The city never really slept — not even on a good day. But tonight, Seoul felt like it was holding its breath, waiting for the next spark.
It started with a single phone speaker, cheap and tinny, crackling out Minjun's broadcast from the underground cell. A girl standing in the shadow of a convenience store freezer held her breath as she replayed it, feeling the hum of his rough lullaby through her palms.
Then another — a boy on the last train out of Gangnam, headphones jammed so tight his ears hurt, humming under his breath, fingers drumming on the plastic seat.
By the time the train screeched into its final station, a dozen kids had pulled out phones, earbuds, battered speakers. They didn't speak — they didn't need to. They all knew the tune.
Across the river, on the rooftop of a crumbling karaoke bar, a crew of dancers who once trained under Starline cranked open old amps they'd stolen years ago — relics of basement gigs that had gotten them blacklisted. They patched in the feed, looped Minjun's voice on a battered mixer, and pointed the speakers at the neon-lit city below.
One rooftop turned into three. Three rooftops turned into ten. The melody crawled across alleys, up fire escapes, over parking garages. The same anthem they'd once sung in fear now rippled like an unchained scream.
Inside the holding cell, Minjun didn't know any of this. He sat hunched in the corner, wrists bruised again where the guards had zip-tied him tighter than before. Miri's tablet was gone — confiscated, cracked in half, maybe dust by now. Jiwoo lay on the bench, lip split, one eye swollen half-shut. But even beaten, they were alive. Breathing. Waiting.
Miri pressed her ear to the tiny barred window set high in the cell door. She could hear it — faint at first, but there. The echo of Minjun's voice — their voice now — leaking through layers of stone and steel.
She turned to Minjun, blood smeared on her glasses from Jiwoo's busted knuckles as she patched him up. "They're singing," she whispered. "They're really singing."
Minjun closed his eyes. He imagined rooftops blooming like lanterns. Imagined alley walls vibrating with stolen chords.
He didn't need a tablet or a mic now. The city had become the speaker.
On the ground, Seojin's people scrambled. Starline's crisis team fanned out across pressrooms and back channels, feeding stories to journalists desperate for a new angle. They called it "vandalism," "disturbance of the peace," "a coordinated act of reckless incitement." They bought trending hashtags, scrubbed underground clips, flagged social feeds.
But the kids were quicker. For every takedown, ten reuploads bloomed. For every shut rooftop, another sprang up two streets over.
The city's old guard didn't know how to fight an echo.
Near Hongdae, a group of buskers who used to be Starline trainees dragged an old piano onto a rooftop bar's deck. The thing was out of tune — two keys jammed, another held down with duct tape to kill the buzz — but when they hammered out the chords of Minjun's rooftop anthem, nobody cared about perfection.
Below, a crowd spilled into the street — students, skaters, night shift cooks still in their aprons. Someone passed around a half-broken megaphone, chanting the chorus through the feedback screech.
A girl on her dad's delivery scooter skidded to a stop by the curb, lifted her phone, and livestreamed the whole scene with a caption that said only: #WeAreTheRooftop.
Within an hour, it was trending number one.
At a precinct down the block, one young guard leaned against the wall by the holding cells, earbuds tucked just deep enough to avoid the sergeant's glare. He listened to the broadcast loop. He didn't say a word when he saw Miri's bruised face through the door's slit. He just tapped the bars twice — a quiet pulse of solidarity — before slipping back to his post.
Jiwoo cracked his swollen eye open and smirked. "Told you. Nobody's gonna shut us up."
Minjun laughed — a low, ragged sound that scraped his raw throat. But there was relief in it too, a bright edge that cut through the ache in his bones. "Not tonight," he said. "Not ever."
At the edge of town, a student with a cheap laptop tapped into the last thread of Miri's backdoor code. She was sixteen, still wearing her school uniform, hair pinned up to hide the streaks she wasn't allowed to dye. She cloned the broadcast to pirate servers halfway around the world. Within minutes, kids in Tokyo, Manila, Bangkok, even New York were catching fragments of the rooftop anthem on Discord, on midnight pirate streams, in basement gigs where the lyrics didn't matter because the beat was all that counted.
And up above it all, the city's tallest tower flickered with ad screens that normally blared corporate slogans. A lone projector, snuck in by a rogue intern at the ad company, hijacked the feed for exactly fifteen seconds.
Minjun's face — blurry, bruised, but grinning — stared down at the city like a ghost painted in pixels. No sound. Just three words in white text below: We Are Rooftop.
The billboard cut to black. But the echo stayed.
In the cell, Minjun leaned his head against the wall, listening to the muffled, swelling chorus through the concrete. Somewhere out there — on rooftops, in alleyways, in bedrooms where kids should've been sleeping for school — the city sang him back to life.
For the first time since he stepped into Seojin's office at fifteen, he felt bigger than the stage they'd promised him. Bigger than any contract they could threaten him with.
He looked at Jiwoo, who flashed a crooked grin through a bloody lip. He looked at Miri, who wiped sweat and blood from her brow like war paint.
They were caged — for now. But out there?
Out there, they were a thousand rooftops strong.
And tomorrow night? A thousand more.