The streets of Pine Hollow were unrecognizable.
Nathan pedaled through the darkness, flashlight off to save battery, his eyes slowly adapting to the pale starlight. Without the streetlights, without the house lights, without the diffuse glow of civilization, the town seemed like a different place. More ancient. More real.
And more unsettling.
From the houses came voices—confused, frightened, angry. Someone was crying. Someone was shouting. A woman in her fifties stood in her driveway, car hood open, staring at the engine as if she could make it start through sheer force of thought.
"Nothing works!" a man shouted from somewhere to his left. "Not even the generator!"
Obviously it doesn't work, Nathan thought. It has electronic components. The EMP fried them.
He stopped at the intersection of Maple Street and Oak Avenue. He pulled the compass from his backpack, briefly illuminated it with the flashlight.
The needle still pointed west-northwest. But it had changed slightly from when he was in the backyard. Nathan noticed it immediately—he'd developed an eye for precise details, years of astronomical observations had taught him to measure angles by sight.
He pulled the notebook and pen from his backpack. He opened to the first page, placed the notebook on the bike's handlebars. In the flickering light of the flashlight, he started writing.
Point 1: Intersection of Maple Street and Oak Avenue. Compass deviates approximately 15 degrees West from true North. Anomaly direction: West-Northwest.
The writing was quick, almost illegible, but it didn't matter. All that mattered was recording. Documenting. His father had taught him that an undocumented observation was a lost observation.
If I move and the angle changes, I can triangulate, he thought. Basic geometry. Two points and two angles identify two lines: one intersection point.
It was the kind of reasoning his father had taught him years before. "Science isn't magic, Nate," his father had told him. "It's just paying attention to details everyone else ignores."
Nathan put the notebook back in his backpack and started pedaling again, heading north along Oak Avenue. The road was deserted here, the houses more spaced out. Every now and then a window briefly lit up—someone lighting a candle, a battery-powered flashlight—then went dark again.
After about two hundred meters he stopped again. He got off the bike, leaned it against a tree. He pulled out the compass and notebook again.
The needle had shifted. Now it pointed more decisively west, perhaps twenty-five degrees from its previous position. Nathan did a quick mental calculation—if the angle had changed by ten degrees moving two hundred meters north, and assuming the source of the disturbance was point-like...
He pulled out the pen, started drawing in the notebook. A rough diagram: two lines starting from his two observation points, angled according to the compass deviation. The lines intersected somewhere to the northwest.
Hollow Woods, he confirmed mentally. Maybe a kilometer, a kilometer and a half into the woods.
He wrote in the notebook: Point 2: Oak Avenue, 200 meters North from P1. Compass deviation approximately 25 degrees West. Triangulation indicates possible source location in Hollow Woods, estimated distance one kilometer or one and a half kilometers from current position.
A part of his brain—that part he'd learned to silence over the last two years—was fully awakening. It was the same part that lit up when his father posed a problem to solve, when he saw a pattern in data, when the universe suddenly made sense.
Nathan. The Noise, again. More insistent. What are you doing? Go home.
But the voice seemed so distant now. Like a whisper under a waterfall. Nathan heard it, but it no longer had the power it once had. For the first time in years, there was something stronger than The Noise: curiosity.
He started pedaling again.
***
Main Street was a silent chaos. The diner on the corner was dark, overturned chairs visible through the windows. The pharmacy had its shutter open—someone was looking for candles or flashlights, probably. The post office looked like a black monolith against the starry sky.
And everywhere, people. Shadows moving in the dark, voices calling out, the sound of footsteps on invisible sidewalks.
"Do you know what's happening?" someone shouted at him as he passed.
Nathan shook his head without stopping.
Not yet, he thought. But I'll find out.
He took Old Quarry Road, the secondary road leading toward the edge of town. Here the houses thinned out, the lots became larger, and the darkness deeper. No neighbors shouting, no cars stopped in driveways. Only the rustle of his wheels on asphalt and the beating of his heart.
After another three hundred meters he stopped for the third time. This time he dismounted from the bike with deliberate, almost ritual movements. He pulled out the compass, the notebook, the pen. In the flashlight's glow, he observed the needle.
