The morning heat came early, pinning the city under a soft, irritable haze. Alisys wiped a fogged crescent from the mirror, scraped on a thin line of eyeliner, and watched the droplet crawl down like a comet burning out. The apartment hummed—a fan that always complained, pipes that giggled even after the water shut off, distant traffic grinding uphill. Somewhere a speaker bled a pop hook—two bars of a winter anthem in June, a jingle for something sanctified.
On the bus she counted billboards because numbers put bones under a day.
One: a golden arch of a lyre, strings glittering like dew, the slogan in serif white: Theobald Group—Talent in Harmony. At the corner, a smiling boy held a violin and a paycheck, the check light-flaring, with a watermark shaped like a god's sigil: three concentric circles threaded by a single line. God of Music. The sponsor mark was on the lower right where ordinary companies used holographic seals.
