Chapter 1: Lightning in the Veins
The cord was a frayed, silvery snake in his hand, its plastic skin split open to reveal coppery veins. Ethan Bellweather’s knuckles were white around the roll of electrical tape. His apartment was a cathedral of clutter in the deep, unnatural quiet—towers of canned goods, bulging backpacks, haphazard stacks of books on practical engineering and survival medicine. He’d always been a preparer, a collector of useful things. It was a nervous habit, his therapist had said once, back when therapists and normalcy were things that existed. Now, with the strange red light seeping through the blinds, painting everything the color of old wine, it just felt like foresight.
Outside, the wind howled, a sound that had become constant over the last twenty-four hours, ever since the blood moon had first stained the sky. The news had gone from concerned to chaotic to silent. The power had flickered and died an hour ago. His phone was a dead brick. This stupid desk lamp, his last source of light, had chosen tonight to give up the ghost.
“Just need to…” he muttered to the empty room, his voice too loud in the stillness. He positioned the exposed wires, the live end and the neutral, careful not to let them touch. His heart was a frantic bird against his ribs. He wasn’t an electrician. He was a university student who read manuals. There was a difference.
His fingers, slick with nervous sweat, slipped as he suddenly felt dizzy when he tried to apply the tape. The bare copper strands kissed.
A searing, blue-white light exploded in the dim room. A vicious crackle filled his ears, and a jolt of pure, convulsing force shot up his arm. It wasn’t pain, not at first. It was annihilation. It was his nervous system turning into a supernova. His muscles locked, his back arched violently off the floor where he’d collapsed, and his vision strobed between the after-image of the arc and the deep, pervasive red from the window.
The electricity searched for ground through him, but found something else. A slowly unfurling potential, not dormant anymore and coiled tight in the core of him, snapped awake. He felt it unfold.
It was a tearing, a rending sense of internal space violently expanding where no space should be. A screech of metaphysical tectonics. The raw, coursing power from the outlet fused with this new, waking thing, feeding it, distorting it, catalyzing it into something raw and crackling. His veins burned, not with electricity anymore, but with a desperate, expulsionist pressure, as if his body was trying to vomit out a galaxy it couldn’t contain.
Then the fever took him, and nothing.
Consciousness returned in a slow, painful drip. His mouth tasted of burnt metal and dust. Every muscle felt chewed on. He was on his back on the scratchy carpet, staring at the water-stained ceiling. The red glow was still there.
He sat up, a groan ripping from his throat. The apartment was the same chaotic tomb. The dead lamp cord lay beside him, innocuously taped. He stared at his hands. They were unmarked.
But inside… inside was different.
He knew. It wasn’t a thought; it was a fact, etched into his newly-scrambled neurons. He had a… space. An internal place. It felt vast and hollow and his, a bruised, aching emptiness that had been violently carved open and now sat, raw and quivering, behind his sternum. He could feel its edges, strange and non-physical. It crackled with a residual energy, a ghost of the storm that had birthed it.
Shaking, he crawled to the window and peeled back the blind.
The blood moon hung swollen and low, a malevolent marble in a starless sky. Its light bathed the street below in a monochrome nightmare of crimson and black shadow. Figures shambled in the intersection. They moved all wrong, limbs stiff, heads lolling. One of them was half-dressed in a business suit, now stained and torn, dragging a foot that bent at an impossible angle. It stopped, turned its head slowly, and looked up. Ethan jerked back from the window, his breath catching. Had it seen him?
A car was embedded in the front of the pharmacy across the street. Another had jumped the curb and taken out a fire hydrant, which was now a useless fountain in the moonlight. Plumes of dark smoke smudged the horizon in several directions, unmoving in the still air. No sirens. No voices. Just the low, guttural moans that sometimes carried on the wind.
“Door,” he whispered, his voice raspy. He scrambled across the room, his paranoia a live wire. He checked the deadbolt, the chain, the extra lock he’d installed himself. All secured. He pressed his ear against the cold wood. Silence from the hallway.
