Rain blurred the city lights into trembling colors, like the world itself had started to smear. A low hum ran beneath the sound of traffic, faint but wrong—like a radio signal trapped between two frequencies.
Elian Moritz leaned his forehead against the bus window and watched the drops race each other down the glass. His reflection wavered in the streaks, pale and distant, the eyes looking back not quite matching the rhythm of his breath.
He told himself he was just tired. Exams, night shifts, endless coffee. Nothing more.
Then again, the humming had been following him for three days.
The driver shouted something, but Elian barely heard it. The world flickered, once, like a power surge, and every light outside dimmed at the same time. A billboard across the street blinked and froze on a single word—LISTEN—before the power came back.
The others on the bus didn't notice. Or pretended not to.
Elian straightened, heart picking up speed.
When he got off, the rain had already turned the pavement into a mirror. His building stood across the street, old bricks darkened by water. The windows were yellow from the inside. He climbed the stairs, shoes squeaking, and stopped outside his door.
Something scraped from within.
He hesitated, keys cold in his hand, and pressed his ear to the wood. Silence. Then, faintly, the hum again.
He opened the door.
Inside, the apartment looked normal enough—books stacked, kettle on the counter, laptop screen still glowing from his earlier notes. But something was off. The air had that charged smell right before lightning strikes.
The TV flickered to life on its own.
A woman's voice, low and unsteady: "Do you hear it too?"
Elian froze. The screen showed static, but behind it, for a fraction of a second, a human silhouette flickered—someone standing on what looked like a rooftop.
The voice again: "You're not supposed to ignore it."
Then it cut to black.
Elian backed away, breath catching.
He shut the TV off, yanked the plug from the wall, and still—he could hear the hum.
He didn't sleep.
By dawn, the city's color had drained into the same washed-out gray as his thoughts. The sound followed him to class, faint but constant, like tinnitus that pulsed in time with his heartbeat.
At the campus café, his friend June dropped into the seat opposite him. Messy black hair, a chipped smile, and a habit of noticing what others missed.
"You look haunted," she said, sipping from his cup before he could stop her.
"Thanks," he muttered. "That helps."
She tilted her head. "So what's got you this time? Existential dread or caffeine overdose?"
He hesitated, then said, "Have you ever heard something that nobody else could?"
"Like… voices?"
"No, like a sound. A frequency. I can't explain it."
June grinned. "You're either picking up ghosts or bad Wi-Fi."
But the moment she laughed, the lights above them flickered again. Her smile faded.
"Elian," she said slowly, "is that—?"
The hum rose like pressure in the air, a vibration deep enough to make the cups on the table tremble. Everyone around turned to look, startled—then blinked, confused. Whatever they'd felt was gone.
June whispered, "Okay. That wasn't normal."
By evening, Elian found himself walking toward the eastern end of the city, where the radio towers loomed against the sky. He didn't know why. Every step felt drawn by something older than reason.
The air there was thinner, quieter.
A narrow path cut through an abandoned lot, and halfway through, he saw her.
A girl stood by the fence, soaked in the rain, facing the skyline. Her clothes didn't fit the weather—a thin white shirt, sleeves rolled, boots muddy to the ankles. Her hair was silver, not dyed, but like the color had bled out of it.
When she turned, he stopped breathing.
He'd seen her before. On the TV, in the static.
"You took long enough," she said, voice calm but carrying something brittle underneath.
Elian swallowed. "Who are you?"
"Doesn't matter yet." She walked closer, hands in her pockets. "You hear it, don't you?"
He nodded.
"Then it's already started."
Her eyes were strange—not bright, but clear, like glass over something flickering behind it.
"The sound you hear," she said, "isn't in your head. It's in the gap. Between memory and time. It only reaches those who've forgotten something important."
Elian frowned. "Forgotten what?"
She smiled without humor. "You'll remember soon enough. Or you won't survive it."
A tremor ran through the ground. The radio tower lights blinked red in sequence. The hum deepened, rolling like thunder underground.
She grabbed his wrist. "Don't move."
The air in front of them shimmered. For a second, the world folded—like a skipped frame in a film—and a figure stepped out.
No face, no eyes, just static shaped into a human outline.
The girl pulled Elian back. "Stay behind me."
"What the hell is that?" he whispered.
"Something that forgot it was human."
The thing tilted its head. The sound poured from it—an overlapping chorus of whispers, too many to count. Elian's vision blurred, and a flood of images hit him—streets he didn't know, a voice saying his name, a red door swinging open into darkness.
Then the girl pressed her palm to the air, and symbols flared around her wrist like brief circuitry.
A flash, white and sharp.
The creature dissolved, melting into static, and the hum cut off.
Elian fell to his knees, gasping.
The girl looked down at him. "You shouldn't be able to see them yet. That's bad."
"What are you talking about?"
