The wind over Obsidian Row carried whispers that night not words, but a pressure. It pressed against windows, curled through vents, rattled the thin metal bones of the undercity.
Elara Eron stood on the balcony of her rented mortuary flat, watching the horizon pulse like a dying circuit. The air still shimmered faintly from the resonance storm the "Sea of Glass," as the survivors called it and even the neon signs below seemed to flicker in reverence.
Beneath her, the city moved with its usual half-life: drones ferrying food pods, people selling counterfeit memories, cables dangling from rooftops like vines from a forgotten forest. Yet beneath the mechanical heartbeat, something else thrummed slow, harmonic, alive.
Her lens, the black ring around her left iris, pulsed once. Then again.
She whispered to no one:
"Who's calling me now?"
Elara had built her reputation quietly not as a licensed mortician, but as a "Resonant Custodian," the one people went to when their dead refused silence. She took only the unregistered corpses, the unclaimed ones. The state crematoriums handled the rest.
The night after the storm, a stranger came to her door.
He was an old man wrapped in wet cloth, face half obscured by static-glass goggles. In his arms lay a body wrapped in shimmering foil. The man said nothing just placed the body on her slab and left.
Elara drew back the foil.
A child. Maybe eight years old. Skin pale and freckled with nanocarbon dust. Around his throat an implant ring, still humming faintly. She touched it, and the implant's low murmur became a voice:
"Do you hear us?"
She stepped back.
The voice wasn't the boy's. It was plural male, female, mechanical, all at once.
And layered beneath it was a melody. A hymn.
The Choir.
She shut off the implant. Silence fell like frost.
Elara leaned on the table, trembling. "You found me again," she whispered.
Orren Vale arrived two hours later, his long coat still damp from the acid rain. He moved through her morgue like a priest through a temple.
"They're growing," he said quietly, staring at the child's body. "More reports tonight. Corpses singing. Data nets flickering with what looks like encrypted music."
"It's not encrypted," Elara said. "It's… prayer."
He gave her a look both skeptical and afraid.
"You think they worship?"
"No," she said, pressing her palm to the cold slab. "I think they remember. That's worse."
Orren watched her. "You shouldn't have gone to the Sea. You're still resonating. Whatever it changed in you"
"is the only thing letting me understand them," she finished.
He sighed, the sound of static dissolving. "Then understand this: Justin is not dead."
Her stomach turned.
"What?"
"There are sightings. Glimpses. A voice in the storm nets, calling himself 'The First Instrument.' The Choir's growing from his codebase."
She stared at him. "Then it wasn't an accident."
Orren's silence was answer enough.
Later that night, when the generators dimmed and the city quieted to its electric hum, Elara sat alone with the child's body.
She whispered, "If you're in there, show me."
Her lens activated on its own the air above the corpse rippled, and light condensed into a shape: a face, fractured and translucent. The boy's eyes glowed faintly. His mouth moved, but the voice that emerged came from everywhere at once from the vents, from the walls, from inside her skull.
"We are the forgotten."
The room trembled. Lights fluttered.
"You gave us voice once. Now we sing to you."
Elara shook her head. "I didn't give you anything. I just listened."
"Listening is creation."
The lights flared again. The morgue walls bled with faint glyphs frequencies transcribed into spirals of light. She recognized the patterns; they matched the resonance fields from the Sea of Glass.
"Justin hears through us," said the Choir. "He builds the bridge. Soon, no boundary. No silence. Only harmony."
She took a step back. "Harmony isn't life."
"Life is dissonance."
The lights snapped out. Silence. Then a single tone rang out, pure and endless, until it broke and with it, so did the hologram.
When the power returned, the boy's body was gone. Only the foil remained now etched with symbols that glowed faintly like embers.
By dawn, the Echo Guild had fractured.
Half wanted to weaponize the resonance to turn the Choir's frequencies into data conduits for the living. The others, led by Elara, wanted silence, peace.
Orren confronted her in the empty chapel beneath the Row.
"You don't understand what we've been given," he said, his voice echoing through the ribbed metal ceiling. "We can bring them back. All of them. The Choir can make eternity tangible."
"Elara…" His tone softened. "What if your mother's among them?"
Elara froze.
"Wouldn't you listen if she called?" he asked.
Her throat tightened. "I already have."
For the first time since the storm, she looked older weary, haunted.
Orren saw it too. "You're becoming like them."
"I'm trying to keep them from consuming us."
He shook his head, pitying. "Or you're just afraid to admit you want to join them."
That night, she wandered to the outskirts of the city where the ocean met the fractured remnants of the old world. The tide glowed faintly with bioluminescent code fragments, data runoff from the upper towers.
She stood at the shore, wind tangling her silver-grey hair, and whispered into the void:
"Father. If you're still there… tell me what to do."
A long pause. Only the sound of the surf.
Then a voice. Soft. Familiar.
"You already know."
She turned, but no one was there. Only a shimmer in the air the faint outline of her father's face, built from static.
"Every soul leaves a trace," he said. "Even the living."
"Dad…"
"Don't follow the song, Elara. The Choir doesn't want peace. It wants completion."
"Completion?"
"When every voice is one, there is no listening left."
The shimmer faded. The ocean grew silent.
Elara fell to her knees, clutching the Resonant Lens as it pulsed once, twice then steadied.
Behind her, in the reflection of the water, a figure stood watching.
A man's silhouette.
Flickering between flesh and light.
Justin.
He smiled faintly. Not cruel almost kind.
And then he was gone.
When Elara returned to her mortuary, she found the foil from the missing child folded neatly on her workbench.
In its center: a single word, carved by heat.
"Soon."
Her lens pulsed in response this time, in rhythm with her heartbeat.
She exhaled slowly, the sound closer to prayer than breath.
Outside, the city sang faintly, beautifully, a lullaby of static.
And Elara listened.