Aarav Mehta
At 02:17 a.m., my phone rang with the same number that had stopped calling me eight years ago, a ghost of ten digits branded into the inside of my skull, and by the second ring my ribs felt like a locked drawer someone was rummaging through; I swiped, whispered “hello,” and heard only the soft clicking of a line held slightly open, air carrying the distant hum of traffic and a faint three-note whistle that I recognized from a forgotten Kolkata monsoon when an informant named R—had told me you could train a bird to return home but not a city, and then the line dropped, just like it did the night she vanished; I should have let it go, tucked the phone face-down, lain still as if the bed were a boat and I was the night watchman on an empty deck, but I dragged myself out, pulled on jeans, a black hoodie, the old reporter’s tote with my recorder and a notebook already stained with ghost coffee rings, and went out into the corridor that smelled of floor disinfectant and peeling paint, as if the building were trying to scrub its history clean; the city outside breathed in sodium yellows and the occasional blue of a passing siren, and the street dogs were arguing over a territory line drawn in invisible ink, and I walked fast because when the past hooks its finger at you your feet learn the choreography on their own, and every shuttered shop was a closed eyelid keeping secrets, and the metro substation around the corner exhaled a wet metallic heat that fogged my glasses; I headed towards the tramline where the poles wrote music against the sky, because the three-note whistle in the call had lived under those wires once, and because I knew the whistle wasn’t a tune but a code saying meet me where the city forgets its name, by which R—always meant the old printing lane off Bowbazar that still slept in lead and paper; on the way I noticed a taxi idling too long with its headlights off and a driver who kept his eyes on his hands, not the mirror, which is a way of saying I know you’re there without giving you the courtesy of fear, so I turned into a pharmacy’s after-hours hatch, bought a bottle of water so the security camera would write me into the night’s ledger, then doubled back through the colonia of laundry lines, listened to the taxi cough and move, and felt the old nausea that says you’re not being followed, you’re being expected; the lane was darker than my memory had kept it, the print shops locked and the air still scented faintly with ink that wanted to be permanent, and there, at the blind wall with the mangled poster of a missing councillor, someone had chalked a rectangle around a drain cover and drawn an arrow to it, then, in tiny letters, written: 217—open, listen, leave; I crouched, lifted the iron, heard a throat of water saying the city is awake under you, and pressed my recorder down into the hole; the first thing it heard was a train two streets away, the second thing a woman’s breath caught like a paper in a fan, the third a voice I hadn’t let myself name in eight years saying “Nolan, left jacket pocket,” and my name—my old byline—woke every muscle I’d placed in retirement; my left jacket pocket contained a small USB that I did not remember taking from my desk, zipped inside a coin pouch like a good luck charm I’d never believed in, and when I looked up the taxi had turned into the mouth of the lane and the headlights were the categorical yes of a question I hadn’t understood, and a man in a pale raincoat stepped out holding an umbrella even though the sky was dry, and he smiled like he’d been waiting for the first sentence of a story and I had finally said it; “Hello, Mr. Nolan,” he said in a careful accent that warmed each syllable as if he wished to be kind to the words that would hurt me, “we’re late, but not too late,” and from the umbrella’s hooked handle he slid a thin envelope and let it fall into the chalked rectangle’s heart, and in that moment a motorbike screamed past the lane mouth, an arm extended, a muzzle flashed, and the handle of the umbrella shattered into splinters while the man barely blinked, and I lunged without thinking, dragged him into the wedge of shadow near the old tin shutter as two more shots stitched the lane with punctuation marks nobody wanted to read aloud; the bike wailed away, the taxi reversed with a groaning theater of innocence, and the raincoat man, unruffled, checked his watch and said, “You have something that belongs to us and to someone you once loved; the difference is whether you can keep time better than men who do this for a living,” and when I did not answer he added, “02:17 is not an hour, it is an appointment; you missed it then, don’t miss it now,” and I finally asked the only thing that would let me breathe: “Is she alive?” which was the most naïve question an old reporter could frame, but it was also the engine under my ribs; “Alive is a flexible word,” he said, as the envelope bled a faint damp into the chalk and the city did its best impression of silence, “but she is more reachable tonight than she has been in years; if you plug in that drive and if you go where the message says; if you don’t, she will go where messages cannot follow,” and I realized the three-note whistle was not only a code but a map of breaths, and the rectangle was not a rectangle but a window, and that I had already opened it.
