The hum was the only thing keeping the ghosts at bay.
It was a low, constant drone, the sound of a thousand muted waterfalls pouring into a static sea. For Miles Corbin, it was the sound of survival. It filled the cavern of his small apartment, smothering the sensory specters that clung to the edges of silence. Most people feared the dark; Miles feared the quiet. In the quiet, the echoes returned.
He sat in the bruised leather of his armchair, a pair of industrial-grade noise-canceling headphones clamped over his ears, feeding him the monotonous bliss of white noise. The blinds were drawn against the weak afternoon sun, carving the room into stripes of shadow and dusty light. A graveyard of takeout containers formed a crumbling monument on his coffee table. This was his sanctuary. His prison.
Three years. Three years since the pile-up on the interstate that had killed seven people and, in a way, him too. The doctors called it a traumatic brain injury coupled with profound PTSD. They had clinical, sterile names for the lightning that had rewired his soul. They couldn't explain why, after waking from a three-week coma, he could touch his wife's hand and feel the phantom sting of the IV drip she'd had removed hours earlier. They certainly couldn't explain what happened when he'd been called back to the force for a final, disastrous case. A jumper. The moment his ungloved fingers had brushed the corpse's arm, he hadn't just seen the victim's final moments. He had felt them. The rush of wind, the gut-wrenching lurch of gravity, the final, explosive punctuation of impact.
He had screamed for a full minute, feeling the phantom shatter of his own bones. They called it a breakdown. He called it a curse. Now, they called him a consultant, which was a polite word for "pariah we only call when we're out of all other options."
The insistent, rhythmic pounding on his door was a violation. It pierced through the hum, a physical intrusion into his carefully constructed void. He ignored it. The pounding grew louder, angrier.
"Miles, I know you're in there! I can smell the three-day-old chow mein from the hallway. Open up!"
Isabella Rossi. Of course. His ex-partner. The only person with a key and the nerve to use it. The lock rattled, and the door swung open, dragging a rectangle of bright, unwelcome light across the floor. Izzy stood there, her silhouette sharp and uncompromising. She wrinkled her nose.
"God, Miles. It smells like a tomb in here."
He slowly pulled the headphones down, letting them rest around his neck. The ghosts stirred at the edges of the room's silence. He could feel a faint, residual ache in his left temple—the phantom of a headache from a cashier he'd accidentally brushed against at the grocery store last week.
"That's the idea," he rasped, his voice rough from disuse. "What do you want, Izzy?"
"We've got one," she said, stepping inside and letting the door click shut behind her. She didn't bother turning on the lights, a small mercy. "It's… weird. Superintendent's pulling his hair out. He said to bring you in."
"The answer is no." He reached for the headphones.
"Wait," she said, her voice softer now. "Just listen. Please. You're the only one who might get this. We found her an hour ago. Downtown, at the Galerie Vaudreuil. The winter exhibit."
Miles stayed silent, his thumb tracing the rim of the earcup. A gallery. The pretension alone was enough to make him say no.
Izzy took a deep breath. "She was the centerpiece of the exhibit, Miles. Posed on a marble plinth in the middle of the main hall. She's frozen solid. I mean, completely encased in ice. Like a damn sculpture."
He paused. It wasn't the usual brutality. It was… theatrical. Psychotic, yes, but with a chilling artistry to it. The killers he knew were creatures of rage, or greed, or desperate passion. They were messy. This sounded clean. Deliberate.
"There's no sign of a struggle," Izzy continued, sensing she had his attention. "No visible cause of death, besides, you know, being a human ice pop. The gallery's temperature is kept at a steady seventy degrees. The plinth she's on isn't refrigerated. The ice isn't melting, Miles. Not a single drop."
He finally looked at her. Her face was pale in the gloom, her dark eyes wide with a mixture of professional bafflement and genuine fear.
"How is that possible?" he asked.
"That's the million-dollar question. Forensics is losing their minds. They think the killer used some kind of hyper-cooled liquid, maybe nitrogen, to flash-freeze her on site. But the logistics… it's insane. This wasn't a crime. It was a performance."