Okay. Okay. He was safe. For now.
His mind, always practical under the panic, began to tick. Supplies. He had to take stock. It’s what you did.
He moved through the cramped apartment like a ghost in a museum of his own anxiety. The pantry was a fortress of carbohydrates and preservatives: stacks of pasta, bags of rice, enough canned beans and soups to survive a siege. He’d done his monthly shopping haul just… yesterday? The day the moon turned. He had gallons of water in old soda bottles, lined up like soldiers under the kitchen table. First aid kit, fully stocked. Batteries. Tools. A mountain of books. He even had a bag of gummy bears, the expensive kind.
He was prepared. For a normal disaster. For a blizzard, or a blackout, or a financial rough patch. Not for… that. Not for the things outside his window.
The sheer, gut-churning fear wanted to pull him to the floor, to curl up in a ball. But the new thing inside him, that raw, expanded space, hummed. It itched. It was a distraction from the horrors outside, a puzzle only he could see.
He knelt in the center of the living room, surrounded by his stockpiled life. He focused on the hollow feeling inside. The space. How did it work? He looked at a can of tomato soup on the coffee table. He thought about it, really looked at it—the red label, the cylindrical shape, the slight dent near the top.
A strange sensation, like a mental inhale. The can blinked. It wasn’t a light or a sound, but a sudden, total absence in his perception. One second it was there, solid and real. The next, it was… inside. He felt its weight, not in his hand, but elsewhere. A perfect, isolated presence suspended in the cool, dark stillness of his internal void.
“Whoa.” The word breathed out of him. He concentrated on the space, and the awareness of the can’s presence was immediate and precise. He willed it back.
It reappeared on the coffee table with the same non-sound blink, exactly as it had been. The dent, the dust on its top. Nothing changed.
An experiment. He took a box of cereal from the kitchen, a simple cardboard rectangle. He focused, performed that mental gesture. The box vanished into his space. He held the awareness of it there, then pushed further. He focused on its essence—the cardboard, the flakes inside, the waxed liner. He felt a drain, a slight tug of something from his own core energy.
And in his space, a second, identical box of cereal materialized beside the first.
He stared, wide-eyed. He could replicate it. He pulled both boxes out, setting them side by side on the floor. Perfect copies. His heart thrummed, not just with fear now, but with a wild, tremulous excitement. This changed everything. Food wasn’t a consumable anymore; it was a pattern. Water was just a template.
He spent hours lost in it. A battery duplicated. A roll of duct tape. A can of beans. He learned the energy cost was tied to complexity and mass. The can of soup took more out of him than the cereal box. He felt a growing fatigue, a mental weariness, but the hunger to understand was stronger.
As the night deepened and the blood moon traced its path across the sky, Ethan Bellweather sat surrounded by twin stacks of everything he owned. He was scared. The world outside his door was a graveyard painting. But inside, he had just discovered a universe.
The discovery left him trembling, not just from the residual shock, but from a bone-deep, searing exhaustion. It felt like he’d run a marathon while simultaneously taking a university final. Every cell in his body ached with a hollow, drained feeling. The act of creation, it seemed, came from his own reserves. He’d pushed too far, too fast.
The thought of the door, of the street, of the things in the crimson dark was a physical weight on his chest. Outside was a waking nightmare. In here, he had a universe in his chest and two of everything he’d ever need. The math was simple, brutal, and comforting. Ethan didn't dare go outside. Everything was safer in his own home, where nothing could hurt him, and he apparently had an endless supply of food and water.
The deep fatigue from his endless spending of energy swallowed him whole. His vision blurred at the edges, darkening like a tunnel. He slumped backward onto the carpet, the rough fibers scratching his cheek, and consciousness evaporated into a thick, dreamless nothing.
He woke hungry. Not just peckish, but a gnawing, stomach-clawing emptiness that felt like a separate entity inside him. The red light was gone, replaced by a grim, overcast daylight seeping through the blinds. Silent daylight.