Back in my room I locked the door with the stupid ceremonial flourish people perform when they want to believe they control a night that has already made up its mind, shut the windows, killed the lights, slid the USB into the old laptop I kept for memories I didn’t want to admit were evidence, and the drive announced itself as WINDOW_0217 with a folder named FERRYMAN and a single video file stamped with a date from the year she disappeared, which made my throat tighten like a fist, but when I opened it the timestamp jumped to tonight and the screen bloomed with grainy footage of the printing lane from an angle above the shutter we’d crouched beside, as if the city itself had been recording me since before I arrived; the frame jittered, stabilized, then a voice-over—hers—came through soft and close, as if she’d leaned into my ear while the world was busy elsewhere: “Nolan, you were always late in the ways that mattered, but if you’re hearing this you were on time when I needed you; don’t chase the umbrella, don’t negotiate with politeness; follow the whistle to the substation, find the locker numbered 34, and take only the black book; the others are decoys, the key is in the binding; if anyone asks you who sent you, say ‘the city,’ because a city can be blamed without consequences; trust the woman in the red raincoat only if she offers a cigarette and never if she asks for one; drink water; hold your left hand when you’re scared,” and I did, ridiculous as it felt, because the gesture hooked the past to the present like a seam, and the video switched to a map drawn in thick pencil lines, a child’s treasure route through adult streets, with little stars labeling places I used to meet sources and one star I didn’t recognize near the river with the annotation home; I copied the folder to my internal drive, pulled the USB, snapped it in two with a flat deliberate motion that shocked me with its violence, stuffed the halves in separate socks, and left; the corridor had collected a new smell—something floral, faint, artificial, the way rental cars sometimes smell of someone else’s good intentions—and on the landing below mine a shadow eased back into a doorway the moment my foot hit the tile, which is how professionals smile; I took the stairs all the way down, then up one flight to the roof, crossed under a line of tired prayer flags somebody’s grandmother had hung for a nephew’s exam, and stepped to the adjacent building with a stupid little leap that made the night yelp in my chest; from there I dropped to a back lane where motorcycles napped like animals, and kept to the telephone shadows until the substation rose ahead, humming its secreties with the monotone patience of a librarian; I had no key for a locker and none was promised, but R—had taught me that public places have codes if you listen with the right kind of silence, so I traveled the perimeter until I found the staff entrance somebody always props with a paint-scraped brick for smoke breaks, palmed open the tired door, and breathed the metallic tea of hot copper; inside, the corridor wore numbers like a train—34 painted in smaller digits over a row of anonymous gray lockers with vents that exhaled old rain—and when I pressed my ear to 34 I heard nothing because the thing behind the door wasn’t alive, but my hands shook anyway; the key? The video had said the key is in the binding, which sounded like a metaphysical joke until I remembered the print shops and their habit of wrapping a sliver of metal into hardback spines to weight them straight; I checked my tote: I still carried R—’s last notebook, the one that had survived the night she didn’t, its spine frayed into confession, and when I bent it back hard a tiny iron shard surrendered, blade-thin, like a splinter that had been waiting eight years to be asked; it fit the locker with two rude attempts and on the third the cheap cam latch sighed and turned, and inside, exactly as promised, sat three identical black books, the kind with red thread that used to live on managing editors’ desks, and I laughed once without humor because decoys are sentimental people too; the message had said take only the black book, but it didn’t say which, and the only clue in the video was the way her breath had caught between “take only” and “the black book,” a rhythm I’d once learned to read better than headlines; the middle one had a hairline nick in the upper spine like a healed cut; I took it, left the other two to haunt the locker, and as I closed the door a man’s reflection slid through the vent slats—wide forehead, calm eyes, no umbrella now—and a voice behind me said, “Some of us prefer doors,” and when I turned he was there with his raincoat open to reveal the immaculate blankness of a man who carries no wallet, no phone, no life that can be stolen; “You’re efficient when you’re scared,” he observed, “it’s almost admirable; come along, before the men who shoot for a living return with patience,” and when I didn’t move he added, “If you go with me you may still have a city to blame; if you don’t, you will have only yourself,” and I said, “You keep saying ‘we’—who is ‘we’?” and he smiled with his eyes and said, “The department that doesn’t exist to solve a disappearance that didn’t happen,” which is the kind of sentence every reporter wants to hear exactly once; outside, a siren stitched a bright thread through the night cloth and he guided me not to the taxi but to a battered blue minivan whose windows were crowded with government stickers that contradicted one another so thoroughly they formed a truth; inside sat a woman in a red raincoat smoking without apology, and she offered me a cigarette without words, and my ribs unfisted slightly because the rule had been precise; “Good evening, Nolan,” she said, as the van rolled, “we are going to see a ferryman; you have his book,” and I realized I had been drafted into an expedition where every instruction was also a trap and every trap a kind of mercy.
