviewing photographs for a claim. An empty driveway. A lawn. A house with its curtains drawn. In each photograph, the sunlight had bleached away a little more of the scene. I kept adjusting the contrast, trying to find out what had been lost, until my own hands began disappearing against the keyboard.

I woke hot, thirsty, and crying before I knew why.

12:17.

The day had waited for me.

Shianne had sent fourteen messages.

u awake

check outside

DON'T GO OUTSIDE JUST LOOK

I lifted a corner of the blanket.

The light had lost its gold. It was white now, a cleanliness so complete it made the houses look less inhabited. The lawn shimmered. The street was empty.

In Mr. Aster's driveway, a human silhouette lay on the concrete.

Nobody stood above it.

I stared long enough to become aware of my own breathing. The shape had the square shoulders of his work shirt, the small notch where his elbow usually rested away from his body. It was attached to nothing at all.

Its head turned.

Not the way a shadow changes when a person moves. The black oval rotated within the outline of the shoulders until the suggestion of a nose pointed toward my window.

I let the blanket fall.

The alert arrived while I was still holding the fabric.

REMAIN INDOORS. COVER WINDOWS. DO NOT APPROACH UNATTACHED SHADOWS.

I read the last two words repeatedly. Government language had found a way to make an impossible predator sound like something public works would collect on Thursday.

Mom called.

“Your father is boarding the basement windows.”

“Is he outside?”

“No. He's doing it from in here.”

“Okay.”

“Have you covered yours?”

“Blankets. Whatever I could find.”

“That's good,” she said, with more certainty than either of us had earned. “That's what they're telling people to do.”

I could hear her trying to reassure herself as much as me. I held the phone closer.

“Can you stay on for a bit?” I asked.

“Of course.”

Then Dad swore in the background.

Mom moved away. I heard something fall, a sharp cry, and him insisting he was fine in the exact tone that meant he was bleeding.

“Dad?”

She handed him the phone.

“Caught my hand on the plywood.”

“Get away from the window.”

“I am.”

“What happened?”

He didn't answer immediately.

“Mrs. Davison went into her house,” he said. “Earlier. Before we came downstairs.”

“Okay.”

“I just saw her shadow outside.”

I closed my eyes.

“Was she with it?”

“No.”

The word seemed to take something from him. My father had a way of speaking that assumed a problem could be made smaller by describing its components. This time there were only two components, and they refused to belong together.

“Stay inside,” I said.

He promised.

Chapter 6

The videos grew less useful and harder to stop watching.

A cyclist rounded a corner; his silhouette continued straight. A woman stepped through a revolving door; her shadow pressed against the glass after she had disappeared inside. Under the white sky in Seoul, pedestrians moved twice, once in bodies and again in dark repetitions several gestures behind them.

Then one of the repetitions stopped copying.

It crawled toward another pedestrian's feet.

The person filming dropped the phone before we saw what happened. For a while there was only pavement and a woman's shoe kicking in and out of frame. Then the shoe stopped.

Artificial light produced ordinary shadows. Someone demonstrated this with a desk lamp in a sealed room, a spoon, and a hand. Sunlight through glass produced the delay. Thick clouds weakened it without eliminating it. An umbrella did not seal out the glare reflected from streets and walls. Beneath it, the person still made an outline, faint and joined to the larger one. People in fully enclosed, opaque vehicles appeared safer, provided nothing had already followed them inside.

Clothing didn't help. The light needed your outline, not your skin.

At that point the safest advice seemed simple: block out the motionless daylight coming through the windows and use indoor lamps instead. Whatever was wrong with the light outside did not seem to affect lightbulbs. Before letting anyone into your shelter, check whether they cast a normal shadow beneath one.

The advice assumed everybody still had somewhere to shelter.

Shianne lived above a laundromat. Her building's water stopped before mine. The owner put bottled water beside the ground-floor machines and messaged the tenants to come down one at a time.

There was an awning over the outside stairs.

There was also a gap.

