Dr. Emma Pierce-Yates pulled into the driveway, bone-tired from another 12-hour shift tracking the Napier 9-2-9 asteroid. She hit the garage button and there he was, Aaron, in his favorite Star Trek pajamas, wearing a frown that could block out the sun.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?”

“Mom… you need to see something.”

He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t scared. He was rattled. That alone made her stomach tighten.

Inside, the babysitter hovered by the stairs, looking lost. “He wouldn’t tell me what he saw. Said he had to wait for you.”

“It’s fine. I’ve got him. Thanks.”

As soon as the door clicked shut, Aaron grabbed her hand and dragged her upstairs. His telescope was already aimed skyward, obsessively precise. He wordlessly pointed to the eyepiece.

Emma braced herself, another “the universe is ending” moment from her over-imaginative kid. She bent down, looked…

Blackness.

“Aaron, the cap is still…”

“No, it’s not.”

“Then it’s out of focus…”

“It’s focused, Mom.” His voice was a whisper now. “That’s where Jupiter is supposed to be.”

She paused, the meaning sliding uneasily into place.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s gone.”

“Aaron. Jupiter can’t just…”

“I was watching it for hours. A shadow moved across it and… swallowed it.”

Emma stood still, her hand frozen on the scope, a chill creeping up the back of her neck. Jupiter, the biggest thing in the neighborhood, the anchor of half the Solar System, doesn’t just vanish.

But the eyepiece stayed black.

Emma didn’t move at first. She stared into the eyepiece as if Jupiter might magically fade back into view if she blinked the right way. It didn’t.

She straightened slowly and pulled her phone from her pocket.

“Aaron, stay here a minute.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“No. You’re… absolutely not in trouble.”

Her voice came out thin. She stepped into the hallway and dialed the observatory.

It rang twice.

“Emma, you forget something?”

Tom Hargreaves. Night shift. Good guy. Chronically caffeinated.

“Tom, where’s the Napier asteroid right now?”

“Still crawling along the ecliptic, same track as when you left. Why?”

“I need you to do something for me. Stop tracking it.”

A beat. “Stop? Why?”

“Point the primary at Jupiter.”

There was a longer pause this time, the kind where you can almost hear someone frowning.

“…You want me to move a hundred-ton telescope off an active observation target so you can… look at Jupiter?”

“Yes.”

“That’s gonna take several minutes.”

“I know,” she said, already pacing. “Start now.”

Tom sighed the sigh of a man who knows he’s not winning this fight.

“Alright. Repositioning. Give me… six minutes for the full slew.”

Six minutes. The longest six minutes of her life.

She kept glancing back into Aaron’s room, at the telescope standing there like an accusation. Aaron sat on the bed, knees pulled up, watching her with wide, worried eyes. She forced a smile she didn’t feel.

The phone stayed pressed to her ear. Machinery hummed faintly on the other end, the deep mechanical groan of motors shifting thousands of pounds across the sky.

Finally: “Okay, I’m locked in. Jupiter’s coordinates centered.” A pause. “Starting exposure.”

Another pause.

Then: “…Emma?”

Her stomach dropped. "What do you see?"

"Nothing."

"Define nothing."

"Black. Pure black. No planetary disc. No reflectivity. It’s like the damn thing isn’t there."

The air left her lungs.

"Tom, are you absolutely certain you’re pointed at the right location?"

“Oh, I’m certain. I triple-checked the RA/Dec. If Jupiter were there, I’d be looking at it. But I’m not.” He exhaled sharply. “What the hell is going on?”

Before she could answer, Emma heard a rapid, insistent beeping from Tom’s end, an incoming priority alert on the observatory's global network feed.

"Hold on," Tom said, his voice shifting from confusion to focused alarm. "Something's coming in... it's from Subaru. They're flagging an urgent, joint-observation alert."

Emma could hear him frantically clicking through the shared data portal. The line was silent for a moment, then he let out a low, stunned curse.

"Tom? Talk to me."

"Emma... it's not just us. Subaru in Hawaii, VLT in Chile... they all see it. The occlusion. They've been tracking it for the last ten minutes." His voice was a whisper of pure disbelief. "The network has a preliminary solution... Emma, the parallax data... it's solid."

"How far?" she asked, her own voice barely a breath.

"That can’t be right, but they are saying the anomaly is currently six hundred fifty million kilometers, inside Jupiter’s orbit. And it's not holding still. It's moving. Fast."

The number hung in the air, colder and more final than any she had ever calculated. Jupiter is over seven hundred million km. This is well inside its orbit. A stone’s throw on a cosmic scale.

From the bedroom, Aaron’s small voice drifted out, sharp with a child's intuition.

"Mom? Is it coming this way?"

Emma pulled the phone from her ear. She looked down the hallway at her son, then back at the phone, at the invisible, data-defined monster now lurking in their sky.

“Emma, how is this possible?”

She had no answer for either of them.

She hung up, the global network's confirmation echoing in the silence. The professional curiosity was gone, replaced by a primal, icy dread.

Her son had moved next to her without making a sound. “Mom?”

She faked a smile the best she could. She crouched down and opened her arms. “It's ok honey, it is probably a satellite. You go on to bed.” She lied, terribly, but she hugged him tight.

Aaron just laid his head on her shoulder, his mom is lying to him. A tear he had been holding back slid down his cheek.

She never lied.

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