They took me to a neighborhood that had been renovated into forgetfulness, where the old houses wore new paint like witnesses put into program, and the van stopped in front of a clinic whose sign promised sleep to the sleepless with the help of machines and discipline, which is to say with the surrender of sovereignty, and inside the reception smiled its now-smiles and the raincoat woman led me past the fishbowl and down a darkened corridor to a room that smelled of rubbing alcohol and clean fabric, where a man in a white shirt sat beside three tanks full of a methylene blue solution that rippled under a ceiling fan, and he said “I am the ferryman” the way other men say “I am the dentist,” not as a threat but as a bill; “I don’t cross rivers,” he continued, “I help people cross from the person they were to the person they need to be in order to tell the truth without choking on it; leave the book on the tray,” and I set the black ledger down and watched his eyes flick to mine, weigh me, update a model; “You aren’t police,” I said to umbrella man; “you aren’t anything official enough to write it down,” and he inclined his head as if I had finally joined the conversation; “We’re conservationists,” he said, “we keep certain ecosystems intact—those made of lies so large that if you kill them too quickly the smaller lies go feral; eight years ago, someone attempted an extinction event; we’re repairing the habitat,” and the ferryman sliced the book’s endpaper with a scalpel, teased out a wafer of plastic from the binding that looked like an apology, and slid it into a reader that hummed like an electric prayer; a screen woke, showed columns and coordinates, dates and names, shipments and cover companies, all arranged with the perfect ugliness of something true; “This,” the ferryman said softly, “is an index of movements that were never supposed to be movements: people relocated under the ledger of goods, what bureaucracies call ‘non-assets’; eight years ago your informant took this from the men who rent a floor in a ministry without appearing on any lease; she called us when hiding it became harder than breathing; we failed her; we’re trying not to fail again,” and the woman in the red raincoat tapped ash into a kidney dish and said, “He needs to see the annotation layer,” and the ferryman toggled a switch and the ledger’s margins blossomed with tiny red notes in R—’s handwriting, arrows and warnings and jokes only I would understand—“don’t trust him, he uses coasters,” “ask the cousin about the shirts,” “Nolan stop rolling your eyes and look right,” which dragged a laugh out of me that punched tears into my vision; “Where is she now?” I asked, again, the stupid essential question; “Near the river,” the woman said, “but not at it; moving, under a protection that expires at dawn; your presence extends it because the men who shoot for a living want you alive until you tell them how much you know; they do not yet understand that you don’t know enough to be interesting,” and I said, “Then why am I here?” and the ferryman answered, “Because you read her margins like a second script; without you we cannot decrypt the annotations in time; with you we might move people tonight who have been waiting eight years for a door to remember it is a door,” and he handed me a set of headphones and a tablet that showed CCTV of a warehouse near the river with trucks sleeping like guarded cattle and men smoking in threes, and he said, “Listen for the whistle,” and there it was again, three notes, slow, on the edge of the audio like a moth at a window, and my skin prickled because I suddenly understood the whistle wasn’t a person’s habit but a machine’s fault, a tiny harmonic produced by a misaligned fan in a substation—that the code had never been about a tune but about an address, an acoustic pin dropped into the city’s throat; I leaned over the map, dragged my finger along the tramlines, triangulated the substation’s hum against the warehouse camera’s microphone and the river’s breath, and the umbrella man watched me with the faint admiration men reserve for old tools that still work; “Here,” I said, circling a downriver feeder where power lines braided over a decommissioned ferry pier, “she wants us to meet at the oldest place labeled new,” and the raincoat woman stubbed her cigarette and said, “Good; we have sixty minutes before men with borrowed badges arrive to confiscate our failure,” and I said, “You’ll take me to her,” and she nodded once, but the umbrella man shook his head at something behind my shoulder and in the observation glass of the clinic door I saw a black shape bloom where a person should be: a man holding the casual patience of a professional with all night to solve a problem; the first shot took the corner of the monitor, the second shattered the ferryman’s blue tank into a flood that ran like a moving bruise across the tiles, the third buried itself in the door’s hinge, and the umbrella man did something beautiful with his hands and a chair that turned the shooter’s fourth shot into a ceiling ornament; then there were three of us moving, me stupidly brave behind a steel trolley, the woman coldly efficient with a compact weapon she had not been carrying a moment ago, the ferryman holding the ledger like a newborn while glass and water and blue licked his shoes; the corridor became a wind tunnel of alarms, the receptionist pressed her palms to her cheeks as if holding her face on, and we burst into the alley with the night chewing everything into smaller pieces; “You wanted to know who we are,” the umbrella man said as we ran, “we are the ones who keep score when the game refuses to end,” and the raincoat woman laughed once hard enough to sound like anger and said, “Scorekeeping is a luxury; tonight we steal the scoreboard,” and for the first time since 02:17 I believed we might.
