Chapter 1: The Rooftop Lullaby
The girl didn't scream when she fell.
She just dropped like a broken note from a song no one finished.
Ji-Ah stood frozen near the school gate, headphones still clamped over her ears, as the body hit the pavement three floors below the rooftop. Students screamed. Phones flew up. Teachers ran. But all Ji-Ah could hear was the lullaby.
The same haunting melody she'd heard last night.
It started again, softly—faint notes dripping like rain through her mind, curling behind her ears, running down her spine. A piano. Three notes. A hum. Then silence.
She knew that song didn't exist.
It never had.
She'd never told anyone about the melodies. Not the ones that woke her at 3 a.m., not the ones that made her press her palms against her ears so hard her fingers shook. And definitely not the ones that came hours before someone died.
Her breath caught. The girl on the pavement—Lee So-Min, second-year, dance team, smile too bright to be fake. Ji-Ah had seen her yesterday in the locker room, humming to herself. Ji-Ah had heard her humming that song.
Now So-Min was gone.
The lullaby faded. The screams didn't.
Ji-Ah turned and walked away.
---
No one stopped her. No one ever did. Teachers barely remembered she was enrolled. Classmates avoided her like she was a ghost. Ji-Ah didn't speak, didn't raise her hand, didn't exist beyond the background static of high school chaos. And she liked it that way.
Back in her apartment, the silence clung like wet clothes. Her mother wouldn't be home until midnight, and the lights were always off. Ji-Ah didn't mind. Her world wasn't in the light.
She opened her notebook. Page after page of musical notation — but they weren't her songs. She couldn't write music. Couldn't compose. Couldn't sing.
These were the songs she heard.
She flipped to the last page. Last night's melody—three bars, written shakily in pencil, as if the music itself resisted being remembered. She stared at it.
Then ripped it out.
The doorbell rang.
Ji-Ah froze. No one visited. Ever.
She walked to the door and looked through the peephole. A boy stood there in a black school uniform. His face half-shadowed by the hallway light. She didn't recognize him.
He didn't knock again. Just waited.
She didn't open it.
The boy raised a small, rectangular object to the peephole.
A music sheet.
The same one she had just torn up.
Ji-Ah's pulse skidded. Her hands shook. She opened the door an inch.
"You hear them too," he said.
---
His name was Min Seo-Joon. Transfer student. Former child prodigy. Vanished from the public eye two years ago after a meltdown on stage during a televised orchestra performance.
Now, he was standing in Ji-Ah's living room, staring at her notebook like it was a crime scene.
"You wrote this down?" he asked, holding up the torn sheet.
She nodded.
He didn't ask why she wasn't speaking. Didn't flinch when she stayed silent. Instead, he laid down a USB drive on the table.
"I want you to listen to this," he said.
Ji-Ah stared at it.
Seo-Joon said nothing else, just stepped out onto the hallway and left her alone.
She didn't play it right away. Not until the city fell asleep. Not until the familiar ache of music built in her bones again.
She plugged the USB into her laptop.
One file. One track.
ghostmelody_01.wav
Ji-Ah pressed play.
The sound was static at first. Then a hum. Then...a piano. The same three notes.
She slammed the laptop shut.
It wasn't possible.
She'd never recorded the melody. Never played it out loud. No one else had heard it.
But it was real.
And someone else had it.
---
The next day at school, So-Min's death barely made it to the PA system. Suicide, the administration claimed. Counselors stood awkwardly outside classrooms offering tissues and pamphlets.
Ji-Ah ignored them.
Seo-Joon sat in the back of her music theory class like he'd always belonged there. No one asked where he came from. No one noticed he had no sheet music, no books.
Except her.
He passed her a folded note halfway through class.
They called it Project Soundless.
Her fingers curled tightly around the paper.
Everyone in it either became a genius—or died.
---
Lunch was chaos. Ji-Ah sat under the staircase alone, as usual. Until Seo-Joon appeared with two boxed coffees and a bag of triangle kimbap.