It was trembling now. Not oscillating wildly like it had at the beginning, but vibrating with a constant frequency, as if reacting to a pulsating field. And the deviation was even more pronounced—at least thirty degrees west of true north.
Nathan felt a shiver down his spine. Not of fear. Of excitement.
Whatever was out there was generating an incredibly powerful magnetic field. Powerful enough to distort Earth's magnetic field in a radius of kilometers. This wasn't just unusual. It was impossible. Or at least, it should have been.
He wrote in the notebook: Point 3: Old Quarry Road. Deviation approximately 30 degrees West. Compass needle shows vibration, frequency approximately 2-3 hertz (visual estimate). Very intense magnetic field. Note: power required for this distortion is an order of magnitude greater than any known artificial source.
He stopped, pen suspended above the paper. He reread the last sentence.
An order of magnitude greater than any known artificial source
This meant... what? That it wasn't artificial? That it was natural? But no known natural phenomenon could generate such an intense magnetic field without other observable manifestations. Certainly not a magnetite deposit, not a geological anomaly, nothing at all.
Unless it was something new. Something no one had ever observed before.
The thought should have frightened him. Instead he felt something ignite even stronger in his chest. That flame, that wild curiosity he thought had died along with his father.
What are you?
He looked ahead. The road continued for a few hundred more meters, then turned into a dirt path that disappeared among the trees. Hollow Woods was there, a black wall of vegetation against the starry sky. The woods where kids went to make illegal bonfires, where high school couples went for privacy, where Nathan himself had come a few times—always alone, always at night, looking for a point dark enough to see the stars without interference.
I need to get closer, he thought. I need at least one more point to triangulate precisely.
He got back on the bike, started pedaling. The houses had completely disappeared now. Only open fields on the sides of the road, the rustle of tall grass in the night's light breeze, and in the distance the dark mass of the woods.
***
The last observation point was at the entrance to the path leading to Hollow Woods.
Nathan got off the bike, leaned it against an old fence post that had once marked some forgotten property. The wood was rotten, covered in moss, but still held.
He pulled out the compass and illuminated it with the flashlight.
The needle was going crazy.
It no longer trembled with that constant vibration. Now it spun, oscillated, stopped for a second pointing in one direction, then suddenly snapped toward another. As if there were multiple sources of disturbance, or as if the source itself were... pulsating.
Nathan observed the pattern for almost a minute. He counted mentally. The needle completed a full cycle—from extreme right to extreme left and back—every seventeen seconds or so. Not exactly seventeen. Sometimes sixteen. Sometimes eighteen. But centered around seventeen.
Periodic, he thought. The magnetic field is periodic.
He opened the notebook, wrote quickly: Point 4: Entrance to Hollow Woods trail. Compass unusable for navigation. Needle oscillates with period of approximately 17 seconds (uncertainty interval between sixteen and eighteen seconds). Pattern suggests source is pulsating or rotating. Impossible to determine precise direction but general trend is: West-Northwest, estimated distance less than 500 meters.
Nathan breathed deeply. The night air smelled of damp earth, decomposing leaves, and something else. Something strange.
Ozone?
Nathan knew that smell. It was the smell of thunderstorms, electrical discharges, sparks. Ozone—O₃—formed when oxygen was ionized by a strong electrical discharge.
Then he stopped. He added another note: Strong smell of ozone. Concentration increases approaching the woods. Hypothesis: atmospheric ionization from high-energy electrical discharges.
He closed the notebook. He put it back in the backpack along with the compass—which was now useless for navigation. From now on he would have to rely only on sight and smell.
The smell of ozone was unmistakable now. Pungent, metallic, the same smell you felt after a thunderstorm but much more intense. Nathan had smelled it before—during electrostatics experiments at school, when they generated sparks with the Wimshurst machine. But this was different. This was... massive.
How much ozone did it take to produce such a strong smell? And how much electrical energy did it take to ionize enough oxygen to produce that amount of ozone?
Nathan did a quick mental calculation. Ozone had a very low olfactory threshold—you could perceive it at concentrations of a few parts per billion. But to smell it this strong, the concentration had to be at least on the order of one part per million. And to produce that concentration in an open space, where wind would disperse the molecules...
