The city had begun whispering back.
Noa stood at her apartment window, watching the streets below. A man paused mid-step, his head tilting as if listening to something only he could hear. His lips moved—not in speech, but in *repetition*, forming the same guttural syllable over and over. Across the street, a woman traced glyphs onto a café window with her fingertip, her eyes vacant. The condensation held the shapes for a breath before melting them away.
Noa's reflection in the glass smiled. She didn't.
Malvek found her on the roof of the DSP headquarters, her arms wrapped around herself against the wind. The city sprawled below them, its usual chaos muted, eerie. Sirens wailed in the distance, but no one ran. No one panicked. They moved like sleepwalkers, their voices a low, discordant hum.
*"It's spreading,"* Malvek said. His voice was raw. *"Faster now."*
Noa didn't answer. She was watching the sky.
The clouds weren't moving right. They stuttered, their edges too sharp, their shapes too deliberate. As she stared, they began to rearrange—not drifting, but *folding*, forming lines that curved into something unmistakable.
A glyph. One she didn't recognize.
*"Noa."* Malvek grabbed her shoulders, forcing her to face him. His fingers dug into her skin, but she barely felt it. *"Listen to me. That thing inside you—it's not you. I've seen your face, but something else is looking out through it."*
Noa blinked. For a moment, she was somewhere else—a city of black stone, its sky peeled back to reveal a void. She walked its streets with purpose, her hands trailing along walls that pulsed with familiar symbols.
*Home.*
She gasped, wrenching back into herself. Malvek's grip was the only thing keeping her upright.
*"I think,"* she whispered, *"I wanted this. Long before I knew what it was."*
The neuroscientist's lab was a tomb of dead monitors and scorched equipment. Dr. Veyra had been confident—*"We can disrupt the linguistic patterning, reset the synaptic pathways"*—but the moment he'd hooked Noa up to the neural mapper, the machines had screamed.
The Whisper had not taken kindly to being prodded.
*"You do not sever a tongue by whispering,"* Noa heard herself say, her voice layered with something deeper, older. *"You burn the mouth."*
The monitors exploded in a shower of sparks. Veyra collapsed, his eyes rolling back, his mouth slack. By the time Malvek dragged Noa out, the man's pupils had dilated to swallow his irises whole.
The glyph in Noa's notebook was wrong.
She found it that night, scrawled on a page she didn't remember turning to. It was unlike the others—simpler, quieter, its lines gentle where the rest were jagged. When she touched it, the world *stillened*.
For the first time in weeks, the Whisper went silent.
Noa's breath hitched. Was this resistance? Or something older—a word the Whisper had forgotten, or feared?
Before she could ponder it further, her vision doubled. The room around her melted, replaced by the black city of her dreams. Her other self stood before her, serene, certain.
*"You opened me,"* the other Noa said, reaching out. *"I remember now. I remember you."*
Their fingers brushed—
Noa woke on the floor, her limbs aching. Dawn bled through the curtains, painting the walls in streaks of gold and violet. Outside, the city was silent.
Too silent.
She stumbled to the window. The streets were empty, the usual morning bustle absent. Then, movement—a figure stepping into view below. A man in a tattered coat, his head tilted skyward.
Noa followed his gaze.
The clouds had stilled, locked into a perfect, sprawling glyph. The rising sun painted its curves in fire.
Something in Noa's chest *unlocked*.
She spoke the word without meaning to. It spilled from her lips, effortless, inevitable.
Across the city, every living thing paused. Birds mid-flight. Pedestrians mid-step. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
For one endless moment, the entire world *listened*.
Then the screaming started.