She crouched, her tone softening. "Your name's Elian Moritz, right? Student, night shifts, insomnia, three days of hearing something you can't describe."
He nodded, trembling.
"Then you're marked. Whatever lives between the frequencies has noticed you. It means something in you woke up too soon."
He stared at her, trying to breathe normally. "And you—what are you?"
"Someone who stopped being normal a long time ago."
They found shelter under a bridge when the rain returned. The air smelled like iron and wet stone.
Elian sat on the concrete edge, still shaking. The girl wrung out her hair, then handed him her jacket—dark, worn, and far too big for him.
He hesitated before taking it. "Why are you helping me?"
She shrugged. "You wouldn't last the night alone. The things that cross over… they're drawn to confusion. It's like light to insects."
He laughed weakly. "Great. I'm a streetlamp."
That made her smile, briefly. "You're the first person I've met in months who can still joke after seeing one."
They sat in silence, the sound of rain filling the gaps.
Finally, he said, "What's your name?"
The girl looked toward the river, eyes reflecting the faint orange of the city lights. "Lyra."
"Like the constellation?"
"Like the mistake."
He waited, but she didn't explain.
Later that night, she drew a circle on the ground with chalk pulled from her pocket. Symbols he didn't recognize formed along the edges.
Elian watched. "What's that for?"
"Protection. Or focus. Depends who you ask."
"Magic?"
"Names don't matter. What matters is belief and precision."
She knelt and placed a small device in the center—a cracked portable radio. When she turned it on, instead of music, it released the same low hum that had been haunting him.
Only now, it was steady. Contained.
"Listen," she said.
At first, it sounded like noise. Then, behind the static, words began to form—distorted, barely human:
Remember the silence before the sound.
Elian shivered. "Who's saying that?"
Lyra's expression didn't change. "Someone who used to be me."
They talked until dawn. Or rather, she spoke, and he tried to keep up.
She told him about the Frequents—echoes of people lost between timelines. Fragments that drifted too far from memory and grew desperate enough to claw their way back into the living world.
"You mean ghosts?" he asked.
"Not quite. Ghosts remember they're dead. Frequents don't."
"And you fight them?"
"I contain them. Sometimes. Sometimes they win."
Elian leaned back, staring at the thin strip of sky. "And now I'm part of this."
"You already were."
Her tone was quiet, and something about it made him look at her. She wasn't just talking about him. There was guilt buried in that voice, and loneliness older than her face.
"Lyra," he said carefully, "why do I feel like you've been waiting for me?"
She didn't answer.
The radio between them clicked. Static turned to a single, clear note—a sound like glass breaking underwater.
Lyra's eyes widened. "They found us."
The bridge trembled. Shadows along the walls twisted, stretching into shapes with too many limbs.
She stood, hand already glowing faintly blue. "Stay behind the line."
Elian's pulse slammed in his throat. "Can't you stop them like before?"
"Not without you."
"What?"
"You're the signal now. I can't block what's already marked you."
The shapes closed in. One of them spoke, voice warped through static: "You don't belong here."
Elian felt a pull in his chest, like his ribs were bending inward. The hum filled him, sharper, higher, almost like it was trying to tune him.
Lyra reached out, pressed her palm to his chest. "Listen to me. Focus on the silence. Not the noise. Silence."
He tried. The sound rose anyway, scraping at his mind until it burned.
And then—he remembered.
A room, blinding white. A monitor reading his heartbeat flat. Someone whispering his name through tears.
June's voice.
He gasped. The sound shattered around him like broken glass. The shadows screamed, turning to static that burned the air before dissolving into nothing.
When the noise died, Lyra slumped to the ground, breathing hard.
Elian stared at his hands. They glowed faintly blue, fading as he watched.
"What did I just do?"
Lyra smiled weakly. "You listened."
The sky lightened above the bridge. Traffic hummed somewhere far off, normal again.
Elian sat beside her, shaking but alive. "So what now?"
Lyra opened her eyes, weary but calm. "Now we find out why you were marked. And who tried to wake you."
He frowned. "Wake me?"
She nodded. "You weren't supposed to remember yet. Someone's changing the order of things."
He rubbed his temples. "You talk like the world's a recording."
Her smile was faint. "Maybe it is. Maybe it just keeps replaying the parts it forgot."
When they stepped out from under the bridge, morning light hit the wet streets. Elian's reflection stared back from every puddle—but in each one, he was a second slower to move.
Lyra noticed too. "You're fading in both directions now."
He tried to laugh it off, but the look on her face stopped him.
"Don't worry," she said softly. "You'll stay anchored as long as I do."
"And how long is that?"
Lyra didn't answer. She just started walking, hair silver under the pale sun, the hum of the world settling into silence for now.
Behind them, the radio tower lights blinked once, twice—then held steady on red.
Somewhere in the static, a voice whispered, almost fondly:
"Welcome back."