“The school!” Naomi yelled in surprise and veered down the road. Tommy wrenched his handlebars and tore off after her. The lights all along the street started to flicker wildly, throwing them between darkness and light in a way that made Tommy dizzy.

“Naomi?” Tommy called cautiously. Naomi didn’t slow down.

“We’re almost there! We’ll worry about the weird electrical shortage after we lay claim to the space debris!”

They neared the dim behemoth that was Silver Creek High, a large concrete monstrosity painted a sky blue that didn’t make it look any less the prison it felt like inside. Without the light of day to show the color, however, it looked dull and gray beneath the shadows of the night, and, as if Tommy needed more reasons to hate the place, just amped up the creep factor. He did not want to be there.

“I don’t think we should be here,” he said as they pulled up to the school and dumped their bikes into the bushes, where they couldn’t be found by a potential passersby. If there would be passersby at two in the morning on a weekday night.

“Too late for that,” Naomi replied, nonchalant as she turned on her heel and half-ran towards the nightime-abandoned building. Tommy grumbled something to himself about how it was never too late and took off after her as she vanished into the poorly-lit night.

“I don’t see anything,” Naomi said in disappointment once Tommy found his way back to her side again. She dug into the pocket of her jacket and procured a flashlight, then clicked it to life before Tommy could even register its existence, never mind stop her from lighting up their position to any authority that might be watching.

“Naomi!” he half-hissed, half-yelped, as Naomi swept the beam of light around.

“Shh, Tommy. It’s fine. No one is awake this late at night but us.” Using the light, she started walking across the parking lot, closer to the front gates of the school. “Do you think it fell into the woods around back?”

“Maybe it burned up in the atmosphere,” Tommy tried, squinting into the dark for any signs of movement with no success.

“No, we saw it. It definitely hit somewhere, there’s no way something that visible disintegrated. Maybe shattered when it hit ground, but definitely not disintegrated.”

While she turned away from the front doors and did a second sweep, Tommy leaned against the cold bricks that made up the building’s outer walls and scrubbed a hand against his face. It was a school night, so he’d been wholly unprepared to face the next day with little to no sleep, but he hadn’t expected to exert himself more than what it took to climb up and down Naomi’s roof. Running around school property? Was not in the agenda. He already felt exhausted thinking about what the day would bring.

He was so caught up in himself that he almost missed Naomi when she called, “Tommy?”

His head shot up. She was standing a few feet away with the flashlight beam aimed up, and she looked over at him when he didn’t move. Though he couldn’t exactly see it, he knew she was rolling her eyes when she urgently beckoned him over with her free hand. With a sigh, he pushed off the wall and joined her.

“I either found the point of entry,” she started once he was close enough, gesturing with her head up towards where she still had her light trained, “or someone decided tonight was a good night to break into the school from the third story.”

Frowning, Tommy looked. It took him a moment, and then he realized, with a hot spike of alarm crawling up his spine, that one of the windows was broken. On the third floor.

“How the hell?” Tommy asked.

“Exactly. Weird, right?”

Beyond weird. But Tommy wasn’t going to admit to that.

“Well, there’s not a whole lot we can do if it’s inside the school.” Tommy shrugged instead, starting to turn away. “Guess we’ll just have to find out what happened tomorrow.”

Naomi rounded on him, directing the flashlight beam into his face, and he winced away like it was going to incinerate him alive. He held out his hand to block it, but it did little to help. “Are you kidding me, Thomas? We’re not leaving now!”

“It’s in the school, Naomi,” Tommy said through gritted teeth, squinting through the blaring light. Naomi still didn’t lower the flashlight. “What exactly are you planning to do, break in?”

If the idea hadn’t occurred to Naomi before Tommy had said anything, it certainly had now, and her silence spoke all the volumes Tommy didn’t want to hear. She directed the beam away again, pointing it towards the school’s front entrance.

“Oh, no,” Tommy started immediately when Naomi didn’t reassure him that’s not what they would be doing and instead turned and started making her way back to the front doors. Tommy followed easily, gesturing at her with both of his hands like that would do anything for his case. “No, no, no. Absolutely n—”

He cut off abruptly when a noise, louder than his speaking voice, echoed through the night. A hissed curse followed the noise, and that was when Tommy realized someone was right behind him, stumbling through the dark.