She told me all of this later, apologizing between details as though I were deciding whether to reimburse her.

“I crossed it fast,” she said.

“You shouldn't have had to cross it at all.”

Her camera showed her sitting against the bathroom wall. The ceiling light was on. A shampoo bottle cast a small dark triangle across the tile. Her knees cast nothing.

She moved one leg. The bottle's shadow trembled when she brushed it. Beneath her calf the floor remained uniformly bright.

I asked her to move the phone. To stand. To put something beside her. There is a humiliating optimism in checking an impossible thing from several angles, as though reality might correct itself if you stopped misunderstanding the lighting.

“I saw it come off,” she said.

My mouth went dry.

“On the stairs?”

“It stayed on the wall. I thought if I got inside—”

“Keep the light on. Get another one.”

“I have my phone.”

“Do you have a flashlight?”

She shook her head.

“Call downstairs. Ask them to bring one.”

“I did. They aren't answering.”

I was twenty minutes away when driving still meant something. My keys sat in the bowl beside the door. I looked at them and pictured the detached thing in Mr. Aster's driveway.

Shianne wiped her nose with her sleeve.

“Don't come,” she said.

“I didn't say I would.”

“I know your face.”

For the rest of my life I would remember that she had given me permission to survive before I had admitted I wanted it.

“Stay with me,” she said.

“I am.”

Her bathroom light flickered.

She looked up.

The next flicker lasted longer. In the brief darkness, the little gap under the door seemed to thicken. When the light returned, something black remained on the tile beside her foot.

It had fingers.

She did not scream. She pulled her foot away with the slow, incredulous caution of someone finding a spider much larger than a spider ought to be.

“Shianne. Get up.”

The lights went out.

Her phone lit her face from below. I heard her breathing, then a hard impact, then the sound of nails scraping tile. I shouted until my voice tore.

When the bathroom light returned, the camera was lying sideways. I could see the bottle, the closed door, and Shianne's sleeve.

There was no arm inside it.

The fabric flattened, slowly, as though something underneath had finished leaving.

A human outline climbed the wall beside the sink. It turned its head toward the phone.

Then the picture stopped.

I kept talking anyway.

Chapter 7

After that, I stopped calling them shadows.

I still used the word because we had no other one, but a shadow is what light fails to reach. These things were reaching back.

Emergency instructions changed. Complete darkness was no longer recommended. Keep an enclosed room artificially illuminated. Inspect entrances. Report any person who failed to cast a shadow under a single artificial light source.

The test could identify a breach. It could not prove there hadn't been an exposure. People with things already moving independently outside still cast ordinary shadows beneath lamps; some lost those later. Shianne had reached that later stage before she called me.

Nobody could explain whether the shadowless were infected, injured, or already something else.

A leaked briefing offered a phrase that travelled farther than any practical advice: MIMICRY PRECEDES INDEPENDENCE.

I had seen it lift Shianne's shape onto the wall. I thought of Mr. Aster's elbow, copied with such unnecessary care. Whatever was happening, the details mattered to it.

The power failed after my second sleep.

The refrigerator quieted. The air-conditioning stopped. For the first time I could hear how few ordinary sounds remained outside. No mower. No children. The bird had given up.

I filled the bathtub while the taps still worked. Filled pots, jars, the big mixing bowl I had bought during a brief, optimistic relationship with baking. I found an LED camping lantern and a battery radio in a closet, checked their batteries, and shut myself in the interior bathroom. The lantern made the room visible corner to corner. I no longer believed that meant safe, only safer than waiting for something I could not see.

I ate yogurt with a plastic spoon and a towel across my knees. A strip of light beneath the door came from the kitchen window, where one blanket had sagged. I watched it as though it were a crack in an aquarium containing something enormous.

Mom called while I was replacing the lantern batteries.

“We're still downstairs,” she said.

“Do you have light?”

“The flashlight. But the batteries—”

“Dad has more.”

“Upstairs.”

“Get them.”

“He went.”