The van rolled past the sleeping riverside, headlights brushing walls where posters of vanished political candidates peeled like molting skin, and I counted the rhythm of bridges as if they were heartbeats marking how close we were to the place the whistle wanted us, the old pier that was no longer a pier but a skeleton jutting out into black water that pretended to rest. Inside the van the air was thick with unspoken arguments: the umbrella man silent with his folded hands, the raincoat woman chain-smoking as though her breath alone could keep the city honest, and me, clutching the ferryman’s ledger against my chest like an organ transplant nobody had asked me to deliver but everybody needed.
We stopped two blocks short of the river because the road ahead was already claimed by two SUVs with tinted windows and men whose stillness announced they weren’t watching for strangers—they were waiting for them. “You walk the last stretch,” the raincoat woman said without turning, exhaling smoke that smudged the interior light. “You’re the only one they expect alive.” Umbrella man handed me a small metal clicker, the kind conductors used in trams, and said, “One click if you find her, two if you find only her shadow. Three if you find nothing.” The arithmetic of despair, as if lives could be tallied like tokens.
The pier smelled of rust and old salt. The river carried its cargo of silence and garbage in equal measure. At the warehouse door the whistle sang again, faint and mechanical, three notes, a weary bird too stubborn to stop. I slipped inside, breath catching on the dust.
Rows of crates stretched like pews in a church abandoned mid-sermon. In the gaps between them, mattresses rolled, water bottles stacked, shoes paired but missing feet—evidence of lives paused, evidence of transit that never concluded. And then I saw her.
Not as I remembered, not the woman who vanished into the seam of a city eight years ago, but thinner, her face marked with nights that had not slept, her eyes carrying that dangerous light of someone who has learned to live on borrowed time. She was sitting on a crate, a scarf wrapped over her hair, a black duffel by her feet. When she saw me, the smile came not to her lips but to her shoulders, loosening them as if they’d been clenched for years.
“Nolan,” she whispered, and the sound almost undid me.
I wanted to run, to collapse, to ask questions all at once, but movement froze because a shadow stirred behind her. A man stepped out—calm, suited, holding a tablet that reflected the green light of spreadsheets no human should own. His voice was patient, curious: “So the city sends its ghosts to fetch its mistakes.”
She stood, between us, palms open. “He’s not part of this,” she said.
But he smiled at me. “On the contrary. He is the only part that matters. He is the proof the ledger has a reader.”
I raised the ledger, the black book that had become heavier with each step. “Then you know I won’t give it to you.”
The suited man tilted his head, gentle, as if teaching a child: “You misunderstand. The book was never about possession. It is about testimony. And testimony dies unless repeated. Open it. Read one page aloud. That is all I require.”
Her eyes screamed no though her mouth said nothing.
I opened it anyway, to the first annotated page, and saw numbers disguised as inventory of textiles, but in the margin her hand had written: “Fifty-four souls, route to Assam, disappeared at river checkpoint. Ask who signed off.”
The words burned in my throat. To speak them was to birth them into the room. To keep them was to smother them.
And then the sound arrived—not a whistle this time, but three clicks from the darkness outside, crisp, metallic, from the tram conductor’s device I carried. Only I hadn’t pressed it. Which meant someone else was telling the night we had found nothing.