He hated the part of him that felt a morbid flicker of curiosity. He hated that, even after everything, the puzzle of it called to the detective he used to be. The man who existed before the echoes.
"No," he said, more to convince himself than her. "I can't, Izzy."
"Her name was Alita Romero. A ballerina," Izzy said quietly, playing her last card. "She's posed mid-pirouette. Her expression… the M.E. said it's the calmest he's ever seen on a victim. Almost serene."
Serene. That word snagged on something deep inside him. Death was never serene. He had felt it in dozens of echoes before he'd shut it all out. It was agony. It was terror. It was confusion. It was never, ever peaceful.
He stood up, the movement stiff and protesting. The ghosts of sensation whispered around him—a dull throb in his knee from a long-dead car crash victim, the faint taste of copper from a mugging gone wrong. He ignored them.
"Fine," he sighed, the word tasting like defeat. "But I do this my way. Nobody touches me. Nobody even gets close. And you owe me for a new sound machine. This one's starting to rattle."
The Galerie Vaudreuil was a cathedral of glass and white walls, now desecrated by the profane circus of a murder investigation. The air was frigid, an unnatural cold that had nothing to do with the building's climate control and everything to do with the tableau at its center.
There, on a stark white plinth, Alita Romero held her final pose.
She was breathtakingly, horrifyingly beautiful. The ice encasing her was perfectly clear, distorting her form just enough to make it seem ethereal. Every delicate feature was preserved: the spun-glass detail of her eyelashes, the graceful curve of her neck, the elegant tension in her outstretched arms. The artist—and Miles had no doubt this killer considered himself an artist—had frozen her at the peak of her motion, a perfect, eternal moment of grace.
And Izzy was right. Her face, framed by a halo of frozen dark hair, was a mask of pure tranquility.
Miles felt the familiar bile of dread rise in his throat. He pulled on a pair of thin, latex gloves, a useless talisman against a power that operated on a plane far beyond simple hygiene.
"Give me the room," he ordered, his voice echoing in the cavernous space.
Izzy nodded, shooing the forensics team and a handful of uniformed officers out. Soon, it was just him, her, and the silent dancer. The hum of the gallery's ventilation system was a poor substitute for his machine. The ghosts were closer here. Sharper.
He circled the plinth, his detective's mind cataloging the scene, trying to find a foothold in logic before he surrendered to the chaos of sensation. No water, no equipment left behind. A perfect, impossible crime. The killer was a ghost.
But the victim wasn't. She had a story to tell. And he was the only one who could hear it.
He stopped in front of her, his breath fogging in the cold air. He looked at Izzy, who gave him a tight, worried nod. This was it. The point of no return.
Slowly, deliberately, Miles peeled the glove off his right hand. The air felt like needles on his bare skin. He took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to brace his mind for the inevitable sensory assault.
He reached out.
His fingers, warm and alive, made contact with the ice covering Alita Romero's outstretched hand.
The world vanished.
Cold.
Not just cold. It was a pressure. A crushing, absolute absence of heat that didn't sting his skin but sank straight into his bones. It was a slow, internal crystallization. He felt the blood in his own veins thicken, turning to sluggish slush. His lungs burned, not with a lack of air, but with an intake of microscopic razors of ice.
It was the feeling of every cell in his body having its energy, its very life, methodically erased. He felt the hardening of his own skin, the stiffening of his muscles locking into place, the pressure building behind his eyes. This was a death of inches, of seconds stretching into agonizing eternities.
But as the final, numbing blackness began to consume the edges of his stolen consciousness, he felt two other things. They were clear, distinct, and utterly wrong.
First, a sharp, precise prick in the crook of his arm. Clinical. A needle.
And then, underneath the screaming agony of the freeze, spreading through the echo like ink in water… something impossible.
Peace.
A profound, dreamlike wave of serene acceptance, a gentle letting go. It was a feeling that had no place in the heart of such a brutal, horrifying end. It was the last thing he felt before the echo released him, and he stumbled back with a choked gasp, his mind reeling not from the horror of the cold, but from the terrifying mystery of that final, placid sensation.