"You ever hear a song that felt like it was trying to kill you?" he asked.
She didn't nod. But she didn't walk away either.
"My older brother," he said, "used to write symphonies in his sleep. Said they came from the walls. Said he could hear them in the silence."
Ji-Ah's hands tightened.
"One day," Seo-Joon continued, voice flat, "he jumped in front of a train. The melody playing on his iPod... I heard it again last week. Coming from the school speakers."
He looked at her. Dead on.
"I think it's happening again."
---
Over the next few days, Ji-Ah and Seo-Joon exchanged notebooks, music sheets, USB files.
What emerged was terrifying:
The same melodies appeared at different times for both of them.
Each melody came before a death.
Each had a frequency above 21 kHz—just barely outside normal hearing.
More disturbing?
Each melody had a signature embedded.
The initials: P.S.
Project Soundless.
---
Late that Friday night, Ji-Ah sat alone on the roof of their apartment building. Headphones on. Volume low. The city buzzed far below like a tired machine.
She pressed play on Seo-Joon's second file.
A child's voice sang softly. Off-key. Like a music box in the dark.
> "If you hear it, don't follow... If you hear it, don't fall..."
Then: a woman's scream. Distant. Echoing.
Ji-Ah tore the headphones off.
The rooftop door creaked.
She turned—Seo-Joon stood there, pale, eyes wide.
"I found out what the project really did," he said. "And we're both in it."
She shook her head slowly.
"No," he said. "I mean we were both subjects."
Ji-Ah's world tilted.
She remembered—barely—a place with white walls, machines, wires on her temples, lullabies in the dark.
"I think someone is restarting it," Seo-Joon whispered. "Using us."
Behind them, the rooftop speakers crackled to life.
The ghost melody began to play.
The melody was louder now.
Not just in her ears—in her bones.
It didn't play like a song. It moved, crawling up her spine, wrapping cold fingers around her throat. Ji-Ah backed away from the rooftop edge. The speakers above them whined, distorting. The child's voice returned, warped and cracked.
> "Come with me... come and see..."
Seo-Joon lunged for the speaker controls—ripping open the metal panel mounted on the rooftop's maintenance wall. Static hissed, sparks jumped.
"Help me find the kill switch!" he snapped.
Ji-Ah dropped to her knees beside him. Inside the panel: a mess of wires, some taped over, some new. Not standard school tech. Someone added this. Recently.
She pointed at the blue wire.
He yanked it.
The music stopped.
They sat in silence, breathless. Then Seo-Joon looked up, his voice low.
"I don't think this school is just a school."
He pulled a crumpled blueprint from his bag. Ji-Ah unfolded it—an old map of the campus.
"There's a basement level," he said. "It's not listed anywhere. But I found it mentioned in an old forum post from a student who disappeared five years ago."
Ji-Ah traced the hallway on the blueprint. It ended at the music wing. Behind the old recording studio.
He nodded.
"I think that's where Project Soundless started."
Ji-Ah's eyes darkened. She wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to him.
"Then it's time we listened to the silence."
---
They planned it carefully: sneak in during Saturday rehearsal chaos, when the music building would be packed with noise, students, distractions.
Ji-Ah had never broken a rule in her life. But when she followed Seo-Joon through the back stairwell and into the dimly lit recording hallway, she didn't hesitate.
There it was. The door.
Unmarked. Locked. Cold.
Seo-Joon slid a keycard through. It didn't belong to him—it had the name of a teacher who'd gone "on leave" last week.
The door clicked open.
Inside: silence. Total. Pressurized.
Not a speck of dust. But not new either. Equipment covered with black cloth. A red piano against the far wall. Shelves of reel tapes marked only with numbers.
Ji-Ah stepped forward.
And a voice boomed from the intercom.
> "Welcome back, Subject 11."
She froze. Her hands clenched. Something sharp surged in her chest—recognition.
Not just the voice.
The words.
