Hole in the Sky by Daniel H. Wilson

Author:Daniel H. Wilson [Wilson, Daniel H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2025-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

22

Clarity

MIKAYLA JOHNSON // Spiro, Oklahoma

Impact, +10 Minutes

“Wake up,” says a voice in the mist. “Mikayla.”

Oh my goodness.

I’m cold all over. Smelling earth, I realize I’m lying on my stomach with my butt in the air like a fucking toddler. Laid out in a gully at the bottom of a hill, with the slow memory of impossible things surfacing in my mind.

I groan into greasy, metallic-tasting dirt.

Liquid is flowing somewhere nearby. Gurgling in that gross guttering way like a toilet sucking down a flush. I force my eyes open and crawl around until I’m sitting up on my knees. A thick fog is sliding down the hill past me. The ground is covered in what looks like the silver tinsel my grandma used to throw all over her plastic Christmas tree. I swear they made that stuff illegal, but she always had extra cardboard boxes of it.

Who knows, maybe she saved it.

Oh shit. It hits me that the object was here! It came down right over top of me. It hovered in the sky, completely, beautifully impossible. The skin of it was kind of flapping and waving. And then it broke. The whole thing deflated, the ground roaring as a giant waterfall of black-silver liquid gushed out.

At the memory, I spit in the grass.

I can still taste the iron tang of it around the sides of my tongue. My clothes are covered in this stuff. My ass and knees are cold and damp.

“Nix?” I whisper. “That you?”

The Nix glasses are wedged up on my forehead. I pull them down and peer through them. They seem to be working. I take a closer look around me.

The black-silver goop is disappearing already. That obscene gurgling sound is from the water-not-water seeping into cracks in the ground. The grass has been flattened and…dissolved. Every stalk is melting like solder against a soldering iron, and the resulting stew is simultaneously draining into the mound and rising as a thick white mist.

I hope it’s not toxic, but it’s way too late for that.

“Nix?” I ask, turning myself over. “Am I okay? Is this shit poisonous?”

The vapor is rising up off the bas-relief terrain—the ground painted in shades of weird silver. All those clouds that were going apeshit a minute ago have gone soft and pillowy, like they’ve floated down to coat the whole sky just above my outstretched fingertips.

“Nix? Seriously.”

I notice the chicken skin on the forever-bumpy backs of my arms is scabbed with black-silver liquid, drying in patches. I try to scrape it off, cradling myself and making frantic little swipes. But all that effort just seems to rub it in like lotion. It’s blending into my brown skin and disappearing.

That’s just fucking great.

A foreign chemical from beyond the stars just got dumped all over me—including inside my mouth—and now it’s going inside my skin.

Yeah, that’s probably not going to have any repercussions.

“Nix!” I finally shout. “Come on, you fucker! Answer me!”

Grabbing the Nix glasses with both hands, I try to yank them off the bridge of my nose.

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