From the rooftop above the laundromat, Priya knew the night sky cold. So she spotted it at once: a tiny blue dot inside Cassiopeia's crooked W, sitting where nothing should be. She checked her star atlas twice, then three different apps. The dot was real to her eyes and to her phone, but it wasn't on any map. Her hands went cold. New stars don't just show up overnight.

Priya grabbed her telescope and aimed it at the blue dot. Up close, it didn't twinkle like a real star. It held perfectly still and pulsed, slow and steady, like a heartbeat. That wasn't natural. She started counting the pulses, hunting for a pattern.

The pulses weren't random. Three short, three long, three short, over and over. Priya knew that one from old movies. It was Morse code for SOS. Someone, or something, was sending a distress call from inside the constellation. She had to find where it was really coming from.

Priya traced the angle of her telescope down to the horizon. The signal wasn't deep in space at all. It lined up exactly with the old water tower across town, the one shut down for years. The "star" was a light on top of it, aimed straight up. She grabbed her bike and went.