For many months now, Subject Seven became a myth in the skies. A ghost hunting another ghost. The ghost it hunted taunting it with uncanny elusiveness. Daring it with sinister cleverness.
Subject Seven had combed the Earth's skies, moving in silence through layers of atmosphere. Free Dome remained elusive: forever seen, never seized. But whispers had piled up like fingerprints on foggy glass.
Seven had retreated. Temporarily. And began to study cases of sky cities reported by travelers. The trail began with the mad pilot over the Caucasus.
He had crash-landed his jet, eyes wide, babbling about clouds that weren't clouds, about structures — towers of silver and bone — looming above him in the upper stratosphere. He'd said he flew through them, felt his instruments scream, and came out with nosebleeds and a mind full of static.
They pulled him from the wreckage with shattered eardrums and a drawing of a citadel he sketched with his own blood.
Southward, far below the equator, a satellite engineer stationed in the Mongolian uplands reported seeing "light pillars" dancing across the horizon at dawn. At first, he thought it was aurora borealis. But the patterns were structured, angular, too perfect to be natural.
He recalibrated his sensors, picked up a signal shaped like harmonic resonance, but not in any known frequency. "It's like they're singing," he'd said to his wife on a staticky call. "Buildings singing in light."
And then there was the old woman in Nunavut. Her voice rasped through frostbitten air as she sat beneath a tapestry of northern lights, clutching a stone talisman carved with concentric circles.
She told her village of a "Hollow Wind" that sometimes whispered in metal tones, and of a city high above the auroras, veiled in sky-glass.
Her granddaughter confirmed it, though she hadn't spoken since. They'd seen it together during the winter solstice: a slow blink of towers like cathedral spires, then gone, as though the stars had blinked and forgotten.
In the oil-dark waters of the South Pacific, on a rust-choked rig lashed by storms, a tech-priestess once told a crew of roughnecks that she'd glimpsed Heaven. That's what she called it.
They laughed until she showed them the sketches burned into her cabin walls: floating bridges of translucent alloy, shapes that hurt to look at.
She called it the "Sky Refuge" and swore it appeared every time her mind stilled into a certain frequency. "It's not a place," she whispered, "it's a song we forgot how to hum."
Subject Seven had found the rig weeks later. It was empty. The walls still bore her sketches.
Over Bolivia, a luxury blimp vanished mid-cruise.
The last radio log caught the captain whispering: "The clouds… they've become metal. There's something above us." Then nothing. The blimp was later found grounded in the Patagonian ice fields.
The crew was gone. In the control room, someone had carved into the frozen glass:
WE SAW THE STAIRCASE IN THE SKY.
In Atacama's dry silence, under telescopes bigger than cathedrals, a half-blind astronomer named Eladio Rivas once screamed through the observatory halls.
"They're moving!" he shouted, "There's a black patch in the skies! A hole that thinks!" What he'd seen, in the silence of skies, wasn't absence, but shifting structures that only appeared when no one looked directly at them.
"It's like they breathe," he muttered, scribbling in his notebook. "The clouds bend around them."
He became a believer afterwards. A shaman apprentice, to be precise, seeking the ancient knowledge of esoteric ways. His telescope was found shattered. On the inner lens: a single fingerprint.
In the Himalayan silence, a monk in an orange robe sat beneath the shadow of an eclipse.
He hadn't spoken in ten years. But when the world dimmed and the air stilled, he looked upward and began to weep. "The monastery of light," he said. "I see it again." He described a great palace rising above the moon's shadow, alive with energy, pulsing like a heart in the sky.
After that, he never spoke again. Machines near him recorded a constant pulse, repeating at nine point eight Hertz. No one could explain it.
Subject Seven tracked every one of these so-called ghosts. He followed a hacker's trace signal in Calabar, Nigeria. She'd broken into a hidden satellite loop and livestreamed the image: towers unfolding like origami in the sky.
The stream crashed mid-broadcast. Her equipment burned. Mysteriously. Till date, she could not account why her machine malfunctioned all of a sudden.
Over the Tasman Sea, a team of weather researchers launched a balloon. As it climbed, the sensors began feeding back radio harmonics: layers of sonic frequency that danced in fractal patterns.
One assistant fainted when she claimed she saw a city "blinking" above the clouds. They dismissed it as atmospheric hallucination—until the balloon exploded without cause.
But the trail that chilled Seven most came from Madagascar. A deaf-mute child painted what she saw in the skies. Her drawings showed cities coiled like galaxies, bridges between lightning storms, and towers taller than Everest—but floating. When asked, she touched the sky, then traced a spiral with her finger. Over and over again. She couldn't speak. But she'd heard the City of Frequencies.
And then, there was the diver in the Gulf of Aden. Coming up from a deep-sea dive, he broke the surface screaming about "reflections above the clouds." He claimed that as he breached, he saw the sea reflecting something far higher—"Towers in the clouds that weren't there when I looked again!" His vision went white, and he slipped into a coma. Overwhelmed by whatever wonder he' d seen.
Each trail led Subject Seven closer to the truth. Not to a place, but to a pattern. He began to see what others missed.
Free Dome wasn't hidden by distance. It was cloaked in Frequency.
Like an old radio searching for the right band, Seven came to understand: you don't arrive at Free Dome. You align.
It was a city tuned out of phase, bending between matter and memory—its architecture riding the wavefront of multi-frequency resonance. Like a mirage dancing on desert heat, Free Dome refracted across the high atmosphere in the same way heat bent light. The difference was, this wasn't heat—it was precision.
Quantum resonance. Frequency-Bending. Substantial matter suspended between states.
When it flickered above the Himalayas, it was because the weather and the harmonic layering aligned. When it shimmered over the Pacific, it was because the clouds and charge allowed for a moment of tuning.
Free Dome wasn't elusive by accident. It was programmed that way.
Its existence was built into the silence between signals, into the gaps of radar pings, into the folds between harmonics. It was a ghost not of superstition—but of science.
And worse still: it shifted its frequency.
Never the same twice. A countless combinations. An infinite variables. Each appearance was like a slot machine wheel clicking into momentary clarity—then gone!