Silas Foster had a theory about Tuesdays.
Mondays got all the hate the alarm clocks, the dragging, the back-to-school dread but Tuesdays were the ones you had to watch. Nobody braced for Tuesday. Nobody saw Tuesday coming. That was exactly why Tuesday was dangerous.
He was cutting through Centennial Park at 11:52 PM, earbuds in, hood up, sneakers damp from the grass, fifteen minutes from home and already crafting the excuse for why he'd missed curfew by two hours. He'd been at Devon's house studying technically true, if you counted the twenty minutes of actual studying that bookended four hours of video games. His mom would not count those twenty minutes.
Metropolis glittered beyond the treeline. Even this late the city hummed delivery drones threading between towers, the distant wail of a siren somewhere downtown, a news chopper sweeping its spotlight across the bay. Normal. Ordinary. Tuesday-night Metropolis doing Tuesday-night things.
Silas pulled out one earbud to check his phone. 11:53. He typed quickly.
"Still at Devon's, leaving now, I know I know I know."
He hit send before his mom could preemptively call. Pocketed the phone. Put the earbud back in.
That was when the sky made a sound he would spend the next three days trying to describe to people who hadn't heard it. Not a boom. Not a crack. Something between a rip and a resonance like the atmosphere had a seam and someone had just found it. He yanked both earbuds out.
The sky above Centennial Park turned green.
It fell in a long arc, trailing emerald fire, leaving a bright line across the dark like a finger dragged through wet paint. Silas hit the ground on instinct flat in the wet grass, arms over his head, the way his dad had drilled into him during the Darkseid Invasion when Silas had been nine years old and Metropolis had been burning.
The impact came and went without drama. No explosion. No shockwave. A soft, percussive thud like a heavy book dropped on carpet and then silence. Just the city humming on, indifferent, and Silas with his face in the grass and his heart doing something complicated.
He lifted his head slowly.
Twenty feet away, a shallow groove had been carved into the earth. At the end of it, something glowed faintly green in the dark.
Silas stayed down for a long moment. He was sixteen, not stupid. He'd grown up in a city where the local newspaper had a standing section titled EXTRATERRESTRIAL INCIDENTS. He knew the rules. You did not walk up to things that fell from the sky.
'Don't do it. You know the rules. You grew up here. You know better.'
He walked up to it anyway.The device was wristwatch-sized, maybe a little larger green and black, with a circular face dominated by a rotating dial and the silhouetted outline of something he couldn't name. Bipedal. Wide-shouldered. Some kind of protrusion at the top of the head. The casing was warm when his fingers hovered close not hot from the fall, but warm from the inside, like something living was tucked behind the faceplate, breathing slow.
'Don't touch it. Do not touch it, Silas.'
He touched it.
The device moved the instant his fingers closed around it. He yelped a sound he would deny making for the rest of his natural life and tried to pull his hand back, but the band was already extending, wrapping, sealing around his left wrist with a click so clean it sounded engineered. The faceplate blazed green. A ring of holographic energy pulsed outward, passed through him like a breath of warm air, and then
Nothing. Dark. Still. It sat on his wrist like it had always lived there.
Silas stared at it for a long moment. Then he tapped the faceplate with one finger.
"Hello? Anyone in there? Is this a communication device?"
Nothing.
"Are you a Kryptonian? Please be a Kryptonian."
The device said nothing. The green light pulsed once slow and patient, like a heartbeat and went quiet again.
'Okay. Okay, think. It's on your wrist. It's sealed. It doesn't hurt. It's not it's not doing anything bad. Just breathe.'
He tried to pull it off anyway. The band was seamless, no clasp, no gap, nothing to work a fingernail under. He tried twisting. He tried scraping it against the dirt in the furrow, which accomplished nothing except getting mud on his hoodie. Every logical step he ran led to the same answer: it was not coming off.
His phone buzzed.
The screen read: *Where are you? It is almost midnight. Silas Jerome Foster if you do not respond in 30 seconds I will call Devon's mother.*
'Great. Perfect timing, universe.'
He typed back one-handed "Walking, leaving right now" then looked at the device. Looked at his phone. The S.T.A.R. Labs tip line number was literally on subway posters all over the city. FOUND SOMETHING UNUSUAL? CALL BEFORE YOU TOUCH. He'd already failed the second part of that instruction. The first part was still technically on the table.
The device pulsed again. Warmth spread up his arm, slow and steady, almost reassuring like it was saying something in a language made entirely of temperature instead of words.
'Tomorrow. Figure it out tomorrow. When it's not a Tuesday.'
He pulled his sleeve down over it and started walking home.
....
His mom, Denise Foster, was a night-shift nurse at Metropolis General who had organized her entire life around the fact that she was raising a son alone. On the nights she was home, she stayed up until he was through the door. No exceptions. No negotiations. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and the very specific posture of someone who had been practicing calm for forty-five minutes when he came through at 12:08 AM.
