“Ry. C’mon.”

Slender fingers shake my shoulder.

I groan.

“Ryan wake up.”

My eyes crack open just enough to see Ollie’s silhouette in the darkness.

“Bleeuurgh.”

A smirk. 

“Ryan come on, I gotta show you something.”

“Fine,” I grumble. I make it to me feet on wobbly legs and a mohair blanket is wrapped around my shoulders. I shove my feet into my shoes and follow Ollie into the living room, out his front door, then through the hallway to another door, up a narrow spiralling stairwell until we reach a roof access door. He looks back at me and grins before opening it up. There are little exhaust vents and whirring box-shaped machines. Ahead lay another blanket and hot coffee and croissants, a few feet from the edge. I wrinkle my brow, but Ollie just keeps going until he’s sitting cross-legged on the blanket, pouring us coffee.

“Sunrise’s in five minutes,” he says, without looking up. 
I settle down across from him on the scratchy fabric and he hands me a steaming cup of coffee, half milk with a dash of sugar. I smile.

Just how I like it.

He gestures toward the little white cardboard box of pastries but I shake my head.

“I’m good for now. Don’t usually eat this early.”

Ollie shrugs and takes an enormous bite of a chocolate croissant.

I look around, the crisp wind sending my hair everywhere and chilling my skin.

“This is nice,” I comment.

“Yeah. I used to come up here with my mom whenever there were meteor showers. You can see the sunrise over the water though, and it’s really beautiful. Albeit cliche.”

I just nod. He crunches loudly through his croissant.

“Where did you get these?” I chuckle.

“Oh...there’s a bakery down the street that opens at like, six. The rest of them open at seven.”

“Ah.”

A faint glimmer of light peels over the horizon, and Ollie jumps up abruptly, running to the other side of the roof.

“What are you doing?” 
He grins like a madman, pushing buttons on a suitcase-sized machine.

Dozens of blocky devices stuck to the edge of the roof all around us flash blue LEDs, and reality changes before our very eyes.

What the hell?

The sky and everything else around us is swallowed in a sea of ink, swirling over our heads. The ink doesn’t cover all of it-there are still pinkish parts of the sky that remain, but they soon give way to the charcoal black. I jump up and poke the weird field-type thing that surrounds us, only to see my finger appear on the other side, just darker. Like I’m looking through tinted glass. I cautiously stick my head through, squeezing my eyes shut. On the other side, I find my neck still intact and outside world much brighter.

It’s like we’re in a bubble.

Ollie fiddles with something on the device he’s using and saunters excitedly back to me.

“Uh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he warns, and grabs my hand, pulling me back.

“Why not?”

“Well, for starters, we’re fifteen storeys off the ground.”

Oh well...

“Second, I don’t really know if it’s safe...”

I walk past him and lean against the barrier that keeps me from falling off.