The birds never came down on the Tuesday that it started.
Every pigeon in the city took off at precisely 6:04 a.m., but none of them ever touched down. The balloons floated up without exploding. Like frozen tears, raindrops suspended in midair. Individuals pointed. Laughed. used their phones to record it.
The kids then began to float.
Panic, not patients, filled hospitals. Scientists frantically searched for solutions, including solar flares, magnetic changes, and quantum oddities. However, no one could explain why gravity just... stopped working for some people while it did not for others.
When a seventeen-year-old girl named Nova woke up, she discovered her younger brother circling the ceiling fan. She used bedsheets and straps to restrain him, but it was not enough. The draw was growing more powerful. Hers was, too.
Ten years prior, in a covert sky accident, Nova's mother—an astrophysicist who had been fired for asserting that Earth's gravity was "conscious"—had disappeared. Now, Nova discovers a secret message concealed within her mother's antique telescope: "The Earth itself is not letting go. It is you.
That night, Nova floats for the first time.
But not up.
Lower.
over her floor. into the ground. Into a huge secret room of stone and stars, where people like her, known as "the Drifted," congregate. People the world believed were lost, dead, or kidnapped.
They are still there. They are evolving.
Gravity is not a force, Nova discovers. It is a decision—a long-standing agreement between life and the earth. And that agreement is being broken by something old.
Nova now has to choose between clinging to a dying Earth and literally rising above it to become something other than human.
About the Creator
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More stories from sazzad hossain and writers in BookClub and other communities.
The Archivist's Lantern
"A woman named Lira works as an Archivist—a government official trained to extract, analyze, and preserve people's memories—in a city where forgetting is a crime and memories are currency." The wealthiest people keep theirs in vaults made of crystal. For food, the impoverished must sell theirs, forgetting their names, loved ones, or even their birthdays.
By sazzad hossain8 months ago in BookClub
Comments (1)
This story is wild! The idea of gravity just stopping for some is mind-blowing. It makes me wonder what could really cause that. I can picture the chaos with the birds and balloons floating. And Nova's situation with her brother is intense. It makes you think about the secrets her mom was hiding. I'm curious what this "old thing" is that's breaking the gravity agreement. How do you think Nova will decide?