Continuous electrical discharges, he concluded. Something in there is generating electrical discharges so powerful and so frequent as to constantly ionize the surrounding air.
He combined this new information with the EMP, with the magnetic field distortion, with the pulsating pattern...
It doesn't make sense, Nathan thought. None of this makes sense according to the physics I know.
And that's exactly why he had to see.
Nathan, said The Noise, but the voice was so weak now that Nathan had to strain to hear it. Nathan, please. Don't do it. Turn back. It's not safe.
Nathan ignored the voice. He took the flashlight from his backpack, turned it on. The beam of light cut through the darkness, illuminating the entrance to the trail. Tall trees—mostly oaks and maples—whose branches intertwined above to form a natural vault. The undergrowth was thick but not impenetrable. The trail was visible, if barely—a strip of packed earth where grass grew more sparsely.
Nathan loaded the backpack on his shoulders, gripped the flashlight. He took a step into the woods.
***
The first hundred meters were relatively normal.
The trail wound between the trees, climbed slightly, then descended. Nathan walked slowly, pointing the flashlight ahead, careful where he put his feet. Exposed roots, rocks, fallen branches—everything could make him trip in the dark.
The smell of ozone grew stronger with each step. Not gradually, but in waves. Sometimes it was so strong Nathan had to hold his breath. Other times it faded, as if the wind had carried the molecules away. But the general trend was clear: the farther he went, the stronger the smell.
After two hundred meters, Nathan noticed something else.
The woods were too quiet.
No rustling of small animals in the undergrowth. No chirping of nocturnal birds. No buzzing of insects, the typical chirping of summer crickets was completely absent. Only the sound of his footsteps, his breathing, and another sound. Something so subtle that at first he thought he was imagining it.
A hum. Low, barely at the edge of hearing. Like the sound of high-voltage power lines, but different. Deeper. More... organic, somehow.
Nathan stopped. He turned off the flashlight. He closed his eyes, focusing only on listening.
The hum was there. Constant. It didn't change pitch, didn't pulse like the magnetic field. It was a single note, low, that seemed to come from all directions simultaneously. And beneath that note, he thought he perceived something else. Like a vibration in his bones, in his teeth, in the back of his skull. A frequency too low to be heard as sound, but powerful enough to be felt.
Infrasound, Nathan realized. Below twenty hertz. At the limits of human hearing.
He opened his eyes. He turned the flashlight back on. His heart was beating faster now, but not from fear. From excitement. Pure, uncontaminated scientific excitement.
Whatever was ahead, it was generating a pulsating electromagnetic field, ionizing the atmosphere, and producing sound waves at infrasonic frequencies. This wasn't a simple phenomenon. It was complex, multifaceted, extraordinary.
He kept walking.
***
After another hundred meters, the vegetation started to change.
Nathan noticed it first with peripheral vision—something strange about the colors, the shapes. He stopped, pointed the flashlight toward the nearest trees.
The leaves had a... wrong appearance. Some were withered, curled in on themselves, as if burned by frost even though it was June. Others showed dark spots, necrosis of plant tissue. And some—and this was the strangest detail—seemed to grow in anomalous directions, as if the normal phototropism of plants had been distorted by some other force.
Nathan approached an oak tree. He placed his hand on the trunk. The bark was warm. Not lukewarm. Warm. As if the tree were generating heat internally.
Side effects, Nathan thought. The phenomenon's energy is interacting with the local biosphere. An intense electromagnetic field can induce currents in plant tissues. If the currents are strong enough, heat develops inside the tissues through the Joule effect. Kind of like a microwave oven, but on a much smaller and less controlled scale.
He pulled out the notebook, wrote quickly: About 400 meters from woods' edge. Vegetation shows signs of stress from strong Electromagnetic Field. Necrotic leaves, abnormally warm trees to the touch. Hypothesis: induction of eddy currents in plant tissues from variable EM field.
He put the notebook away. He took the water bottle from his backpack, drank a sip. His throat was dry—partly from tension, partly from the ozone irritating his mucous membranes.
I'm almost there, he thought. It can't be much farther.
