The city breathed.
It wasn't just the hum of neon or the rush of mag-lev trains skimming their rails—it was the way the air itself vibrated, charged with the static of a thousand overlapping signals. Eliyas moved through the underbelly of Nova Helix like a ghost, his boots scuffing against pavement that shimmered with embedded LEDs, their glow pulsing in time with unseen algorithms. Above him, the sky was a jagged tapestry of light pollution and corporate spires, their peaks lost in the haze of smog and holographic billboards.
A woman's face, thirty stories tall, flickered across the façade of a data hub, her lips parting in a silent advertisement. "Synthea—perfection, redefined." The image stuttered, glitched, then dissolved into a storm of pixelated rain. No one looked up. The crowd flowed around Eliyas in a river of augmented bodies—chrome-plated knuckles, subdermal LEDs tracing veins in electric blue, ocular implants scanning, always scanning. The scent of synthetic street food mixed with ozone and the acrid bite of engine coolant.
He ducked into an alley where the glow of the city dimmed, the walls slick with condensation and the ghostly afterimages of old graffiti. A drone buzzed overhead, its single red eye sweeping the ground before darting away. Somewhere, a burst of laughter echoed, too sharp, too loud—the kind that came from stimulant bars where the drinks were laced with neural enhancers.
This was Nova Helix. A place where silence was a myth.
Even the rain here was different—warm, slightly acidic, carrying the metallic tang of runoff from the upper-tier filtration systems. It beaded on Eliyas's jacket, rolling off the waterproof fabric like liquid mercury. He adjusted the strap of his sling bag, feeling the weight of his scavenged tech inside, each piece a tiny rebellion against the city's endless hunger for upgrades.
Nova Helix didn't sleep. It didn't forget.
But Eliyas did.
And that was why he walked.
He returned home with silence stitched into his skin
The forest had forgotten how to whisper. The breeze died mid-caress against his neck. Even the birds—those relentless morning choristers—had tucked their songs away, leaving the air hollow with absence. Eliyas moved like a man walking through wet paper, each step deliberate, each breath measured. His boots, scuffed raw from the forest's teeth, left shallow graves in the damp earth that filled slowly behind him. The bomber jacket hung heavier tonight, its pockets weighted with things unsaid, its cuffs smelling of woodsmoke and something darker—like rain on hot pavement, like the moment before lightning strikes.
The house waited.
Modest in its decay, it hunched under the hill's sloping shoulder like a child avoiding eye contact. Its stones, slick with evening dew, wept quietly in the fading light. Ivy slithered between the cracks, its leaves trembling when he passed. The front door groaned on hinges that hadn't complained yesterday—a sound too much like recognition.
Inside, the air was thick with the memory of fire.
Everything stood in obedient stillness: the cracked ceramic mug (chip facing east, as always), the wool blanket folded just-so over the chair's spine, the fireplace's blackened maw still holding the ghost of last winter's pine. He shed his jacket with the care of a man undressing a wound. The hook accepted its burden with a faint squeak. His bandaged fingers lingered—ink bleeding through gauze in Rorschach smears—before falling away.
But the silence...
It wasn't empty anymore. It was waiting.
Tea became ritual. Rosemary leaves curled in the steaming water like tiny fists unclenching. He didn't sit. Couldn't. The walls pressed closer with each passing second, their old timber exhaling the scent of beeswax and yellowed pages. His reflection in the window warped as he passed—too tall, too thin, a smudge of a man in a world losing its edges.
The hallway yawned before him, its floorboards creaking in old morse code.
Frames lined the walls like sentinels. Most slept face-down in dust. One watched.
The photograph was a knife between the ribs.
A café. Vines strangling the timber. But the trees in the image stood straighter, younger, their branches clutching at a sky bruised with storm clouds. And at the frame's edge
—a man who wasn't him.
But the slope of those shoulders beneath the coat. The way the head tilted, listening to wind that wouldn't speak. Eliyas's thumb found the figure, callous catching on the photograph's grain. The signature beneath bled through time:
A.M.
The house inhaled sharply.
He felt it in his teeth—that sudden, crystalline awareness of being in a pressing silence. The ceiling beams groaned like old bones. The floorboards sighed under his weight. Even the shadows in the west corridor seemed to lean forward, holding their breath.
He made his way toward the west corridor, a part of the house he rarely entered. At the end of it stood a door.
The door hadn't been there yesterday.
Oak. Brass handle tarnished to the color of dried blood. No dust on the lintel. No scratches on the knob. It stood too perfect, too patient, its very presence humming like a struck tuning fork.
Eliyas's hand hovered.
The house exhaled.
He didn't open it. Not yet.