I pressed the new battery into its compartment. The lantern came on, and for a moment the relief nearly made me faint.

“Mom?”

“He's back. He's looking.”

“Looking for what?”

“The other flashlight.”

Something scraped near her phone.

“Ask him to say something.”

“Odette.”

“Please.”

She called his name. No answer.

I heard a drawer open. Then another. Beneath those sounds, a soft repeated knock, irregularly spaced.

“It's him,” she said, more quietly. “It's your father.”

“Shine the light on him.”

“The flashlight died.”

“Use your phone.”

“I can't while I'm—”

“Yes, you can. Speaker. Put me on speaker.”

A rustle. Her breathing became distant. Something heavy struck the floor upstairs.

From far away, above her, I heard Dad call her name.

She stopped moving.

He called again. Frightened. Asking why she had locked the basement door.

The knocking beside her phone continued.

“Mom.”

She breathed once, very sharply.

“I thought he came back.”

“Turn the screen toward it. Get to the stairs.”

The phone scraped against something. I heard her say my name, not as a question but as though handing it to someone.

Then the call ended.

I tried them until my battery warning appeared.

Afterward I had only fragments to arrange: Dad caught upstairs, Mom locking the door, something already in the basement imitating the shape she expected to return. I don't know which of those guesses is true. People call uncertainty hope when they have not had to live in it.

Chapter 8

I stayed another sleep.

That sounds monstrous when I write it. My parents were twenty miles away and I stayed in a bathroom eating the food that would spoil first. But the roads had become traps. Cars offered no protection from light through the windshield. People covered the glass and drove almost blind; pileups blocked the highway. I could not reach my mother by wanting her hard enough.

I left messages instead.

I said I was coming when I could. I said I loved them. Once I started explaining where the spare batteries were in their own house, and halfway through I understood what I was doing and stopped.

Then I sat with the phone against my chest, waiting for somebody to need me.

The bathtub water developed a gray film. The lantern dimmed. I had enough drinking water to remain for a while, but only one unopened packet of batteries. When those were gone, the bathroom would become the basement my mother had described.

An emergency radio, working intermittently between stretches of static, announced a shelter at the grocery store six blocks away. Its windows had been boarded. A generator supplied interior light. Water was available.

Travel with others if possible. Carry a portable light. Avoid exposing your outline to the anomalous source.

The broadcaster read the instructions twice, then gave the street address.

I knew that address. I knew the parking lot, the automatic doors, the unpleasant little slope that made every cart try to escape toward traffic. A real place. It was the first piece of information in a long time that felt as though it belonged to the world I remembered.

I packed water, the lantern, batteries, and the little first-aid kit I kept beneath the sink. Long sleeves protected the burns on my arms. I took Mr. Aster's hat because it had become harder to leave than to wear.

I did not put a blanket over myself. I had seen footage of a bundled person running beneath an umbrella while the dark shape under the whole arrangement unfolded more limbs than the person possessed.

Protection against heat was one thing. Protection against being outlined was another.

I opened the door.

White light poured across the threshold.

My shadow formed beside me, sharp enough to look cut out.

I bent one finger.

It bent its finger.

For the moment, it was mine.

Chapter 9

The neighborhood smelled overcooked.

Grass had yellowed. Leaves hung from the maple with their edges drawn inward. A dead squirrel lay in the gutter, its small black outline a little distance from its body.

The outline moved when I passed.

I kept walking.

Detached figures covered walls, driveways, the pale siding of garages. Some retained the obvious proportions of people. Others were stretched across several surfaces, an arm on a fence and the rest of the body folded around a shed. They remained separate even where they overlapped. The blackness had edges within blackness.

On the side of an abandoned delivery truck, something shaped like a seated man turned its head without moving its shoulders.

I walked in the open center of the street. Beneath the trees I could see less, and several dark shapes waited in the shade. The light was making my outline available to something, but at least I could see what was coming toward it.

My lantern burned uselessly against my thigh. I kept it on anyway.

“Odette.”