"Studying."
She said it flat. Not a question.
"We lost track of time."
"Mm. Devon's mom know you were there this late?"
A pause that lasted exactly one second too long.
"Devon's mom was working."
His mother looked at him over her mug with the expression she had spent sixteen years perfecting the one that meant she knew exactly what had happened and was deciding how mad to be. Her eyes dropped to his left hand. His sleeve was pulled down, but the faintest green glow was bleeding through the fabric near his wrist, soft and rhythmic.
"What's on your wrist?"
"Nothing. I scraped it. Fell in the park."
"Let me see."
He hesitated one beat too long. She put down her mug and stood up. Denise Foster was five-foot-four and had survived two alien invasions, a hospital evacuation during the Thanagarian Occupation, and sixteen years of raising this child by herself. She did not repeat herself.
Silas pulled up his sleeve.
The kitchen went quiet. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere outside, a cab honked twice. Denise looked at the device on her son's wrist with the same careful, thorough look she gave lab results she hadn't expected and said nothing.
'Say something. Come on. Say anything.'
"Where did you get that."
Not a question either.
"It fell. From the sky. I know exactly how that sounds."
"It fell from the sky."
"There was a green light and a groove in the ground and I know I should have left it alone"
"You should have left it alone."
"but it was just sitting there and I picked it up and then it locked on. I tried to take it off already, Mom. The band is completely sealed. There's no clasp, no gap, nothing"
"Silas."
"I know."
"Silas."
"Mom. I know."
She sat back down slowly. Reached out and touched the edge of the faceplate just the tip of one finger, the way she'd check a patient's forehead for fever. The device pulsed green under her touch. She pulled her hand back, exhaled through her nose.
"Does it hurt?"
"No. Just warm."
"Tingling? Numbness? Can you feel all your fingers?"
He wiggled them one by one.
"Full function. Circulation's fine."
"You sound like one of my patients."
"I grew up around nurses."
Something almost like a smile crossed her face and disappeared just as quickly. She picked up her phone from the table and held it for a moment. Silas watched her thumb hover over the screen. He knew exactly what she was weighing the S.T.A.R. Labs tip line, maybe the MCPD non-emergency number, maybe someone she trusted at the hospital.
'Come on. Think it through the same way she is. If she calls anyone tonight, this becomes a file. A case number. A story.'
He watched her put the phone face-down on the table.
"If we call anyone tonight,"she said, voice low,
"this becomes a story. S.T.A.R. Labs, GCPD, whoever they report it, it gets flagged, and then people who are much more powerful than us start making decisions about what happens to you."
"The Cadmus thing."
"The Cadmus thing,"
she confirmed. The way she said it carried weight the weight of someone who had watched that particular news cycle as a Black woman in a city that didn't always extend the benefit of the doubt to people who looked like them.
Silas looked at the device. The device pulsed back at him, patient and warm.
'She's right. We don't know what it does yet. We don't know who sent it. The second this goes official, we lose control of whatever this is.'
"So we keep it quiet."
"We keep it quiet,"
his mother said.
"For now. We figure out what it is and what it does first ourselves, before we decide who, if anyone, we bring in. Agreed?"
"Agreed."
"Together."
"Together."
Something passed between them across the kitchen table the kind of thing that didn't need words because they'd been building the language for it his whole life. She nodded once. He nodded back.
"You're still grounded for the curfew."
"That seems deeply unfair given the circumstances."
"You picked up a glowing alien object in a park at midnight."
"...Fair."
She stood, kissed the top of his head the way she hadn't since he was maybe twelve, and picked up her mug. At the kitchen doorway she stopped, back to him.
"Your father would've picked it up too,"
she said. Not bitter. Just true.
"Get some sleep."
She went to bed.
....
Silas sat alone at the kitchen table, left wrist resting on the wood, the device glowing its soft and patient green in the quiet of the apartment. He rotated the dial slowly with his thumb. It clicked through ten distinct positions, each one showing a different silhouette on the faceplate ten creatures, ten shapes, none of them human.
'Ten. Why ten? Is that all of them, or just the ones it decided to show me?'
He pulled out his phone and opened a fresh notes page.
'Things I know: 1. It fell from space. 2. It locked on by itself. 3. It has 10 positions on the dial. 4. It's warm and it pulses. 5. It didn't hurt me.'
He stared at that last line, then kept typing.
'Things I don't know: everything else. Also don't tell Devon.'
He closed the app. Turned off the kitchen light. Stood in the dark for a moment with the green glow of the device the only light in the room, painting the walls the color of something new.
'Okay, universe. I don't know what you think you're doing. But okay.'
He went to bed with an alien device on his wrist and the quiet, unsettling feeling that something had just made a decision about him and hadn't thought to ask first.