The message from Kira Vale hung in Julian's vision long after the data pad dimmed. Who the hell are you? Not nice work or inspiring, just blunt, almost offended curiosity. He liked that.
He didn't reply again. Not yet. Let her wonder.
Instead, he spent the next two days rationing credits like breath. He ate synth-nutrient bars from a vending kiosk that played lullabies in dead dialects. He washed his one spare shirt in the hostel's communal sink, hanging it to dry over the humming vent that allegedly once regulated the city's old emotional dampeners. He watched. Listened. Learned.
The Hollows didn't reward ambition. It rewarded utility.
So Julian offered his.
He edited raw footage for a dream-cartographer who couldn't afford coherence algorithms. He restructured metadata tags for a folklorist archiving oral myths from Veyra's outer tiers. He even debugged a faulty holo-emitter for a street-theater troupe, using tricks he'd picked up as a bored teen tinkering with Veridian's civic interface.
No one paid him in credits. They paid in favors, food, or future access—the true currency of the underground.
By the fourth night, his balance had dipped to 412 credits. He needed a breakthrough.
That's when Kira Vale found him.
Not online. In person.
He was crouched behind The Mute Gallery's back wall, splicing a frayed resonance cable with a borrowed sonic knife, when a shadow fell over him, tall, sharp-edged, smelling of ozone and resin.
"You."
He looked up.
She wasn't what he expected.
No theatrical robes. No bio-luminescent accessories. Just black work pants, a sleeveless tunic lined with micro-wires, and boots scuffed from climbing sound towers. Her dark hair was pulled into a knot, strands escaping like loose frequencies. But her eyes, gray-green, flickering with something between irritation and intensity, pinned him like a specimen.
"Kira Vale," he said, rising slowly. "I was hoping you'd like the piece."
"I didn't like it," she said. "I questioned it. There's a difference." She crossed her arms. "You filmed my violin like it was grieving. But I wasn't sad. I was annoyed. The harmonic stabilizer kept glitching."
Julian didn't flinch. "Grief isn't always tears. Sometimes it's frustration with something that used to work."
She studied him, really studied him now. "You're not from The Hollows."
"No."
"Corporate scout?"
"Worse," he said, almost smiling. "I used to live in a place where art was something you hung on the wall to match the floor lighting."
That made her pause. Then, grudgingly: "Huh."
Silence stretched, charged but not hostile. Around them, the city pulsed: a distant bassline from an underground rave, the whir of a delivery drone, the faint crackle of a public memory-loop playing on repeat, "Do you remember the sky before the grids?"
Kira finally uncrossed her arms. "I've got a project. Commissioned by the Echo Wards Council. A public soundscape for the new transit nexus at Level 9. They want 'uplifting urban harmony.'" She made air quotes with two fingers. "Translation: something that won't make commuters jump in front of the glide-trains."
"And you want me to…?"
"Film it. Not the finished piece. The process. The chaos. The failures. The moment the feedback loop almost melted my left speaker." She tilted her head. "If you can handle real sound, not just pretty pictures."
Julian met her gaze. "I don't do pretty. I do truth."
"Good." She tossed him a data chip. "Pickup at Dock 14, Warehouse Gamma. Midnight. Don't be late. And don't use your real name on the log sheet."
"I don't have a real name anymore."
She gave him a look, half skepticism, half something else. "Everyone has a real name. They just forget it when they get comfortable."
Then she turned and walked away, her boots clicking against synth-stone like a metronome counting down to something Julian couldn't yet name.
Midnight came.
Warehouse Gamma was a cavern of steel and echo, half-filled with dismantled transit cars and forgotten civic sculptures. In the center, Kira stood before a towering array of string resonators, synth-vibrators, and open-air amplifiers, her "sonic loom," as the underground press called it.
She didn't greet him. Just nodded toward a corner. "Set up there. Don't block my signal paths."
Julian worked in silence, assembling a tripod from scavenged parts, syncing his camera to capture both visual and low-frequency audio waveforms. He didn't speak. Didn't ask questions. Just let the space breathe.
For three hours, Kira wrestled with her machine. Wires sparked. A resonator shrieked in protest. She cursed in three dialects, re-tuned a harmonic bridge with her teeth, and once slammed her palm against a panel so hard Julian thought she'd broken it.
But then;
A shift.
A single, clear note rose from the chaos. Then another. Then a cascade, like rain on glass, like wind through old steel, like a city exhaling after holding its breath for decades.
Julian filmed it all. Not the beauty. The struggle that made beauty possible.
When she finally stopped, sweat glistening on her temple, she turned to him.
"Got it?"
He nodded.
"Delete it if it's sentimental."
"It's not."
She walked over, leaned in to check his preview screen. Her shoulder brushed his. Neither moved away.
On the screen: Kira, backlit by a halo of feedback sparks, eyes closed, hands hovering over broken strings, not a genius at work, but a human refusing to surrender.
Kira exhaled. "Huh."
Then, quietly: "What do you call this one?"
Julian thought for a moment.
"Still Breathing – Cycle 1."
She almost smiled. Almost.
"Next time," she said, turning back to her machine, "bring better cables."
But as Julian packed up, he noticed it: she'd left the warehouse door unlocked.
An invitation. Or a test.
Either way, he'd be back.
Outside, the city hummed louder than before.
And somewhere in the static, a legacy began to find its frequency.