Mr. Aster stood beside his garage.

I nearly dropped the bag.

His lips were cracked, his eyes red. He held a plastic jug of water in one hand. His other hand clutched a family photograph, glass missing from the frame.

“You're going to the store?” he asked.

I nodded.

“They still have the generator?”

“The radio said.”

“I can go with you.”

I started toward him, then saw the thing beside his feet.

It was the outline from his driveway. I recognized the little notch at the elbow. But his actual elbow was tight against his ribs now, holding the photograph.

“Don't move,” I said.

He looked down.

“I know.”

“You know?”

“It's been outside since I shut the door. I stayed in the living room. Lamp on. I thought—”

His grip tightened around the jug.

“The power went. I saw it starting under the front door. I went out the back. Thought I could get around it.”

The silhouette's hand shifted toward his shoe.

“Walk this way,” I said. “Slowly.”

He took one step.

The hand followed.

He looked at me with the bewildered embarrassment of a man who had spent his life fixing things and now needed someone else to give him instructions.

I held out the lantern. Its light fell over his legs. A faint ordinary shadow appeared behind him, angled away from the LEDs.

The other shape did not change. The lantern had found it, not driven it away.

For a moment there were two of him on the concrete.

Then the detached hand lifted.

It rose like a piece of black fabric being pulled from below, but it had thickness where it closed around his ankle. His shoe collapsed inside it. The toe flattened with a sound like a carton crushed underfoot.

He screamed.

I grabbed his wrist. The jug fell. Water spread over the driveway, carrying the reflection of that white sky.

His shin began to narrow.

I felt the bones resisting through his grip before I understood what I was seeing. The leg was not sinking. It was being pressed into the surface beneath him, flesh losing the space it needed to exist.

“Pull,” he said.

I did.

His fingers tightened until my knuckles ground together. For one instant I thought I could move him. Then the dark shape opened along the outline of its own mouth, and the hand holding the photograph went flat.

I lost his wrist because there was no wrist left to hold.

The frame struck the concrete. The photograph stayed caught between his fingers, now a dark comb spreading across the driveway.

He tried to say my name.

I ran before he finished.

At the next intersection I vomited beside an empty stroller. I stayed bent there, retching, while my shadow leaned over me a little later than it should have.

Chapter 10

The shelter occupied the rear of the grocery store. Volunteers had blocked the front windows with shelving and sheets of corrugated metal. The generator ran outside in a fenced loading area; a thick cable entered beneath the service door.

Someone shone a work lamp at me before letting me in.

“Turn.”

I turned. My ordinary shadow rotated across the wall.

“Arms up.”

I obeyed.

The woman testing me had a bandage around her forehead and a scanner clipped to her belt. I recognized her from the checkout lanes. She had once explained a sale to me three times while I became increasingly unpleasant about forty cents.

Now she let me live.

There were eleven people inside. An elderly couple shared a bench near the pharmacy. A teenage boy sat wrapped in an emergency blanket. A woman held a little girl asleep against her chest. A man with a shotgun helped unload bottled water, the weapon slung over his shoulder where both hands could remain useful.

The store smelled of spoiled meat beneath disinfectant. Every illuminated surface seemed exhausted.

A power strip behind the pharmacy counter let me charge my phone. I plugged it in, then gave the cashier my spare batteries.

She stared at them, then pressed her mouth shut before she thanked me.

Nobody asked whether I had seen anything outside. We could already see enough on one another's faces.

They put me near the pharmacy and handed me water. I drank slowly this time. The teenage boy offered half a packet of crackers without looking at me.

“Is it getting worse?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He nodded, grateful, I think, that I hadn't spent energy making the answer prettier.

The little girl woke and asked whether it was tomorrow. Her mother said she wasn't sure.

“My birthday's tomorrow.”

“Then we haven't missed it.”

The girl considered that. She had a red mark around one ankle, exactly where the strap of a sandal would have rested.

Her mother caught me looking.

“She fell,” she said.

