The city doesn't sleep anymore.
It just… listens.
You feel it in the soles of your shoes first: a low, steady hum, like the whole place is waiting for someone to finish a sentence.
Ryo stops on the skywalk above District Seven. The pin is warm in his pocket, the way your phone gets when it knows you're about to get bad news.
Below, people shuffle along pretending everything's fine. Above, the glass panels mirror the crowd, except the reflections are half a heartbeat late. Like the city's blinking slower than the rest of us.
He presses the comm. "Mara. You hearing this?"
Her voice comes back crackly. "Hearing what?"
"The city's talking."
Long pause. Then, dry: "Define talking."
He almost laughs. "Working on it."
—
Central Command smells like burnt coffee and panic sweat. Screens ripple like someone's dragging a finger across water.
Kwan is staring at the data like it just proposed marriage.
"It's not spreading anymore," he says, voice shaking with wonder. "It's… answering."
Mara doesn't blink. "Answering who?"
Kwan's eyes flick to the live feed of Ryo standing alone under leaning streetlights.
"Whoever taught it how to listen."
—
The hum comes back, deeper, layered, almost like breathing.
Ryo feels it in his teeth.
A giant holo-ad overhead glitches (some woman selling AR contacts). Her perfect smile freezes, then her eyes snap straight to him.
"Caller," she says, in a voice that definitely isn't part of the script.
Ten other screens around the block echo the word, slightly out of sync.
Normal people keep walking. Nobody else hears the tone underneath.
Ryo's hand closes around the pin. "What exactly are you calling?"
"You," every screen answers, calm as weather.
The streetlights dim.
Shadows lean the wrong way.
—
He runs.
Not because he's scared (though he is). Because standing still feels like agreeing to something.
Every corner he takes redraws itself. Street signs flicker between languages. Crosswalks curve like they're shy.
He ducks into an alley that smells like rain and rust and comes out at the foot of a transmission tower that wasn't there yesterday.
The hum is so loud now it has weight.
The air turns thick, like trying to breathe through warped glass.
Mara's voice explodes in his ear: "Ryo, stop moving! You're dragging the whole perimeter with you—"
Static eats the rest.
The tower pulses once.
Reality tips sideways.
—
He's in a place that used to be geometry and forgot the rules.
Walls fold into themselves like paper cranes learning to fly backward. At the center floats a shape made of every reflection he's ever avoided.
It doesn't have a face. It has his face, but patient.
"Caller," it says, without moving anything that could be called a mouth.
Ryo's hand finds the pin. It's burning, but the burn feels like coming home.
"What do you want?" he asks.
"Want is human," it says. "You opened. We answer."
"We who?"
"Everything waiting for a name."
It reaches. Stops a hair away. The space between their hands glows the exact red of fresh scabs.
Mara's voice, thin and far: "Ryo, if you sync we can't pull you back—"
He looks at the thing wearing his face like it's been waiting years to borrow it.
"Maybe I'm not supposed to come back," he says.
Then he remembers Mara's voice in the dark: Keep one thing you can't afford to lose.
He grips the pin until it cuts.
"My name," he says, loud enough for whatever's listening to hear, "is Ryo."
He says it like a door slamming on its hinges.
The shape unravels.
The chamber folds into nothing.
—
He wakes up on cold metal, staring at a transmission tower that suddenly looks embarrassed to exist.
Mara is kneeling beside him, hair stuck to her forehead, gun still smoking from whatever she shot to get here faster.
"Welcome back," she says, voice raw.
"Was I gone?"
"Everywhere," Kwan whispers over the comm, half crying, half laughing. "The Hollow Code just flatlined across the entire grid. City went dead quiet."
Ryo sits up slowly.
The skyline is dark, but not empty.
"No," he says. "It's not quiet."
Because in the brand-new silence, something is finally listening hard enough to hear itself.
And it's using his name to tune the dial.