Queens, New York
Late October, 2018
Eli Rowan was fifteen and three-quarters, and he knew the exact frequency on which the world lied to him.
It was 89.3 MHz, the public-radio station that always said "mostly sunny" when the sky looked bruised and angry. He sat cross-legged on the fire escape outside his bedroom window, headphones clamped over his ears, the cheap SDR dongle plugged into his equally cheap laptop balanced on his knees. The city's electromagnetic soup poured into his skull in cascading waterfalls of color he could almost taste: subway third-rail hash, Wi-Fi chatter, the slow heartbeat of Con Edison transformers, and somewhere far away, the alien carrier wave that had been whispering to him since the day the sky turned purple.
He called the wave "Mother."
Not because it sounded maternal. Because it was the only thing that never lied.
Today Mother was agitated. The waveform jittered like a frightened bird. Eli's fingers danced over the keyboard without looking, tweaking filters, narrowing bandwidth until the noise floor dropped away and the signal stood naked in the waterfall display: a repeating 512-bit sequence that hurt to perceive directly. He wrote it down anyway, in the spiral notebook he kept rubber-banded to his thigh so it couldn't fall.
His mother's voice floated through the cracked window.
"Eli, dinner in twenty. Take your headphones off before you come in, okay?"
He made the small grunt that meant yes. Two short, one long. She understood. She always did, even when the words jammed behind his teeth like marbles.
Inside, the apartment smelled of cumin and tomatoes. His little sister Amaya was setting the table, humming the Spider-Man cartoon theme off-key. Their father wasn't home yet—still on shift driving the A train. Eli slipped past them, washed his hands exactly eight seconds per finger, and sat in the chair that didn't wobble.
Amaya plopped a plate in front of him. "Guess what happened at school today?"
Eli raised an eyebrow. That was invitation enough.
"Flash Thompson tried to stuff me in a locker again, but Gwen Stacy kicked him in the shin so hard he cried."
Eli's mouth twitched. Gwen Stacy went to Midtown High with Peter Parker. Peter Parker was Spider-Man. Eli had known for nine months and eleven days. He knew because Spider-Man's suit transmitter operated on an unlicensed slice of the 902–928 MHz band with a very specific digital signature Eli had catalogued the night of the Washington Monument incident.
He had never told anyone.
His mother set a bowl of rice down. "You okay, baby?"
Eli nodded once, sharp. Then he opened his notebook to a fresh page and wrote in his neat, tiny capitals:
THEY ARE COMING AGAIN.
SOON.
I CAN HEAR THEM COUNTING DOWN.
His mother read it, sighed through her nose, and kissed the top of his head. "Eat your food, Eli."
He ate.
Later, when the apartment was asleep, Eli climbed back onto the fire escape with his go-bag (a JanSport full of Red Bull, a soldering iron, three RTL-SDRs, and the emergency Ativan his mother thought he didn't know how to palm). The sky was cloudless and starless, light pollution bleaching everything the color of old bones.
Mother's signal had changed key. It was singing now, a rising perfect fifth that made the fillings in his teeth ache.
Eli plugged his best dongle into the high-gain Yagi he'd built from coat hangers and PVC pipe. He pointed it south-southeast, toward Manhattan, toward Avengers Tower. Toward whatever was left of the universe after half of it turned to ash and then came back.
He closed his eyes and listened.
And for one perfect second, the world went quiet.
Then the sky tore open.
Not like Thanos. Not purple and gold and cosmic. This was surgical. A needle-thin lance of green-white light stabbing down from low orbit, striking the East River just off Roosevelt Island. The EMP that followed was so clean it felt polite. Every light in Queens flickered once and died. Car alarms rose in a brief, apologetic chorus before they, too, went silent.
Eli's laptop screen went black, then rebooted on battery.
Mother was screaming.
Not in words. In raw carrier. A single tone climbing into ultrasound, so pure it felt like a scalpel dragged across the inside of his skull. Eli dropped the Yagi, clapped both hands over his ears, and rocked forward until his forehead touched his knees.
Make it stop make it stop make it stop—
It stopped.
The silence that followed was worse. It was the silence of a dead star.
Eli tasted copper. His nose was bleeding. He hadn't had a nosebleed since he was nine.
He looked up.
The green-white beam was still there, thinner now, pulsing every 1.618 seconds—the golden ratio, which meant someone out there had a sense of humor. At its base, where it touched the water, something was rising. Not a ship. A lattice. A three-dimensional fractal made of black glass and starlight, unfolding like origami in negative space.
Eli knew, without knowing how he knew, that it was looking for him.
His phone buzzed in his pocket—one bar of battery, no signal, yet a single text message glowed on the screen.
UNKNOWN NUMBER:
you hear us now
come home
He stood up. The fire escape groaned under his sneakers. For the first time in years, words arranged themselves in his mouth without friction.
"No," he said aloud, voice rusty. "I'm already home."
Then he did the only logical thing.
He climbed down the fire escape, go-bag bouncing against his hip, and started walking toward the bridge.
Three hours later
The National Guard had thrown up checkpoints on the Queensboro Bridge, but they were looking for vehicles, not a skinny kid in a hoodie moving along the pedestrian walkway with his headphones around his neck like a stethoscope. Eli kept to the shadows and counted steps—one Mississippi, two Mississippi—until the lattice on the river was close enough that its edges hurt to perceive.
Up close it wasn't black glass. It was absence. A hole cut in reality and folded into the shape of a cathedral. People stood at the railings filming on phones that no longer worked. Some were crying. Some were praying. One guy was trying to sell glow sticks.
Eli walked past them all.
He reached the end of the bridge where the lattice kissed the railing, and he reached out with one finger.