I looked away.

Later I would think about that moment more than anything else that happened inside the store. Not because I knew. Because I did not know, and had still understood that the woman desperately wanted me not to ask.

Chapter 11

The generator coughed twice while we ate.

Everyone stopped chewing.

The cashier went to check the fuel. The man with the shotgun followed, taking a flashlight and returning without the look of someone who had good news.

They had fuel for another cycle of sleeping and waking, maybe less. The radio mentioned a municipal shelter farther away with more reliable power, but nobody could confirm that the road remained passable.

“We move together,” the cashier said. “When we have to.”

Someone asked how we'd know when that was.

She looked at the lights.

We arranged people in pairs, checked water, made room for the elderly couple in a wheeled stock cart. There was something almost unbearable about the ordinary competence of it. Humanity had not disappeared. It was sitting on the grocery-store floor deciding who could carry whose bag.

I unplugged my phone and called my parents again. No connection. I opened Shianne's last messages and scrolled far enough to find a photograph she'd sent before Friday: her lunch, aggressively beige, with the caption girl dinner but make it depression.

I laughed, and the sound became something else before I could stop it.

The teenage boy moved closer. He didn't touch me or ask what was wrong. He sat beside me until my breathing quieted, giving me the mercy of another person who wasn't making me explain.

I put the phone in my jeans pocket before lying down. When I slept, I dreamed of Mr. Aster's hand. I woke with my own wrist clutched against my chest.

The little girl was sitting beneath a checkout counter where her mother had spread a folded coat.

“There's somebody under me,” she said.

Nobody answered immediately. Children had been saying frightening things since children began, and for half a breath we all reached for that explanation.

“She keeps doing it after I stop.”

Her mother reached beneath the counter.

The girl slid forward into the fluorescent light.

She cast no shadow.

The mother's hand stayed extended. Her face changed slowly, as though she were reading a sentence whose last word she already knew.

“You saw her,” she said to the cashier. “You checked her.”

“You were carrying her,” the cashier said. “I asked you to put her down.”

“She was asleep.”

“You said she was hurt.”

The mother looked at the mark on her daughter's ankle.

“I couldn't leave her outside.”

The cashier's eyes moved to the coat beneath the counter. A wrapped child held against her mother would have given them one crowded outline. Whatever had happened on the way here, the woman had been afraid to let anyone look closely enough to name it.

The girl smiled at her mother.

A familiar smile. That was the worst part. Nothing split open; no teeth multiplied. It was the small pleased expression of a child expecting to be gathered up.

The man lifted the work lamp. Nothing she wore cast a shadow either. The discarded coat beneath the counter cast a perfectly ordinary patch of darkness. Whatever had taken her outline had taken everything it counted as part of her.

On the tile behind her, another shape remained.

It had her height. It reached toward her mother's shoes.

“Move,” I said.

The mother did not.

The generator faltered.

In the moment between one cough and the next, the girl's outline changed. Her hair lifted without air. Her shoulders spread sideways, as though the body were a sleeve and something larger inside had begun withdrawing its arms.

The lights died.

My lantern remained on.

I grabbed the teenage boy's sleeve and pointed its beam toward the floor. Something passed through the edge of the light: a black hand, six feet long, attached to an arm that had not decided how wide it needed to be.

The mother screamed the child’s name.

I remember it. But after telling you what happened to her, her name feels like one more thing I have no right to give away.

A flashlight beam crossed the room. The shotgun fired. Glass fell. I heard the cashier shouting for the loading door and followed her voice, an ordinary woman's voice in an ordinary room where ordinary things no longer had any authority.

The boy held the back of my shirt. Behind him somebody dragged the stock cart. We moved together until a shelving unit crashed between us.

His grip vanished.

I turned. The lantern found spilled cereal, a reaching hand, the wheel of the cart spinning in the air. I called to him. No answer. Something struck my bag and tore it from my shoulder.

I could keep the lantern pointed down our escape route or turn its beam into the wreckage and search for him.

