The fluorescent lights in the holding cell flickered once, then went out for exactly three seconds before humming back to life. To the guards pacing the corridor, it was nothing but an old wire or a glitch in the building's aging circuits. But to Miri, it was the signal she'd been waiting for.
She lifted her head from her knees, eyes gleaming behind smudged glasses. "It's time," she whispered to Minjun.
Minjun glanced at Jiwoo, who perked up instantly, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "We're doing this here?" Jiwoo asked, voice pitched low.
"Where else?" Miri grinned — a quick, sharp flash of teeth that made her look feral and free, even behind concrete and steel. She pulled her battered tablet closer, fingers flying over the cracked screen.
Minjun shifted closer to block her from the small, grimy window in the door. Beyond the bars, the guards leaned on a desk, scrolling their phones, laughing at some muted video. Their attention was elsewhere — just like Miri predicted.
Deep in the belly of the precinct, the holding cells were connected to a forgotten maintenance network — an old security backdoor that Miri's friends had found buried in the blueprints. While the rooftop riot was burning in the streets, they'd been digging tunnels through firewalls, planting digital explosives no one could see until they blew.
Miri tapped the side of her tablet twice — a signal. Minjun bent lower, letting her use his back as a brace. Jiwoo hummed under his breath, tapping a rhythm on the bench to drown out the tiny beeps of Miri's code compiling.
Outside, the city was restless. News outlets flipped the rooftop story a dozen ways — reckless rebellion, violent punks, misunderstood youth. Starline's PR machine pumped out statements about "rogue trainees" and "dangerous radicals." But every time they tried to control the narrative, kids in coffee shops, arcades, and underground forums rewrote it.
Footage of Minjun's last rooftop anthem looped on stolen screens. Grainy cell phone clips of riot shields pressing into singing crowds spilled onto feeds faster than the censors could scrub them. The city buzzed like an open circuit, and all it needed was a spark.
Miri found the spark. She cracked the old CCTV system first — easy, since the precinct ran on outdated software nobody bothered to patch. Then she dove deeper, punching through layer after layer until she found the internal broadcast hub: a forgotten livestream channel the cops used for press statements and security briefings.
"Got it," she hissed. "Ready, Minjun?"
Minjun's throat tightened. He glanced at Jiwoo, who just grinned like a fox cornered but still hungry. "Always ready," Jiwoo said, and clapped him on the back.
Miri angled her tablet's cracked camera at Minjun's face. The metal bench became his stage. The cold concrete walls became curtains pulled back for the city to peek through. He wiped a smear of dried blood from his eyebrow and squared his shoulders.
Jiwoo leaned in close enough to share the frame. Miri switched on the mic, patched through a secure chain of proxies and encrypted routes that snaked their signal out the back of the precinct's locked network and spat it out, raw and blinking, onto the same feeds the rooftop riot had once claimed.
The screen lit up black at first — then Minjun's face flickered into view, pale under the buzzing lights, eyes shadowed with exhaustion but burning bright as neon.
He didn't clear his throat. He didn't apologize. He didn't introduce himself. He just spoke:
"Hey," he rasped. His voice was rough, cracking at the edges. Jiwoo's hand drummed a steady beat on the bench beside him, the only background music they had left.
"I don't know how long this will stay up. Maybe seconds, maybe minutes. But if you're watching this… you're part of it now."
He leaned closer to the camera. Miri adjusted the angle, her fingers trembling. On her screen, she could already see the chat windows explode — tiny floods of he's alive and we see you and sing for us.
"You've seen what they say about us," Minjun went on. "They want you to believe we're criminals. Thugs. Losers who couldn't make it in their pretty glass towers. But you know the truth. You sang it on the rooftops. You shouted it through tear gas. You carried it when they dragged us away."
Jiwoo chimed in, voice hoarse but steady: "You are the rooftop now. You're every note they can't silence."
Minjun's hands trembled — but he wasn't scared. Not anymore. He felt the warmth of Jiwoo's beat, the hum of Miri's code. Beyond the bars, he felt the city vibrating like a plucked guitar string.
He closed his eyes for a heartbeat, then opened them, locking onto the lens like he was staring straight into every room and alley and midnight bedroom watching him.
"I don't want your money," he said. "I don't want your pity. I want your voice. One more time — wherever you are. On your phone, in your car, on the subway. Sing it. Record it. Post it. Drown them in our chorus. They can lock our bodies up, but they can't cage the echo."
Miri turned the mic so they could all lean in. Jiwoo tapped faster, his beat speeding up like a heartbeat ready to burst.
Minjun started to hum. No lyrics this time — just the rooftop melody, stripped to bones and breath. The lullaby they'd carried through tear gas, turned riot anthem, now reborn as an underground prayer.
The camera feed jittered. Miri cursed under her breath, fingers dancing over the screen to patch the signal as guards shifted outside the cell. Jiwoo's voice rose over the hum — words this time, raw and half-sung:
We are the rooftopWe are the reverbWe are the chorusYou can't unlearn
Minjun joined him — their voices cracked, imperfect, echoing off stained walls that did nothing to muffle the truth.
Behind the bars, the first guard turned, eyes narrowing at the glow of Miri's tablet. Boots scuffed concrete. Orders barked.
Miri hit send. The signal shot out one last time, bursting like a flare across servers, pinging phones in basements and rooftops and lecture halls and empty stairwells. Kids with headphones on night buses heard it. Workers on night shift heard it. The city heard it.
The door slammed open.
A baton swung. The tablet skidded across the floor, screen spiderwebbed but still blinking the last frozen frame: three kids in a cell, singing like they owned the sky.
The feed cut. The lights buzzed back to cold silence.
But outside — in the alleys, the subways, the rooftops waiting for dawn — the city began to hum it back:
We are the rooftop. We are the chorus. We are the echo.