The suited man’s smile widened just slightly, and he said, “Now we all know the city keeps two ledgers: one written in ink, one in footsteps. Tonight, Mr. Nolan, you must decide which ledger you belong to.”
The warehouse lights flared on—rows of figures revealed, some armed, some not, their faces blank as inventory tags. She reached for my hand with fingers colder than the river outside and whispered, “Don’t read. Whatever you do. If you read it here, they win.”
The book throbbed in my grip, alive with every margin she had written for me. The air felt sharp, as if the night itself waited for my sentence to complete it.
And somewhere deep in the pier, under the humming of the substation fan, the true whistle sang again, long and urgent, a command instead of a code.
The whistle stretched through the rafters like a blade dragged across glass, and everyone in the warehouse froze the way prey does when it hears a sound that rewrites its place on the food chain. The suited man’s smile faltered for the first time, not from fear but from calculation, and he turned his head toward the fan humming above the crates as though it were an uninvited guest. She gripped my wrist tighter, her nails digging crescents into my skin, whispering without sound: wait.
The whistle ended in a cough of static, then a crack: the unmistakable punctuation of a gunshot outside. The lights flickered, half the warehouse plunged into a stuttering blackout, and in that broken rhythm of shadow we moved. She yanked me between two crates, the ledger pressed against my ribs, and hissed, “Don’t stop—whatever happens, don’t stop.”
Boots clattered on concrete. Men shouted codes that meant nothing but sounded official. The suited man barked one word—“Seal”—and suddenly shutters screamed down across the doors, slicing the night into a cage. But cages have rust, and rust has memory. She led me toward a side hatch I would never have noticed, the kind used for moving out bodies nobody wanted seen. She had mapped this place in her bones; I just followed her pulse through her grip.
The hatch jammed halfway. She kicked it once, twice, and it gave, coughing dust. Beyond was the pier itself, naked to the river, the boards slick with algae and history. The whistle sang again, closer now, and this time it wasn’t the fan. It was human, alive, insistent. Three notes, falling, rising, falling. A signal. A summons.
We ran.
Behind us, bullets tore through the hatch like angry punctuation marks. One splinter grazed my shoulder, heat blooming through my hoodie. She didn’t let go, didn’t slow. The pier trembled under our weight, each plank a verdict, and at the end, where the water slapped hungrily at rotted pylons, a boat idled. Small, unmarked, its engine muttering low like a conspirator. A man in a hood sat at the tiller, whistling those three notes with the calm of someone who’d been waiting years for this very measure.
She shoved me forward. “On!”
The boat shifted under our weight as we leapt in. The hooded man killed the whistle, gunned the engine, and the river seized us, pulling us away from the pier just as armed figures burst through the hatch behind. Muzzles flared, white against black. Water spat around us. The suited man’s voice carried, amplified by fury: “The ledger belongs to the state!”
Her laugh answered, bitter and bright. “The state doesn’t even know what state it is in.”
The boat curved into darkness. The city’s skyline bent away, leaving only the river’s patient heave and the echo of sirens already converging on the pier we had left bleeding. My shoulder throbbed, but the ledger pressed steady against me, as though to remind me pain was only rent paid for survival.
The hooded man finally spoke. His accent was local but flattened, as if sanded down by years of anonymity. “You kept the margins?”
I nodded, though I didn’t understand how he knew. He didn’t look at me, only at the current. “Then we still have a chance.”
She sat opposite me, face ghostly in the weak light. I wanted to speak her name aloud for the first time in eight years, to test if it would still fit my mouth, but her eyes stopped me. They said: not yet, not here.
Instead I asked, “Where are we going?”
“To the crossing,” she said.
“What crossing?”
“The one the city forgets every night and remembers every dawn. If we reach it before sunrise, we buy another day.”
The hooded man gave a humorless chuckle. “And if we don’t, the river takes its due.”
The boat nosed into fog thick as cloth. The city lights dissolved, and the only sound was the engine’s mutter and the slap of water. I realized how fragile the ledger felt in my arms: paper, ink, annotations in the hand of a woman who had died in every record except the one sitting in front of me.
I broke the silence. “Why now? Why after eight years?”
Her eyes met mine, heavy with exhaustion but fierce. “Because the network that swallowed those fifty-four souls is about to swallow thousands more. Because the book you carry isn’t history—it’s prophecy. And because someone still believes you can write endings.”