I turned and reached once.

Nothing touched my hand.

Then the cashier caught my elbow and pulled me through the loading door.

Sunlight hit my face like rescue.

I hated it for that.

Chapter 12

Five of us reached the parking lot.

The cashier was bleeding from the mouth. The elderly man had made it without his wife. He kept looking back at the loading door, apologizing, though nobody had accused him of anything.

Then we noticed the horizon.

A black line stretched across the east.

It looked almost painted onto the bottom of the sky. Above it, the impossible afternoon remained blue. Below it, the distant buildings disappeared.

“Night,” the cashier said.

The word emptied something inside me.

For so long I had wanted darkness. Then darkness had taken Shianne, taken my mother, filled the places we went to hide. I no longer knew which desire was safe to have.

The line rose.

Stars appeared behind it.

Through a gap in the buildings I could see a tower lose its white illumination. The detached shapes along its walls vanished as the boundary crossed them.

A street farther east emptied of black figures.

They had not disappeared quietly. For the first time we could see them move with something like panic, crawling down walls, leaping from pavement to pavement, attempting to stay inside the retreating light.

One reached a person.

The person fell, convulsed, and stood again.

When night crossed them, they remained.

The cashier saw it too.

“The people,” she said. “They can stay in people.”

That was all we had time to understand.

The loose shapes in the parking lot turned toward us.

Chapter 13

The first wave came off the store itself.

Figures peeled from the brickwork, from signs, from the white delivery vans. They moved across the ground with the fluidity of spilled oil until they came near somebody, then found hands and knees and the shape they had practised.

We scattered.

I saw the elderly man stand still while two outlines reached him from opposite sides. His body stiffened between them. I kept moving, carrying a lantern that could show me what was happening and do nothing to stop it.

People ran west, following the false daylight. I ran with them for half a block before seeing a woman pulled backward out of her shoes.

The shoes continued sliding forward.

Behind us, actual night crossed the intersection. Loose silhouettes vanished at its edge. A figure already standing inside a man's body walked through it unharmed, the man's head turned a little too far toward the light.

A dark room had never removed the thing above us. It only hid what its light had already let in. This was different: as the boundary advanced, the white disk itself lost another segment. The sky was closing. I could not have explained why any more than I could explain why the false light chose our outlines, but I could see the difference.

I turned east.

The cashier was still behind me, limping. I held out my hand.

“This way.”

She looked past me at the black wall crossing the city.

“Did you see them?”

“Yes.”

“Inside the people?”

“Yes.”

She took my hand.

We ran toward the darkness.

Chapter 14

The thing above us changed as night approached.

I had avoided looking directly at it. Now the glare weakened enough that I could see its edges, and the disk stopped being a disk.

Segments folded inward. Vast pale surfaces moved over one another, revealing seams of brightness too deep to be flame. It had never been a distant star. It was something close enough to occupy our sky while leaving the sky above the atmosphere untouched.

It had given the entire world the same afternoon because distance did not seem to matter to it.

I thought of the first reports: normal Earth from orbit, motionless noon below. The conflicting measurements had not been failures. They had been warning us that something had placed itself between us and the rest of the universe.

The white surfaces contracted again.

Beneath my feet my shadow stopped running.

I felt a tug, small and intimate, at my heel.

The cashier kept moving. Our hands separated. The lantern slipped from my other hand and struck the road, its beam rolling across our feet before settling against the curb.

I looked down.

My outline lay on the road, its arm still extended toward hers. I had crossed so much light to get here. I had given it all the turns of my body, all the ways I recoiled, the shape I made when I reached for somebody I could not save.

It lifted its head from the pavement.

Then its shoulders.

For a moment it knelt behind me, a darkened woman learning how to stand.

I backed toward the approaching night.

It stood too.

My hair. My height. The stoop I developed when frightened. It even held one wrist against its chest.

I did not feel recognized. I felt catalogued.

It lunged.

I ran, and a cold hand closed around my heel.