She had been here before.
---
She dropped to her knees as the memory hit.
A white room. Her wrists strapped down. A metronome ticking slowly beside her head. Electrodes on her temples. A man in a gray lab coat tapping a glass panel.
> "Subject 11 shows hyper-resonance. She hears frequencies above cognitive thresholds. Induced auditory hallucinations continue. Record it."
Then: a lullaby.
Not sung. Not played.
Broadcasted into her mind.
She gasped, clutching her head.
Seo-Joon grabbed her arm. "Ji-Ah! Hey, stay with me."
Her lips parted—but no sound came out.
Then, without meaning to, she sang:
> "If you hear it, don't follow…"
Her voice cracked halfway through. She hadn't spoken in five years. The words tasted like blood.
Seo-Joon stared at her, eyes wide.
"You remember," he whispered.
---
They found a black journal tucked behind the reel tapes. Bound in cracked leather. Pages scribbled in two kinds of handwriting.
One neat, clinical. The other—sloppy. Panicked.
Entry 1: Test subject 11 responds to layered auditory hallucinations.
Entry 6: Subject 07 became catatonic. Transferred. No known family.
Entry 10: Begin melody sequencing. Use sleep cycles.
Entry 13: They won't stop singing. They come even when I block the signal. The red piano plays by itself.
They stopped reading.
Somewhere deeper in the walls, a sound moved. Metal scraping metal. A footstep that wasn't theirs.
Seo-Joon slammed the journal shut.
"We're not alone."
They ran.
---
Back on the surface level, the school looked the same. But Ji-Ah knew it wasn't.
Something had changed.
She heard it in the silence between footsteps. In the quiet between school bells.
At night, she began drawing the red piano.
Over and over.
Every page in her notebook.
Red.
Black keys.
Missing pedals.
And behind it—shadows with mouths open, but no sound.
---
Ji-Ah woke one morning with blood on her pillow.
Not from a wound.
From her ears.
She didn't go to school.
Instead, she went back to the basement.
Alone.
This time, the red piano was uncovered.
Waiting.
The red piano stood in the dark, untouched, yet warm.
Ji-Ah stared at it from the doorway of the hidden room. The same piano she'd drawn over and over, the one from her fragmented memories. A pulse beat in her ears—was it fear? Or something deeper? Recognition?
She stepped forward.
Dust motes floated through the air, but the piano itself gleamed. Someone had wiped it clean.
Someone was still coming here.
Her fingers hovered over the keys.
She didn't play.
She couldn't play.
She had never learned. And yet, her hands knew the spacing, the angle, the exact weight of a C-sharp without looking.
She pressed a key.
Sound exploded—not just in the room but in her head.
It wasn't music.
It was a scream.
---
Ji-Ah fell back, clutching her head. The sound wasn't loud, but it pierced, as if it bypassed her ears and burrowed straight into her mind. Her vision flickered. Shadows danced along the walls. The piano key she'd touched was now redder than before—almost wet.
The scream faded.
And then—voices.
> "Subject 11's auditory cortex is hyperreactive. Proceed with Stage 3."
> "Her silence is the result of overexposure. We'll use that."
> "No one will believe her anyway."
Ji-Ah pressed her back to the wall, breathing hard. She wasn't just remembering—she was hearing the past. Trapped echoes stored inside this room, inside the instrument. The piano wasn't an object. It was a container.
Footsteps sounded behind her.
She turned.
Seo-Joon.
"You shouldn't be here alone," he said quietly, stepping inside.
Ji-Ah tried to speak. The words burned. Still wouldn't come.
He didn't push. Just sat beside her on the cold ground.
"I found something else," he said. "On the USB. Hidden files. Not audio."
He opened his laptop, screen glowing pale blue in the darkness. Folder after folder appeared.
Subject logs. MRI scans. Name: Ji-Ah. ID: S11.
They both stared.
Ji-Ah shook her head slowly, trembling.
