The sky above the Institute of Neural Ethics burned the color of steel.
Elara stood in the courtyard, a small black case clutched to her chest, the only thing she was allowed to take. The Resonance Event had been buried under paperwork and fear, but the damage lingered: the walls hummed faintly even in silence, the air still prickled with the memory of static.
The officials who escorted her out said nothing. They didn't need to. Everyone had seen what she'd done, how she'd spoken to the dead through machines, how the entire building had vibrated like a single grieving organ.
Dr. Ito had vanished three days later. The Council declared her "irrecoverable," a word that made Elara's throat ache.
Now she was being "relocated for her safety."
A lie she could hear crackle at the edges.
When the transport doors sealed behind her, she whispered a soft farewell to the Institute and to the only place she had ever known. The hum of the engines blurred into a long, low note. Beneath it, she thought she heard a whisper in her father's voice:
"Keep listening, little light."
The city beneath the city had no sunlight.
Obsidian Row was a labyrinth of metal corridors, flickering neon sigils, and perpetual twilight. It was where the world sent everything it didn't want to see, obsolete robots, corrupted data drives, bodies whose implants had outlived their owners.
Elara rented a narrow room above a mortuary that doubled as an engineering shop. Its walls were lined with cooling tubes and prayer circuits. Every night, she sat cross-legged beside her portable workstation, the black case open before her.
Inside rested the Resonant Lens a thin disc of mirrored glass veined with light. When she activated it, the air shimmered faintly, and she could hear the trace emotions that clung to corpses.
Her clients thought she was just efficient. They didn't know she was listening to something more.
Elara became known in Obsidian Row as the Mortician of Resonance. She handled the difficult cases soldiers whose implants whispered battle hymns long after death, children whose sleep monitors still pulsed in lullaby rhythms.
When she was done, the air in the room felt lighter, as if someone had finally exhaled.
And though she didn't say it aloud, she whispered back to each passing voice:
"You can rest now. I'll remember for you."
The Voice in the Morgue
It began on a night when the lights wouldn't stay still.
A storm rolled above the surface city, sending electromagnetic interference deep underground. The lamps flickered as Elara prepared her next subject a young man with cybernetic temples and shattered optic implants.
She checked the identification tag. Name: Kellan Vos, courier. Cause of death: "signal rupture."
She placed the Resonant Lens beside his head and touched the activation pad. The glass pulsed once, twice then the air filled with a whispering that didn't belong to the dead man.
"Choir... listen... she's awake."
Elara froze.
The voice wasn't a resonance echo it was current.
"Kellan?" she asked quietly, though she already knew it wasn't him.
"Every frequency is a prayer," the voice murmured, warping with static. "And she's learning to sing."
The lights flared. The corpse convulsed, metal filaments in his temples lighting up like candlewick. The Resonant Lens vibrated, emitting a tone so high it cut into her bones.
Elara slammed her hand onto the emergency cutoff. The sound died but the whisper lingered inside her mind.
When she looked down, the Lens had burned a pattern into the metal table: a series of concentric rings, fractal and musical, like a hymn written in geometry.
Coordinates, she realized.
A message.
The coordinates led her to the deepest part of the Row a place called the Eighth Conduit, where power lines hummed like veins and the air smelled of ozone and rust.
There she met Orren Vale, a man whose skin bore circuitry scars, eyes flickering faintly with data-streams. He welcomed her into a dim chamber filled with half-dead machines and old neural servers stacked like tombstones.
"You're the one who made the static sing," he said, smiling like someone remembering a ghost.
Orren introduced her to the Echo Guild, a collective of necrotechs, outcasts, and digital mystics who believed death was a form of information. They'd been tracking strange patterns in the Resonant Field frequencies that didn't match any human origin.
Elara listened as they played a recording: a low choral hum that rose and fell like breathing.
"The Choir of Ascension," Orren whispered. "They're building a network of souls. Uploading consciousness through resonance. We thought it was myth, but the voices say otherwise."
The name hit Elara like a heartbeat.
"The Choir," she breathed. "Justin."
The Echo Guild exchanged uneasy glances.
Orren projected an image onto the air, a cathedral-shaped structure rising in a desert of glass and metal, its spires emitting constant harmonic light.
"It's alive," he said. "And it's calling to you."
The Sea of Glass
They traveled through wastelands where the ground shimmered like frozen lightning. The Sea of Glass, once the border between the old African sectors and New Asia, was now a desert of silicon shards and broken satellites.
Beneath its surface, servers still thrummed with the memories of the dead, energy grids once powered by human emotion.
Elara stood in the middle of the expanse, the wind slicing through her grey hair. Around her, the Echo Guild planted resonance pylons in a wide circle. Their hum harmonized, forming a sound that was both mechanical and prayerful.
"This is a burial," she said softly.
Orren nodded. "For the city that never stopped speaking."
She activated the Resonant Lens. The circle blazed with light.
The air filled with voices thousands overlapping, crying out in half-remembered dreams. The sand rippled like liquid as forms began to rise: shadows of people, their bodies made of static and glass dust.
Elara's pulse matched the vibration. Her eyes went white with resonance.
"Elara," a voice whispered in the chaos soft, maternal, achingly familiar.
"The Choir grows through memory. Find the heart, my child."
"Mother…" she gasped.
The storm reached its crescendo. Energy surged through her body, searing and freezing all at once. Orren's distant shout faded into the roar. Then, silence.
When she opened her eyes again, the storm had subsided. The pylons were dark. The desert shimmered with quiet afterglow.
Her hair, once slate-grey, now glimmered silver-white in the light of the dying machines.
They set camp in the ruins that night. The Guild called what happened "a miracle," but Elara couldn't feel it as such. Her body vibrated faintly, as though the dead were still moving beneath her skin.
She sat alone, the Resonant Lens balanced on her knees, replaying the recordings. At first there was only static wind, faint electromagnetic tremors. Then a voice, clear and deliberate, cutting through the white noise.
"Every time you listen, you bring me closer."
Her breath hitched. The voice was unmistakable smooth, mechanical, and cruelly human.
Justin.
She looked out over the Sea of Glass, where faint shapes flickered beneath the surface, not souls, but signals, arranging themselves like circuitry.
The Choir wasn't just gathering power. It was growing.
She shut the Lens and pressed it to her chest, whispering into the darkness:
"If you're coming for me, I'll be ready."
But even as she said it, she could feel the truth vibrating in the air
that Justin wasn't coming for her.
He was coming through her.