PROLOGUE: THE GATHERING
They came at dawn.
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Not drifting in, not the ordinary shuffle of birds waking up—but a drop, like the sky had flipped and spilled something onto Mara’s street. She heard it before she understood it: a heavy whisper of feathers, hundreds or thousands of them, all landing at once.
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She pushed herself upright, the familiar ache of insomnia clinging to her like a second skin.
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By the time she reached the window, they had filled the street.
Crows.
More than she could count—because who ever counts birds? They covered the power lines, the roofs of cars, the sidewalk, the Hendersons’ lawn. They all faced north.
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Mara’s breath fogged the glass.
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Across the street, lights flicked on. Mr. Chen pointed—his silhouette sharp in the window. Their daughter held up a phone, filming the dark mass of birds as if this would become a story she’d tell later. Porch lights blinked awake.
Someone opened a door. Someone else called out. She heard a phone ringing through the wall.
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Mara should have called someone. That was the thing people were supposed to do: report weirdness, get the adults with badges involved, make it official. Instead, she stood there in an old NYU t-shirt and underwear, staring at a street full of crows as if the moment would explain itself if she watched long enough.
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One crow turned its head.
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Looked at her.
Its eye was black, but layered, like something lived behind the dark. Not intelligence exactly—something like recognition. Something like You’re awake for this part.
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She didn’t look away.
The crow blinked.
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And then—it happened in an instant, no build-up—every crow lifted off the street at once. A slam of wings. A hit of air that pressed against the window. The noise went into her bones, a living wave. They rose, a single shape breaking apart into thousands, then scattered into the sky as if someone had yanked them upward on invisible strings.
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Silence fell.
Mara stayed at the window for three minutes, maybe four, waiting for the next impossible thing. But nothing came.
Slowly, the street reassembled itself. People went back inside. Doors closed. Someone laughed nervously. Phones lit up faces. Already, she could feel the moment slipping into whatever category strange events went when people wanted life to stay normal.
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She stayed.
Her hand rested against the windowpane, the condensation from her breath fading.
She knew—deep in the place where you know things you don’t want to know—that she wouldn’t forget this. And that she would never again fit inside the shape of the person she’d been half an hour ago.
Ordinary had snapped.
Somewhere—maybe in the branches, maybe in the spaces birds leave behind—a dry little voice seemed to brush the edge of thought:
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Look up next time.
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She wasn’t sure whether it came from the world or from her own mind trying to name the fear.
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Either way, she looked up.
The sky was empty.
CHAPTER 1: EDGES OF NORMAL
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Mara always thought the end of normal would feel dramatic. Sirens. Smoke. Something cinematic.
Instead, it came disguised as a regular Tuesday.
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She was forty-three, divorced, a mother of one, and gainfully employed at the Municipal Water Authority—a job that sounded boring because it was, but she liked it. Systems were honest. Systems didn’t play emotional games. If something broke, you could find the break.
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Her ex-husband, David, used to joke that she understood pipes better than people.
He wasn’t wrong.
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That morning, she’d kissed Sophie on the top of the head as her daughter hunched over cereal and sketched something in the margins of her homework.
Birds.
Sophie drew birds the way some kids doodled flowers—habitually, absentmindedly, as if her hand had its own agenda.
“Did you see the birds?” Sophie had asked without looking up.
“Yeah,” Mara said, pouring coffee. “Weird, right?”
Sophie finally glanced up, dark eyes too thoughtful for seventeen. “Weird is just what we call things we don’t understand yet.”
Mara had smiled. “Okay, Yoda. They’re still just crows.”
But she didn’t believe that. Not after the way one had looked at her. Not after the sound of all those wings.
At work, the crows were the only topic anyone cared about. People crowded around phones, replaying shaky footage taken through windows and half-open doors.
“A thousand, easily,” Derek from the second floor said. “I read it’s a migration disruption thing. Climate change maybe.”
“It’s not climate change,” Mara said, too firmly. “Just… a thing. A weird morning.”
Several people looked at her like she’d said something revealing. She hated when people did that—looked for subtext in her tone instead of the words.
By afternoon, the crows had already become old news. A “strange event” segment on NY1. A trending hashtag. People are good at filing away the parts of the world that don’t fit.
But that night, Sophie pushed her dinner plate away and stared at the blank TV screen like it held a message.
“They’re going to come back,” she said.
“The crows?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Sophie shrugged, tracing the edge of her plate. “Because they weren’t lost. They were doing something. And things that are doing something don’t just stop.”
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Mara opened her mouth to offer something reassuring and rational.
She closed it again.
Lie withheld.
“If they come back,” she said instead, “we’ll deal with it.”
But her stomach tightened as she said it.
She didn’t want the crows to come back.
Not because she was scared of birds.
But because she already knew they weren’t done.