One video file stood out.
exp_S11_lullaby_injection.mov
Seo-Joon looked at her. "Do you want to see it?"
She didn't answer. Just reached out and clicked it.
---
Static.
Then a white room. A girl strapped to a chair. Wires on her temples. Headphones clamped over her ears.
Ji-Ah watched herself from the outside.
She was younger. Smaller. Her eyes empty.
> "We begin frequency blend test. Injecting low-wave melody. Watch for resistance."
Then came the music.
It wasn't evil.
It was… beautiful.
A lullaby made of strings and silence. Soft. Gentle. But layered underneath—something else. A second melody. One that crawled like insects beneath skin.
In the video, Ji-Ah began to shake. She screamed. No sound left her lips.
Then the screen went black.
> END RECORDING.
---
"I think this is why you stopped speaking," Seo-Joon said. "Not because you chose silence. Because something made you."
Ji-Ah stood up slowly. Her knees trembled.
She went to the piano again. This time, she didn't sit. She just listened.
She could hear it. Beneath the silence. The layers. The ghosts.
"Why us?" she wrote on her notepad.
Seo-Joon hesitated.
"I think…" he began, "...it wasn't just about music. It was about creating something—someone—who could receive transmissions normal people can't."
She looked up at him sharply.
"Like antennas," he finished.
Ji-Ah backed away from the piano.
If that was true, then the music wasn't from Earth. It wasn't written.
It was broadcasted.
And the red piano was a receiver.
---
That night, Ji-Ah didn't sleep.
Every sound outside—sirens, dogs, wind against glass—bent into song.
She stood at her window, watching the city breathe.
From the rooftop of a building across the street, she saw a figure.
Not Seo-Joon.
Someone else.
Dressed in black.
Holding a violin.
Playing the melody.
The lullaby.
Ji-Ah blinked.
The figure vanished.
But the song remained.
Inside her.
---
The next morning, the news broke: another student dead. Same school. Same rooftop.
Male. Third-year. Quiet. No enemies.
Ji-Ah knew his face. He sat two rows behind her in homeroom.
His fingers had always tapped against his desk, like a metronome.
She'd never spoken to him.
Now, she never would.
Ji-Ah walked into the music room before class.
On the whiteboard, written in shaky black ink:
> "The melody isn't what kills us. It's what wakes us up."
She turned slowly.
No one was there.
But the message was fresh.
Seo-Joon met her outside. His face pale. In his hands—another USB.
"This one was mailed to me," he whispered. "No return address."
They opened it in the school library, surrounded by whispers and worn books.
Inside: a single video file.
orchestra_room_cam02.mp4
They played it.
A security feed. Dated two nights ago.
A boy entered the orchestra room alone. Sat at the cello.
Began to play.
The melody.
As he played, the lights flickered. The strings bled.
And behind him—a figure in black appeared.
Mouth open.
No sound.
---
Seo-Joon paused the video.
"I think we're being hunted," he said.
Ji-Ah shook her head.
"No," she mouthed. "Watched."
And
then, without touching the keys, the computer began to play.
The ghost melody.
Again.
From nowhere.
Every speaker in the library clicked on.
Students screamed.
Ji-Ah and Seo-Joon ran.
But it was too late.
It had begun again.
The library descended into chaos.
Books toppled. Students screamed. The old speakers near the ceiling whined with mechanical groans, the ghost melody threading through them like an infection—note by note. Not everyone heard it. Some only flinched at the static. But Ji-Ah could feel every chord laced into her nerves like barbed wire.
She couldn't cover her ears. It was inside her now.
She grabbed Seo-Joon's wrist and yanked him out of the building. The hallway spun with students, but no one chased them. No teachers questioned why the speakers shrieked a melody no one had ever programmed.
Outside, it was quiet.
For a second.
Then Ji-Ah heard it again, not through technology—but through the wind.
Like someone whistling.
Seo-Joon turned to her. "We need to leave. Not just the school—Seoul."