Tommy whirled around, fists at the ready. He wasn’t the most combative of people despite his sports background, but he’d protect Naomi with everything he could if the need arose. But instead of finding himself confronted with some kind of alien creeping along the side of the school, like his space-debris-addled brain had been expecting, he found himself nearly nose-to-nose with another human. Just another human, no older than Tommy was himself.

Dressed in all black with a head of long, light hair brushing his shoulders, he looked like someone Tommy would expect walking the halls of the school and ignoring everyone around him. He seemed just as startled to be confronted with Tommy was Tommy was to be confronting him. It didn’t stop Tommy from grabbing him and pinning him against the wall all the same.

“Whoa, hey, whoa!” the stranger yelled, stumbling up against the wall with the generous help of Tommy’s hand to guide him there, and that was when Tommy realized he recognized him, albeit faintly.

“You go here,” Tommy accused breathlessly, one fist still raised above his head, the other hand fisted in the shirt of one fellow student whose name Tommy wasn’t sure he ever knew.

The guy shook his head frantically, both eyes on Tommy’s fist. “Uh, duh, yeah I do! We have chemistry together, you idiot! Donnelly, third period!” He shoved his hands against Tommy’s shoulders, then did a double-take when Tommy didn’t even budge. “Jesus Christ,” he mumbled faintly.

“Zachary Alcott?” said Naomi in surprise, and the stranger’s eyes flashed to her from where she stood over Tommy’s shoulder. Both her hands wrapped around the fist Tommy still had raised, and he instantly relaxed it, though he still kept a firm grip on the stranger’s shirt.

“You know him?” Tommy accused.

“Not exactly. We have homeroom together.” She tugged on the fist. “Zachary’s been going to school with us for years, Tommy. He moved here from Texas in eighth grade. You’ve had to have seen him in the halls at some point.”

Zachary blinked at Naomi, his mouth hanging open, speechless for a moment. Then, like he remembered he was still being pinned to a building, he jolted. “We have a class together, Jesus. And it’s just Zack,” he corrected in a huff and smacked Tommy again, this time keeping his hands on Tommy’s shoulders when he once again didn’t even flinch. His eyes still widened a fraction, and the color of his irises was indiscernible from his pupil in the low light, despite Tommy’s proximity.

Tommy wondered, for a moment, if maybe the guy was stalking them. Why else would he be creeping around so late at night? A drug deal? He was skinny, but he didn’t seem to be in that heroin chic category that was so popular lately.

“Mind calling off the meat wall, maybe?” Zack asked, and not politely.

“Tommy.” Naomi gently pulled his hand again, then a third time, firmer, when he didn’t relent. “Tommy. Come on, he’s fine.”

Slowly, Tommy let Zack’s shirt go and stepped away. Zack’s hands slid off Tommy’s shoulders as he moved, but he didn’t look away from Tommy’s face until there was a good amount of distance between them.

“What are you doing here?” Naomi asked when it was clear that Tommy wasn’t going to go after Zack again and that neither of them were going to bother using their words.

Zack’s eyes flashed to Naomi. “I saw something fall out of the sky.”

“The comet,” Tommy said at the same time Naomi said, “The meteorite.”

Zack gave them a strange look and continued slowly, “Yeah, that thing. It came this way, thought maybe it landed in the parking lot, but then …” He stopped and lifted a finger up towards the broken window.

“Did you see any other point of impact?” Naomi asked. “Some sort of crater or indentation, any kind of indication that it might have landed around here?” She turned her eyes to the hole in the window again. “That’s not big enough for the size of the object.”

Zack shook his head. “Uh, no. I came in that way.” He moved the pointed finger until it directed their attention towards the school parking lot. “Didn’t see anything suspicious except for you two creeping around. That’s about when I decided I wanted to make the mistake of coming to say hi.” Naomi shot Tommy a pointed look, but he ignored her. “And we’re up to date. Didn’t see anything else, ” Zack concluded, then paused and said, “well, except for the window, but you already got that part.”