The surface felt warm. Like skin.
A seam opened, irising wide. Inside was not darkness but starfields rotating in impossible directions. A corridor lined with soft blue lights that pulsed at 7 Hz—theta waves, the frequency of deep meditation and trance.
Eli's heartbeat slowed to match.
He took one step. Then another.
Behind him, someone shouted. He didn't turn around.
The seam closed.
The lattice folded in on itself with a sound like every radio station in the world turning off at once.
Then it was gone.
And so was Eli Rowan.
Avengers Tower – 38 hours later
Tony Stark hadn't slept since the "Roosevelt Event," as the news was calling it. He stood in the common-area kitchen at 4 a.m., arguing with a holographic display while Bruce tried to meditate on the couch and failed.
"Friday says the kid just walked into the thing," Tony said, gesturing with a mug that had gone cold an hour ago. "No resistance, no weapons, no nothing. Like it was expecting him."
Bruce opened one eye. "And the energy signature?"
"Matches the same weird quantum entanglement we saw in the Snap residuals. Only… gentler. Like the universe's way of knocking instead of kicking the door down."
The elevator dinged. Natasha Romanoff stepped out holding a thin SHIELD folder and an expression that could freeze vodka.
"We found something," she said. "Security camera from a bodega on the bridge approach. Kid's wearing a Midtown High hoodie. Name on the roll sheet: Elias Rowan. Fifteen years old. Nonverbal autistic. Lives with his mom and sister in Astoria. Dad's an MTA conductor."
Tony's eyebrows went up. "A fifteen-year-old autistic kid just got abducted by a sentient interdimensional origami cathedral and you're giving me his GPA?"
"I'm giving you the part where his teachers say he can quote the entire FCC frequency allocation table from memory. And the part where his mom says he's been predicting 'alien radio' for two years."
Silence.
Bruce sat up slowly. "You think he was… targeted?"
"I think," Natasha said, "that whatever took him didn't break in. He opened the door and walked through because someone on the other side said please."
Tony looked out the window where the first pink of dawn was creeping over the city.
"Then I guess we'd better figure out how to say 'give him back' in whatever language origami cathedrals speak."
Somewhere that was not space
Eli woke up on a floor made of warm cedar that smelled like his grandmother's house before she died. There was gravity, but it felt optional. Above him drifted slow-moving schools of light that resolved into numbers when he stared too long—prime numbers, mostly, with the occasional Fibonacci flourish.
He sat up.
A woman crouched a few feet away, watching him with open curiosity. She was tall, easily six-two, with skin the color of deep space and constellations faintly glowing under the surface like bioluminescent tattoos. Her hair was cropped short and silver, and her eyes were galaxies—literally, swirling spiral arms of gold and indigo.
She tilted her head. "You're smaller than the scans predicted."
Eli's throat clicked. Words still felt strange, but possible here. "You kidnapped me."
"Invited," she corrected gently. "You accepted."
"You could have asked."
"We did. For two years, eleven months, and nine days. You just didn't know it was language."
She extended a hand. Her fingers were long, seven-jointed, tipped with soft light. "I'm Captain A'kera of the Choir ship Resonant Lament. Your species doesn't have a word for what we are yet, but 'librarians' is close enough."
Eli didn't take her hand. "I want to go home."
"You are home," she said, and something in her voice made his chest hurt. "The version of it that survived."
He looked around. The cedar floor extended into the distance, interrupted here and there by transparent alcoves full of—what? Memories? Galaxies in bottles? He couldn't tell.
"My mom thinks I ran away," he said.
"Your mother is currently being comforted by a very tired woman in a spider-themed suit who is explaining that sometimes the universe asks to borrow people and usually gives them back improved."
Eli blinked. "Gwen?"
"Among others." A'kera smiled, and it was the first time Eli understood that smiles could sound like music. "You're important, Elias Rowan. The Snap broke something fundamental in the way your reality processes information. You hear the cracks. We need someone who can hear them to help us mend them before the cracks notice they're broken and start breaking everything else."
Eli hugged his knees. "I'm autistic, not magic."
"Autism," A'kera said carefully, tasting the word, "is a difference in operating system, not a bug. Your brain routes around the consensus illusion most sentients need to function. That makes you a natural receiver for what we call the Deep Song. And right now the Song is dying."
She stood, offered her hand again. This time he took it.
As they walked, the cedar floor rippled and showed him glimpses: Earth from orbit with glowing wounds across its magnetosphere; the Avengers arguing in their tower; his mother asleep on the couch clutching his notebook; Peter Parker perched on a rooftop staring at the river like it had personally betrayed him.
And woven through all of it, the faint, fading carrier wave of Mother, no longer screaming. Just… tired.
Eli stopped walking.
"I'll help," he said. "But I have conditions."
A'kera raised a crystalline eyebrow ridge.
"One," he counted on his fingers, "I want regular visits home. Two, my family gets protected. Three, you teach me how your radios work. Four—" He hesitated. "Four, I want to understand why it feels like you already love me."
The Choir captain knelt so they were eye-level. The galaxies in her irises slowed their spin.
"Because," she said softly, "the first time you heard our distress beacon and answered by building a better receiver out of trash and hope, every adult on this ship fell a little bit in love with you. We have been waiting a very long time for someone who listens."
Eli felt his face go hot. He looked down at their joined hands.
"Okay," he whispered. "Then let's fix the Song."
Somewhere far away, in a universe that still had stars, a fifteen-year-old boy with noise-canceling headphones around his neck took his first step toward becoming the most unlikely linchpin the multiverse had ever known.
And the women who would one day follow him into fire already knew his name.
They just hadn't met him yet.
End of Chapter 1