The road tilted. My knee struck pavement. I tried to roll toward the darkness, but something inside my leg began pulling in the opposite direction.

The sensation was not pain at first. It was displacement. My foot seemed to occupy less space than my foot required, then my ankle, then the length of my calf. I could feel myself being made suitable for a surface.

I dug my fingers into a crack in the asphalt.

The cashier came back.

She caught both my wrists and pulled. Her face was wet with blood and sweat. There was no speech about bravery. She was swearing through her teeth, furious at the weight of me.

Night crossed her back.

Her shadow disappeared into ordinary darkness.

Mine tightened.

I felt something reach farther than flesh. A pressure behind my eyes, testing the familiar arrangements of my thoughts. My mother's kitchen appeared with impossible clarity. Shianne's bathroom. The photograph in Mr. Aster's hand.

It was not showing me memories. It was trying them on.

Then the boundary crossed my heel.

The pressure broke.

For one instant every nerve in my body seemed to carry the same enormous, soundless refusal. My leg returned to itself with a pain so complete I could not scream.

The cashier fell backward. I rolled after her into night.

Above us, the last white seam closed.

Stars occupied the place where the thing had been.

Chapter 15

We lay on the road until our bodies remembered what breathing was for.

Somewhere a dog barked. I began crying at the sound. I had not realized how desperately I needed something in the world to remain itself.

The cashier sat up first.

“Your leg?”

“I don't know.”

She fetched the lantern from the curb, put it beside us, and inspected my ankle. A black band circled it where the fingers had closed. The skin was intact. Beneath it, something hurt whenever I moved my toes.

We stayed in the lantern's small circle. Neither of us trusted night completely. We had seen what could carry itself through it.

People emerged slowly from doorways. We checked them under the lamp before letting them near. One man shouted that we were insane and walked away. A woman with a baby held out her hands before we asked.

Farther down the street, someone moved without making any sound at all.

We did not call to them.

The first ordinary morning found us in the pharmacy of another store, doors barricaded, a dozen flashlights standing on the counter. Gold light came through the windows and moved gradually across the floor.

Nobody stepped into it.

The cashier put a bottle on the sill. Its shadow shifted as the sun rose. She watched for a long time before extending one finger into the light.

The dark finger followed perfectly.

She began to cry.

I asked her about her life that morning. She had a son in another state and a sister she had not been able to reach.

For the first time since Friday, I wanted to know somebody beyond the question of whether they were safe to stand beside.

Chapter 16

Time returned locally, the same way it had left. The surviving clocks advanced from whatever readings they had preserved; network corrections came later, when there were networks to correct them.

Orbital records placed the event a little short of three days. On the ground, people argued that it had been longer. I had slept four times, eaten food I could not remember opening, lived through stretches of fear that seemed longer than any three days ought to contain.

Eventually I accepted the records. My body continued to disagree.

There were survivors. More than we had thought, fewer than anyone could count quickly. People who had stayed behind covered windows with lights and enough batteries. People who reached the returning night before anything could use them. Whole shelters that had remained intact beside neighborhoods where no one answered a door.

We found the teenage boy at a municipal triage center. Someone had lifted him over the fallen shelving and brought him out through the front of the store. When he saw me, he asked whether I still had his crackers.

I hugged him so hard he complained.

That was one of the good things. I keep it beside the others deliberately. There were good things, even then.

My parents' house was one of the places where nobody answered.

Dad's blood had dried on the basement stairs. The plywood remained nailed across the window. Mom's phone lay beside her chair, the screen cracked, her glasses folded on top of the book she had been reading.

I stood in that room until someone asked me to leave.

No bodies meant the forms called them missing. I understood why. I hated the word anyway. It sounded temporary. It sounded as though I should be doing something better than sleeping and buying toothpaste while the people who raised me had misplaced themselves.

Mr. Aster's photograph was still in his driveway. Rain had ruined it before I could collect it. I kept the frame.