Naomi looked at Tommy. For the first time that night since observing the comet coming too close for comfort, she seemed uneasy with the arrival of another witness.

Zack seemed to sense this unease, because he ducked his head down and shuffled on his feet. “It’s weird, right?” he asked conversationally, almost nervously. “I thought for sure something terrible had hit the planet and we were going to get knocked out of orbit or something.”

“Not big enough,” Naomi corrected immediately, then pressed her lips together before she could say more on the subject. Zack didn’t look up again, but he’d stopped his shuffling.

“We’re breaking in, aren’t we.” It wasn’t a question, but Tommy was still surprised Zack had decided to jump topics straight to that conclusion.

“I don’t think—” Tommy started in some futile attempt to forego the endeavor entirely, but stopped the moment both sets of eyes landed on him, clearly waiting for him to finish so they could ignore his protest. He sighed. “How exactly are you expecting to break into a school?”

Naomi turned to frown at the building in question. “I guess we could break another window.”

“We are not breaking another window,” Tommy declared immediately.

“You want to climb up to the already-broken one?”

“No, I want to wait until tomorrow when we can legally walk into class and I don’t have to risk becoming a social pariah because I was caught smashing school property at ass o’clock in the morning.”

Naomi rolled her eyes. Neither of them were any sort of rule-breaker by heart, but these were very clearly excruciating circumstances. “No one has shown up yet. I don’t know if anyone else even saw anything happen. And,” she tacked on as soon as Tommy opened his mouth again, and he snapped it shut with a click of his teeth, “when they do see the damage, I have a feeling they won’t let us back on campus so easily. It’ll become a crime scene, probably.”

“We’re not climbing to the third story. I’m putting my foot down.”

“Okay, Thomas, what do you propose we do, then? I’m not going home, so don’t even.”

Zack looked at Naomi, and then at Tommy, who was glaring at Naomi and refusing to give an answer. “I could pick the lock,” he offered simply.

They blinked at one another, then turned at the exact same time and gaped at him. “You know how to pick locks?” Naomi asked. Tommy did his best to ignore the new thread of excitement in her tone.

Zack shrugged. “I get bored sometimes. Learning niche skills are a way to pass the time.”

“Wouldn’t really call lock-picking a niche skill,” Tommy muttered, then almost bit his tongue when Naomi elbowed him hard in the gut.

“Whatever we find,” Naomi started, and there was no way Tommy could ignore her excitement now, because it was encompassing every word she spoke, “you get a third of the credit. We’ll workshop a name.”

“Name?” Zack repeated, clearly confused, but walked past Tommy and Naomi to the door, where he fished in the pockets of his beaten flight jacket, pulled out a small satchel, and got to work.

Naomi waved her hand, though there was no way Zack could see the action from where he was crouched in front of the door, his hands working smoothly through a series of motions Tommy had only ever seen in movies before. “It has to have a name,” Naomi explained, but it fell on deaf ears. Zack was no longer paying attention.

“Hey, meathead,” he barked instead of responding to Naomi, looking over his shoulder and giving Tommy a pointed glare. “Little light, maybe? Standing around looking pretty never did anyone any favors, and we’re burning the night oil here.”

Tommy returned the glare with a distinctly affronted look, but held out his hand for the flashlight all the same and went to stand over Zack as he returned to work. “Do you always talk this much?” he half-grumbled, not really intended to hold a conversation with the statement, but Zack huffed a scoff of a laugh and said, “You have no idea.”

Tommy shot Naomi a silent look. She shrugged in that I’m not digging my grave, this is all on you kind of way, efficiently sliding whatever could happen next with Zack directly onto Tommy thanks to his big mouth. Not wanting to exacerbate the matter, Tommy shut the hell up, and Naomi followed suit. The only sound was the nearly-silent clicking of Zack’s metal implements working against the metal of the lock. It took at least a solid minute, and then Zack was letting out a heavy breath and pressing his forehead against the door.

“Got it,” he said simply, then reached a single hand up to twist the handle. Just as the door latch clicked, the headlights of a car flared to life behind them, and they all froze. Tommy felt his heart stop dead in his chest, all his dreams dying a quick, brutal death in the face of what his life had suddenly become.

They had been caught, and there was nowhere to run.