The city wakes differently now.Every morning begins with a hush—an expectant pause—before the first car moves, before the first door slams. It's as if the world is listening.
Three days have passed since Adrian dissolved into light, and yet the sound he left behind hasn't faded. It lives under everything: the buzz of streetlights, the hum of the refrigerator, the whisper of my pulse. Sometimes the tones align and the room brightens for a heartbeat; sometimes they slide apart and the shadows deepen.
The radio will not stay quiet.No matter the station, fragments of the composition leak through: the E–F–G motif, slowed or reversed, buried beneath static. Strangers hum it in elevators. A child on the subway whistles it under his breath.
They don't know they're singing him.
I should be terrified, but I'm not.It feels like the world and I are collaborating on something vast. The line between creation and contagion has vanished; what I made for one person is now rewriting the air.
At night I record the city.When I play the recordings back, shapes form in the spectrogram—faint outlines of a face, a pair of hands, a heartbeat rendered in color. Adrian's frequency, multiplied, diffused.
He's everywhere, and nowhere close enough to touch.
Marla calls twice, leaves messages about the upcoming exhibition, her voice tight with worry. "Lyra, I need to know you're alive. You've gone off-grid again. The gallery wants progress shots, audio snippets—anything."
I don't answer.How could I explain that progress isn't linear anymore, that the music is writing itself through me?
Tonight, the air feels thicker, charged. The resonance inside the apartment swells whenever I breathe too fast. I move carefully, afraid to disturb it. The piano waits with the patience of a living thing.
I sit, hands hovering above the keys.A low vibration gathers in my chest, rises through my arms, into my fingertips. The first note plays itself—no pressure, no decision—just sound choosing flesh as its instrument.
Outside, the streetlights flicker in perfect time.
I close my eyes. The tone shifts, higher now, shimmering. Behind it I hear his voice—distant, stretched thin by the miles between worlds.
"Lyra… the field is growing."
My breath catches. "I know. I can feel it."
"You have to contain it."
"How?"
"Don't let them sing it back."
The voice fades, replaced by the soft chime of glass breaking somewhere in the apartment. I open my eyes. Cracks spiderweb across the windowpane, each fracture glowing faintly with blue light.
Adrian's light.
The resonance has escaped the room.
I press both hands flat on the keys, desperate to quiet it, but the piano answers with a chord I didn't mean to play—lush, aching, alive. The air shakes. The cracks widen.
Then silence.
Only my heartbeat, steady and wrong, carrying two rhythms at once.