He started walking again. The trail climbed now, a slight but constant slope. The infrasonic hum was stronger, Nathan felt it in his bones, in his chest, in his stomach. It was almost nauseating in some spots, like invisible seasickness.
And then he saw the light.
***
It wasn't a normal light. It wasn't the yellow glow of a flashlight or the bright white of a searchlight. Something completely different.
Nathan stopped abruptly, his heart skipping a beat.
Between the trees, maybe fifty meters ahead of him, there was a luminescence. Between white and blue, flickering, filtering through the trunks and leaves like luminous water. It didn't cast sharp shadows as a point light source should. It seemed... diffused. As if the light itself were part of the air, not something passing through the air.
Ionization, Nathan thought, and his scientific mind immediately catalogued the phenomenon. When air is ionized enough, electrons fall back into lower atomic orbitals and emit photons. It's the same principle behind plasma and the aurora.
But the phenomenon wasn't in the sky, it was on the ground. Not at a hundred kilometers altitude. And the intensity was... it was incredible.
Nathan turned off the flashlight. He didn't need it—that light, whatever it was, illuminated the surrounding environment enough to let him see where to put his feet.
He approached slowly, one step at a time. The smell of ozone was overwhelming now, almost suffocating. The air itself seemed charged, electric, like before a thunderstorm that never came. The hair on his arms and head stood up. His skin tingled.
Nathan. The Noise, from somewhere far away. Nathan, leave. Now.
But Nathan couldn't leave. Not now. Not when he had before his eyes something no one had ever seen before, something that would change everything he thought he knew about the universe.
He got closer. Forty meters. Thirty. Twenty.
And then, through a gap between two enormous oaks, he saw it.
***
Nathan stopped, breath suspended.
It was a perfect circle. Or rather, a perfect sphere—but from where he stood it looked like a perfect circle, suspended vertically between two enormous oaks. The diameter was about three meters, maybe four. The edges were defined but trembling, like the boundary between water and air seen from underwater.
And at the center...
At the center there was nothing.
Not darkness. Not light. Nothing. An absolute void that Nathan's brain refused to process. Every time he tried to look at it directly, his eyes slipped away, as if reality itself didn't want him to see.
Impossible, he thought. This is impossible.
But it was there. Real. Tangible.
With trembling hands he pulled the notebook and pen from his backpack. He had to document. He had to record. Even if he didn't understand, even if it was terrifying, he had to write.
In the blue-white light emanating from the circle's edges, he started taking frantic notes.
Spherical object (circular from this perspective). Diameter approximately 3 or 4 meters. Suspended vertically between two trees. Trembling edges, vibration frequency approximately 1 or 2 hertz. At center a visual void, impossible to focus. Light emitted from edges: blue-white spectrum, probable emission from ionized plasma.
He stopped. He looked at the circle again. There was something in the way it trembled, in the way the light pulsed...
He'd seen something like this before. Not in person. But in his physics books, in documentaries, in computer simulations... In science fiction books.
It bends space, he suddenly thought. The distorted magnetic field. The EMP. The air ionization. The pulsating pattern.
Everything clicked in a blinding second of comprehension.
A wormhole.
An Einstein-Rosen bridge. A tunnel through spacetime connecting two distant points in the universe.
But this was pure theory, abstract mathematics, something that existed only in equations and science fiction movies. A stable wormhole had never been observed. They didn't even know if it was possible to create one, let alone find a natural one. Certainly, there was no known natural phenomenon capable of creating it.
But if it were real...
A wormhole would explain everything, Nathan thought, his mind racing. The opening of a breach in spacetime would release enormous amounts of electromagnetic radiation, and that would explain the EMP. The curvature of space would distort Earth's magnetic field lines, and that would explain the magnetic distortion. The released energy would ionize the surrounding air, and that would explain the ozone and plasma light. Fluctuations in spatiotemporal geometry could generate infrasonic waves, and that would explain the hum.
It was crazy. It was impossible. But it was the only explanation that made sense.
Nathan looked at the circle—the wormhole—and felt something break inside himself. Not in a negative way. In a liberating way. Like a dam giving way, releasing waters that had been held back too long.
For the first time in two years, Nathan Harris felt completely alive.