Shianne's apartment had been cleared by the time I was allowed inside. The shampoo bottle remained in the bathroom, ordinary and green. I sat on the floor where she had sat and tried to remember the last thing I had said before I began shouting.

I could not.

That is what grief does with all your careful attention. It keeps the objects and loses the words.

Chapter 17

Rebuilding did not happen because we were resilient in some inspirational way.

It happened because people needed drinking water. Because children needed food and insulin had to stay cold and someone had to decide what to do with the meat rotting in warehouses. There were forms, arguments, generators, bodies where bodies could be found. The grocery store reopened with half its lights working, and I cried in the cereal aisle the first time I went back.

We did not burn our curtains. We bought more.

We kept battery lamps beside beds, taped instructions to refrigerators, and taught children to stand beneath a single bulb with their arms out. Survivors with injuries like mine attended clinics where people photographed the marks and avoided promising anything.

Some shadowless people were found after the event. Others passed a test once and failed it later. Nobody knew whether those were faulty tests or something capable of learning the test itself.

The official count changed. Then stopped being announced publicly.

My ankle healed badly. On cold mornings I felt pressure inside it, a small suggestion that the bones might remember another arrangement. I wore socks to bed so I would not wake and inspect the mark.

Months passed.

The sun moved. Days shortened. Leaves fell. I began doing work again, though nobody asked me to investigate the jet ski. The insurance company had problems sufficiently large to make one man's fraud almost touching.

I bought one of the awful shirts people sold online: I SURVIVED 12:17 AND ALL I GOT WAS CHRONIC INSOMNIA.

Shianne would have loved it.

Mom would have said I shouldn't joke about something like that, then borrowed it to sleep in.

I planted basil again.

It grew.

Chapter 18

The warning signs had been there for weeks before the second morning.

Clips from border cameras. Delays in shadows near sunrise that vanished when someone tried to repeat them. A deer photographed with two outlines, one falling in the direction its body required and another extending toward a horizon that was still dark.

The clips were called hoaxes. Then the agencies stopped commenting.

I understood later that they had been preparing an alert. I do not know why they thought waiting for confirmation was worth the time it cost us. Maybe I would have done the same thing before I learned what a confirmed thing looked like.

That morning, ordinary sunlight entered through the east-facing window above my sink and warmed the kitchen. The window beside the table faced west, toward the street. Its shade was still down.

I raised the west-facing shade and opened that window to let the kitchen air through. The basil moved in a draft between the open windows. I watched its shadow because I watched all shadows now, the way other people check whether they've locked the door.

The leaves swayed.

The little dark leaves kept swaying after the real ones stopped.

I set down my mug.

One shape remained fixed to the stem. Another slid away across the counter, thin and black, moving toward the western wall.

Outside, a car alarm began. Then someone shouted.

I closed the west window, pulled its shade, and switched on the overhead light. The second outline thinned when I shut out the light from the west-facing window beside the table. I kept watching until I could no longer distinguish it from the grain of the counter. Beneath the ceiling lamp, the plant cast an ordinary shadow behind its pot. I left the lamp on. I did not assume it had killed anything.

I stood there with my hand on the switch, listening to people come out of their houses.

My phone buzzed.

Before I read it, I checked the clock.

6:51.

The minute changed while I watched.

6:52.

Time had continued. That meant the old warning would not be coming.

I lifted the west-facing shade just enough to see the horizon.

The real sun was behind the house, rising where it belonged. Ahead, above the last retreating band of night, a white point brightened.

Its light laid a second shadow beneath the mailbox.

The ordinary one faced west, cast by the real morning. The new one faced east.

For a moment they lay on opposite sides of the same harmless object.

Then the second outline bent toward my porch.

Not toward the light. Toward me.

The phone loaded the message.

DO NOT LET IT CAST YOU.

I dropped the shade and backed away from the window. The kitchen clock continued counting. Beyond the fabric, the new brightness strengthened until I could see the weave of every thread.

On the floor beneath it, a thin white seam widened.

My shadow appeared in that seam before I stepped into it.