The sky over the city was heavy, but not with weather. The air itself felt stained, like the static that clings to a screen long after it's gone dark. A horizon of wires cut across the pale blue, sagging from pole to pole, their tangled veins feeding the endless hum of lights, trains, and monitors. Everything buzzed faintly, though it was the kind of sound you noticed only when you stopped breathing.
On the rooftop of a school building, a girl leaned over the railing. She wasn't older than sixteen, a white blouse ruffling faintly in the breeze, her skirt pressed close to her legs. Her shoes were still on, perfectly in place. Even as she bent forward, her posture wasn't frantic, wasn't panicked. There was no tremor in her fingers as they clutched the rusted edge of the fence.
Her lips parted. The words slipped out in a whisper meant for no one and nothing.
"Do you believe in God?"
The city swallowed the question. Cars rolled along the streets below, their horns far-off, indistinct. Somewhere, a train thundered, rattling glass in windows and shaking birds into the air. She did not look down at any of it.
Her eyes were wide, unblinking, focused not on the world below her but on something above, or beyond, as if she were already looking through another layer of reality.
A pause. Then her body tilted forward, soft and deliberate.
The world became air.
Her hair whipped around her face, ribbons of black flying loose. The ground surged toward her in silence, only the sound of rushing wind filling her ears. Windows blurred, colors smeared together. It felt longer than a second, but shorter than a thought.
And then her body struck the pavement.
A crack. Red blooming outward. A few screams. Most people on the sidewalk kept moving, glancing, pretending they hadn't seen. Just another disturbance in a city where disturbances were routine.
The street swallowed her too.
---
The next morning, the train cars hissed with heat and the chatter of commuters. Overhead, wires and lights flickered, casting shifting shadows that followed the passengers as they swayed with the motion of the car. Students clutched their bags, their uniforms pristine, their eyes glazed in routine.
Among them sat a girl with short brown hair that curved around her face like strands framing a porcelain mask. Her name was Iwakura Lain, but no one in the car knew her name. To them, she was just another uniform, another body lost in the rhythm of the city's arteries.
She stared at the floor, her hands folded stiffly over her school bag. Her shoulders were small, as though drawn inward to avoid being noticed. Lain was always quieter than the others — not disliked, but not remembered either.
The city screamed around her, but she hardly seemed to hear it.
As the train clattered through a tunnel, light stuttered overhead. For an instant, the hum of the electric lines seemed louder, drowning out even the engine. The sound pressed into her ears, into her skull, until she thought she could hear something beneath it — like voices. Not full words, only fragments. A low murmur, meaningless yet strangely personal.
She blinked. The hum vanished. The chatter of the other students returned.
Her gaze drifted to the window. Outside, power lines crisscrossed the sky like webs, as if the city were held together not by buildings or streets but by wires themselves. Each pole stretched higher than the last, their frames bending under the weight of cables that seemed to multiply endlessly, reaching out, connecting, suffocating.
She found herself staring until her reflection blurred into the backdrop, her own eyes looking hollow and distant in the glass.
The train stopped. The doors hissed open. Students shuffled out, their shoes clacking against the platform tiles.
---
At school, the world wasn't much different. A hundred voices filled the air, but none were directed at her. Girls walked in clusters, laughing over weekend stories, over rumors, over text messages. Boys teased each other in half-serious tones, trading slaps and jabs like ritual.
Lain moved through them as if she weren't fully solid, like a shadow barely clinging to the ground. She nodded politely when someone brushed past her. Her lips tugged into the faintest smile when a classmate accidentally met her eyes. But once the moment was gone, she returned to silence.
In the classroom, fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Chalk scraped against the board as the teacher scrawled formulas. Lain sat near the middle rows, her posture neat, her notebook open, her pencil poised. She looked as though she were taking notes, but her page remained blank, the lines empty except for the faint smudge of graphite where her hand had hesitated.
Her thoughts lingered elsewhere.
The girl who had fallen — she hadn't known her personally. But the story had already moved through the school in whispers, half-hidden conversations, little gasps between classes. A high schooler, they said. She jumped from a rooftop downtown. They said she was quiet, strange, detached. They said her name, though Lain let it slip past her ears before it could root itself in memory.
Dead. Just like that.
Yet the words the girl had whispered before falling — Lain had never heard them, not directly. And still, she felt as though they'd been addressed to her.
"Do you believe in God?"
The voice pulsed in her skull as the teacher's words blurred into static.
She pressed her pencil to the page. Wrote nothing.
---
At lunch, she sat near the window. The sun spilled across her desk, though its warmth felt thin, filtered through glass and dust. Other students crowded together, their chatter like water rushing over rocks. She opened her lunchbox quietly and ate in silence, chewing without taste.
Then, from across the room, she caught her name.
"Lain."
She looked up, startled. Three girls stood nearby, half-smiling, curious. They weren't her close friends — she didn't really have those — but they weren't strangers either. Classmates who sometimes remembered she existed.
"Did you hear?" one of them asked.
Another leaned closer. "About the emails."
Lain blinked. "…Emails?"
They nodded. "The girl who killed herself. She's been sending messages."
The words didn't make sense at first. Lain tilted her head slightly, her brow furrowing.
"She died two days ago," one of the girls said, almost gleefully, as though reciting a ghost story. "But last night, I got a mail. It said she wasn't dead — not really. That she just left her body and lives inside the Wired now."
The other giggled nervously. "Creepy, right?"
Lain stared at them, searching their faces for any hint of a joke. But they looked too unsettled themselves, their voices wavering between fear and fascination.
"She sent it to a lot of people," one added. "Didn't you get one?"
Lain shook her head slowly. "No."
"Oh. Maybe you will."
They left with a shrug, their laughter dissolving into other conversations as quickly as it had come.
Lain sat frozen. The hum of the fluorescent lights seemed louder again, filling the silence left behind.
A message from the dead.
She lowered her gaze to her desk. Her hands trembled faintly as she lifted her pencil again, the tip pressing into the paper. She wanted to write, to leave some trace of what she'd just heard, but her mind couldn't settle. Her pulse echoed in her ears.
The Wired.
Her father spoke of it sometimes, though never to her directly. She'd overheard conversations — fragments about connections, about information flowing faster than light. About a place where people could escape themselves. She had never paid much attention.
But now, with those words in her mind, it felt different. The Wired.
Lain closed her notebook and placed her hands firmly on its cover, as though to anchor herself to something solid.
Still, she couldn't shake the whisper.
"Do you believe in God?"
---
The school day dragged on. Each class blurred together, the ticking of the clock louder than any lecture. Lain's body moved automatically: standing when told, sitting when told, bowing at the bell. But her thoughts ran in circles, spiraling back to the rooftop, the fall, the whispers of a girl who shouldn't still exist.
When the final bell rang, she stepped into the corridor. The students spilled into the hallways, laughter echoing, shoes squeaking against polished floors. Lain followed quietly, her bag slung over her shoulder.
Outside, the sun was already fading, the sky shifting into the pale colors of early evening. The wires overhead glowed faintly in the dying light, stretching across the city like veins. Lain stared up at them as she walked, her lips pressed together.
Somewhere in that tangle of cables, in that humming network of electricity and signals, something waited.
And somehow, she knew it was already calling to her.