He moved stiffly, his body protesting. First things first. He dragged his camping stove to the kitchen counter, the small hiss of the propane a shocking, normal sound in the abnormal quiet. He scrambled the last two eggs from the counter, fried some sliced ham in a pan. The smells were incongruously rich, almost obscene. He boiled water for instant coffee in a small kettle.
His hand hovered over the plate of eggs and ham, the steaming mug. An experiment, a habit now. He focused. The plate vanished into that inner space. He felt the slightest tug of energy, less than before—he was rested. He replicated it. A second, identical plate appeared beside the first in the void. He pulled out the original and ate, slowly, savoring the taste of normalcy. The coffee was bitter and perfect.
After eating, he cleaned himself up in the bathroom, a bird bath at the sink with a washcloth. The face in the mirror was pale, his brown hair a wild mess, his eyes wide and shadowed. But alive.
The apartment was a disaster. Having filled his home with two of everything, he could barely navigate. Towers of duplicated cans, twin stacks of books, pairs of flashlights and batteries formed a labyrinth across the carpet. It was a monument to his panic and his power. He couldn’t live like this.
So he slowly put everything into his space as he noted what was what. Can of beans, scan, store. Bag of rice, scan, store. Roll of duct tape, scan, store. It was methodical, calming. He was curating his own personal archive of survival. The physical clutter in the apartment gradually diminished, transferred into the neat, infinite shelves of his mind.
He got distracted when collecting some books. A paperback fell open—a dog-eared copy of a sci-fi novel about deep-space exploration. He sank onto the cleared couch and started reading. The words pulled him in, a lifeline to a world where problems were solvable by engines and courage. He was engrossed.
His stomach rumbled, a low complaint. He’d just eaten, but the energy drain of using his space was real. Then he remembered the extra breakfast he had left in the space. He replicated it again, the energy cost a faint dizziness, and took a portion out.
It was still hot. Steam curled from the eggs. The ham was warm.
Ethan stared. The coffee he pulled out next scalded his tongue. Time froze inside the space. That meant he should probably put all of his food ingredients from the fridge and freezer inside his space. Before they spoiled. Before the silent, dead world took that from him too.
After eating, he went to the kitchen and emptied the fully stocked fridge. It was full of vegetables, fruits, different meats and fish—Ethan especially liked salmon, so there were both salmon steaks and smoked salmon and other kinds. There were also a lot of dairy products and eggs. There was also a cake from the bakery he couldn’t resist, a rich chocolate thing he’d bought for a study group that never happened.
The freezer contained a lot of frozen meats and vegetables and fruits out of season, as well as ice cream and frozen desserts. There were even a few frozen meals.
As he put things away, he got into the rhythm of it, and he also began putting all the spices and staples like rice and flour and sugar away, until his kitchen was bare. Cupboards, pantries, all of it. Emptied into the perfect, timeless void within him. It only took twenty minutes because he didn’t replicate them. He just stored the originals. An entire grocery store’s worth of food, suspended in a moment.
He returned to his book on the now-clear couch and took out a cup of coffee. He needed a break again, even though a lot of stuff—furniture, non-perishables he hadn’t gotten to yet—was still stacked up around him. He sipped the coffee, still hot from inside the space, and looked at the blank face of his television. He absently wondered how other people were faring, not having heard anything from outside. No screams now. No sirens. Just wind.
He hoped people were like him, hiding, and not dead. He hoped Mrs. Gable next door was sitting in her dark apartment with her three cats, living off canned tuna. He hoped the guys in 4B, who threw loud parties, were quiet now, sharing their beer and waiting it out.
Hopefully the government would rescue us all, he thought, the sentence feeling flimsy and childish even in his own head. He took another sip of coffee. Outside, something heavy and metallic crashed in the distance. He didn’t flinch. He just held the warm mug tighter, feeling the shape of it, the heat, and the immense, silent weight of everything he now carried inside.