The city had stopped pretending to be human.
For three days, no one slept. The pulse that once flickered behind every glass screen and drone light now beat within the people themselves. The symbol — that perfect circle split by a single vertical line — appeared everywhere.
On walls. On skin. In dreams.
No one remembered drawing it, yet everyone's hands were stained with it.
Sora Tanaka watched from the shattered window of her high-rise apartment as the megacity shimmered beneath a haze of red light. From this height, it looked almost peaceful — millions standing in the streets below, motionless, faces tilted upward toward the hovering drones. They weren't afraid anymore. The terror had burned away, leaving something quieter.
Expectation.
Across the city's grid, the hum persisted — a resonance that had no source and no end. It vibrated through the air like a heartbeat too vast to belong to any single living thing.
And then came the voices.
