Part I — Frequencies in the Veins
The city didn't sleep. It only dimmed, like a screen set to low brightness.
Somewhere between three and four a.m., the pulse of Neon Vale hummed beneath Kai's apartment walls—elevated trains groaning like tired gods, sirens sighing, the faint thump of bass from a club that refused to die.
Kai sat at the edge of his bed, shirtless, skin still carrying the static from the night before. His reflection in the dark window looked wrong. Not monstrous, not divine—just off. The way a song feels when it's slightly out of tune, even if no one else can hear it.
His pulse drummed at an unnatural tempo.
He tried breathing with it.
Didn't help.
On the table beside him, his phone screen flickered with endless messages—clips from the gig already gone viral. Comments flooding in:
> "That feedback drop? Unreal, Echo's evolving!"
"Was that a power outage or some occult shit?"
"Echo's sound kills tech lol."
He should've felt proud. This was the kind of legend every underground artist wanted—to become myth in a single night.
Instead, the memory of the moment made his stomach twist.
The light had bent.
The sound had thickened into something physical.
And when the amp exploded, he'd seen—just for a blink—a shape behind the crowd. Pale eyes, like mirrors reflecting the moon.
Kai pressed his palms over his face. "Get a grip, man."
But beneath the skin, muscles trembled—not with fear, but with energy. Like his veins were carrying voltage instead of blood.
He got up, moving to the sink. When the tap hissed, he caught it again—the echo.
Not in sound, but inside.
A reverb that came from him.
He stared into the water as it flowed, rippling silver under the dim kitchen light. His pupils contracted strangely—slitted, for a heartbeat, then normal. His fingers tightened around the sink's edge, leaving dents in the cheap metal.
A laugh bubbled up. Half disbelief, half awe.
"Okay… cool party trick."
It wasn't funny.
He grabbed his sketchbook off the counter, flipping past half-finished lyrics and charcoal drawings. The last page he'd touched the night before was a half-sketched wolf—its eyes golden, mouth open as if howling into the page itself.
He hadn't drawn that. Not consciously.
And yet there it was.
> "I dreamt of a moon that looked back," he murmured.
"And it knew my name."
---
fragment from an untitled lyric scribbled beneath the sketch:
"The night hums in my bones now / static in the bloodstream / silver rising through the veins / I am not what I was."
---
The dawn came too early and too blue.
Kai didn't sleep. He sat by the window, cigarette in hand, watching the fog between skyscrapers glow like some living organism.
Something was moving under the skin of the city.
And, worse—under his own.