Ji-Ah's eyes widened.
"We're not safe here. And it's not just about us anymore," he said. "Someone's accelerating the project. The files I decrypted—they show test subject expansions. They want more of us."
Ji-Ah shook her head violently. Not because he was wrong—because she'd already seen it. Felt it.
She wrote frantically in her notebook.
"Running won't change what's inside us."
Seo-Joon stared at the words. "Then what do we do?"
She pointed back toward the school.
"We finish it."
---
That night, Ji-Ah didn't return home.
She slept in the old observatory, an abandoned club room on the top floor of the school no one used anymore. The telescope was broken. The glass cracked. But the view of the city was clear.
She watched the lights.
In the silence between them, she heard something impossible.
Morse code.
Not from machines.
From the blinking red tower light across the river.
Short. Long. Short.
She wrote it down, her fingers shaking.
> L-I-S-T-E-N.
The ghost melody started again.
From inside her chest.
---
Morning came with frost. Not on the windows—on her skin.
She peeled herself off the sleeping bag Seo-Joon had left for her. Her body ached. Her ears rang. She checked her phone.
A message.
Unknown Number: Stop listening.
No reply option. No number. Just the words.
Seconds later, every device in the school buzzed—phones, fire alarms, computers.
All played the same thing:
> "If you hear it, don't follow… If you hear it, don't fall…"
The ghost lullaby. Broadcasted. Live.
Students panicked. Authorities were called.
But no one could trace the source.
Because it wasn't coming from anywhere.
It was coming from everyone.
---
Seo-Joon found her outside the music wing, eyes bloodshot, shaking.
"I translated the research notes," he said breathlessly. "They were trying to map the mind through sound. They believed certain frequencies could rewire perception—make people feel, obey, even die on cue."
Ji-Ah closed her eyes.
She'd felt it.
He continued, "The red piano wasn't just a receiver. It was the original transmitter. They used it to calibrate the lullaby. That's why you remember it. That's why you're immune."
Her mouth opened slightly.
A word trembled at the edge of her throat.
She whispered it.
> "Stop."
Seo-Joon's eyes widened. "Ji-Ah… you spoke."
She nodded.
One word. But the most powerful one she'd ever used.
She took out her notebook.
"We go back. One last time. We destroy the red piano."
---
They prepared all day.
Noise-canceling headphones. Metal-cutting tools. Blueprints of the school's wiring system. Seo-Joon even hacked the power grid to trigger an outage for 3 minutes—just enough to slip in unnoticed.
At midnight, they entered the basement.
The door was unlocked.
The piano was already playing.
But no one sat at it.
The keys moved on their own.
Ji-Ah stepped forward, fingers shaking, breath rapid.
Then—
A scream. Not in her mind. In the room.
They turned.
A third person stood there. Hooded. Thin. Pale.
Eyes bleeding black.
Ji-Ah gasped.
Seo-Joon stepped in front of her.
The figure swayed.
"I was Subject 02," he rasped. "You're late."
He collapsed.
Ji-Ah ran to him, checking his pulse.
Alive. Barely.
On his wrist—burned into the skin—was the full score of the lullaby.
Not tattooed.
Burned.
---
They dragged him away from the piano. He clutched Ji-Ah's hand.
> "It's not a song," he whispered. "It's a command."
> "They're tuning the world."
> "You're the key."
And with that, he passed out.
---
Ji-Ah didn't wait.
She approached the piano. Took out the hammer. Raised it.
The piano screamed.
Not mechanically. Not electronically.
It screamed like a living thing.
The sound bent the walls. Lights exploded. Blood poured from her nose.
Still—she brought the hammer down.
Once. Twice. Again.
The piano cracked. Keys broke like teeth.
And then—silence.
For the first time in years.
Real silence.
---
They burned what they could.
Destroyed the journals.
Crushed the tapes.
By morning, there was nothing left but ash and dust.
No more music.
No more melody.
And Ji-Ah—
She finally slept.
---