The city had turned colder overnight.
Even with the heater humming, the air inside Rylan’s car felt like glass — too thin, too sharp, breaking with every breath. He sat in the driver’s seat, staring at his phone screen.

The voicemail was still there.
The timestamp read 2:13 a.m.

He played it again.
The static roared first — like ocean waves collapsing over each other — and then Ellis’s voice emerged, rough and low, the sound of someone speaking from under rubble.

“Don’t let her speak again.”

Three seconds of silence followed before the file ended.
But those words — the certainty in them — hollowed him out.

Ellis had been gone for three years.
Rylan had watched the fire swallow the psychiatric ward, had dragged bodies out until the heat peeled the skin off his palms. He’d buried his partner with the guilt of arriving too late.

So how was he still speaking?

When Rylan reached the precinct, the hallway lights flickered — a rhythmic pulse he couldn’t unsee. Each flash matched the same three-beat pattern he’d heard in the call’s background.

Aria’s frequency.

He pushed the thought away, but it clung to him like oil.

Aria noticed it immediately — the shift in him.
The way his eyes lingered too long. The way he didn’t quite meet her gaze when she spoke. Their once seamless rhythm — intuition feeding logic — had been replaced by unease.

“Did something happen?” she asked that morning as they went over the old audio logs.

Rylan shook his head. “Just… tired.”

But she knew that tone. The quiet edge of doubt hidden beneath his calm.

“Don’t do that,” she said softly.

“Do what?”

“Look at me like I’m part of the case.”

He didn’t answer.

And that silence told her everything.

That night, rain blurred the city into silver streaks.
Rylan’s phone buzzed — a call from dispatch. Another crime scene. Another voice from the dead.

The address made his pulse jump.
A derelict broadcast storage facility — one of the old radio hubs that had supplied the Hale Institute decades ago.

By the time he arrived, the air smelled of burned wires and damp rust. The forensic lights cut across the darkness in pale cones.

The victim lay sprawled beside an overturned rack of analogue equipment. His wrists — twisted, contorted — were wound with copper radio coils. Mirror shards glinted beneath his palms.

Someone had built the scene like an offering.

A note sat propped against the man’s broken tape recorder.
Black ink, jagged strokes.

“You’re out of sync, Detective.”

Rylan’s jaw tightened.
He pressed play on the recorder — static, then a faint echo of his own voice.

“You left me there.”

He stumbled back, heart punching against his ribs. That phrase — those exact words — had been Ellis’s last transmission before the fire.

He shut the recorder off and turned away, but the sound stayed with him — inside his head, behind his pulse, behind every thought that whispered Aria’s name.

Aria, meanwhile, couldn’t escape her own ghosts.

The studio had always been her sanctuary — quiet, controlled, where her voice mattered and nothing else did. But lately, she’d begun to hear things even when the mics were off.

A whisper under her breath.
The click of an old tape deck rewinding itself.
Her mentor’s voice was threading through the silence like smoke.

“You have the tone that resonates.”

The phrase from her past — the one Hale used to murmur during late-night recordings.

When she found the therapy logs buried beneath Hale’s archived files, her hands trembled before she even opened them.

Patient Code: V-13
Session Date: 04/07/2016
“Patient shows irregular response to sound playback. Subject’s voice aligns with the resonance profile from Case 47B. Possible memory interference.”

Her eyes stopped at the final line.

Voice pattern identical to subject A. Vale, A.

Her chest went cold.

The paper slipped from her fingers as the memory hit — a flash of white light, a soundproof room, Hale’s silhouette leaning close, saying, “Let’s begin the mirror test.”

But she’d been a student then. A trainee. Not a patient.

Hadn’t she?

Rylan arrived just as her breath was shaking, her eyes red from reading.

She turned the monitor toward him. “You want to know the truth? Here. Read it. They said I was part of it.”

He skimmed the file, jaw tightening. “That doesn’t prove—”

“It proves I’m not crazy,” she snapped. “You think I want to be connected to this?”

He stepped closer, voice low. “Aria, Ellis warned me about this project. He said Hale crossed lines — said someone was continuing his work. What if—”

“What if it’s me?” she cut in bitterly. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

Rylan’s silence was answer enough.

Aria’s hand struck his cheek before she even registered the motion — a clean, sharp sound echoing through the studio.

“You think I chose this?” she whispered. “You think I wanted a dead man’s voice inside my head?”

He looked at her — guilt, anger, fear — and left without a word.

Hours later, the studio was empty again.
The city outside had gone still, and the clock read 2:13.

Aria sat before the microphone, staring at her reflection in the glass — her face dim, almost doubled by the faint interior lights.

Her voice came out soft, trembling.

“If you’re in there… tell me what you want.”

For a long moment, there was nothing. Just the hum of electricity.

Then, through the speakers, her own voice replied — deeper, layered, distorted by a frequency just out of human range.

“I want what you took.”

The sound carried through the room like a physical force.
A crack rang out — sharp, clean, violent.

The studio glass in front of her fractured — a spiderweb of splits spreading outward from the centre.

The noise didn’t come from outside. It came from inside the glass.

And as she stared at the broken reflection, she saw it — a faint silhouette, standing just behind her, unmoving, as the mic light flickered on by itself.