The whistle came again, impossibly close, from the fog itself. Not the hooded man this time. Not the fan. Another voice, echoing ours, mocking or answering. The hooded man stiffened, hands tightening on the tiller. “We’re not alone.”
A shadow slid in the fog, parallel to us. Another boat. Then another. Shapes keeping pace, silent except for the scrape of hulls against unseen debris. Hunters on the same water.
“Hold tight,” the hooded man muttered, twisting the throttle. The boat leapt forward, cutting the fog. Behind, engines growled awake, answering the chase. Bullets snapped, sparking water into brief silver fountains.
She crouched low, shoving me down with her. “Protect the book, Nolan. If you lose me, fine. If you lose this, everyone loses.”
The words struck deeper than the bullet wound. Lose me, fine. As if her life were already collateral. As if survival was a luxury she had long abandoned.
The river turned, and with it our boat. Ahead loomed the shadow of an old ferry dock, broken timbers clawing the mist. The hooded man steered hard, teeth gritted, aiming not for the dock itself but for a slit of black water beyond.
“The crossing,” she whispered. “It’s still there.”
Engines roared behind us, closing in. Bullets whined. The fog thinned, revealing the skeletal arch of the dock. And in that moment, with the ledger against my chest and her hand against my arm, I realized the city had not sent me to rescue her. It had sent me to choose which ledger to keep alive: the one of paper, or the one of flesh.
The whistle shrieked one last time, splitting the night, and the hooded man shouted: “Now!”
The boat plunged into darkness.
Darkness swallowed us whole, the kind of black that isn’t just the absence of light but the presence of something older, thicker, like tar in the lungs. The boat’s engine roared once, then coughed as though choked by the water itself, and the hooded man cut it without hesitation. Silence slammed down. Only the river’s slow pulse remained, and even that sounded muffled, as if we had slipped under a lid.
“This is it,” he whispered, voice stripped bare. “The crossing.”
My eyes strained but found nothing—no horizon, no fog, no pursuit. The bullets, the engines behind us, gone as though erased. The ledger’s weight seemed amplified, every page pressing into my chest like a verdict. She sat curled opposite me, face half-lit by the dying glow of the dashboard, her breath trembling but steady.
“What is this place?” I asked, keeping my voice low though I didn’t know why.
She answered without looking at me. “A place the city denies. Every map pretends it isn’t here. Every morning the river closes its mouth and swallows the evidence. But at night—”
“At night it lets you pass,” the hooded man finished.
The water under us felt different now, thicker, as though the boat dragged across memory instead of current. The air was heavy with iron and wet paper, like a printing press left to rot. I realized this was what she meant: a crossing not of water but of stories. Those who vanished, those fifty-four souls, had crossed here too.
A ripple broke the silence. Then another. Shapes rising around us, not boats this time but fragments—chairs, bags, shoes—that floated with eerie precision, forming lines like an honor guard. Every item was worn, waterlogged, claimed. Lives once attached now detached, drifting in orderly formation.
I gripped the ledger tighter. “We’re not supposed to see this.”
“That’s the point,” she said. Her voice cracked but didn’t break. “We’re seeing what nobody else will believe.”
The hooded man leaned on the tiller, guiding us through the procession. His face was unreadable under the hood, but his knuckles whitened. “Keep your hands in the boat. They don’t like being touched.”
“They?” I asked, though the answer was already in my skin.
The water shifted again, and between the drifting objects heads appeared, slick hair plastered, eyes open but unblinking. Faces, pale and smoothed by time, bobbing silently beside us. Not corpses—corpses don’t stare. These were echoes, the unfinished journeys of those taken. They moved with the boat, escorting us.
The ledger burned in my grip, heat rising from paper. The annotations—her hand—were alive. I could feel the indent of her pen strokes vibrating, like messages tapped from inside. I flipped it open without thinking. Pages glowed faintly, margins red as coals. Words rearranged themselves: You are carrying more than records. You are carrying witnesses.
She leaned forward, eyes wide. “Do you see it too?”
I nodded, throat dry.
The hooded man hissed. “Close it. Don’t show them.”
But it was too late. The faces in the water leaned closer, lips parting, mouths filling with the hum of that whistle, the three-note code that was no longer a code but a demand. Over and over, from every throat: three notes, mournful, endless. The boat shuddered as though their voices were current itself.
“They want you to read,” she whispered.
The suited man’s demand returned in my memory—read one page aloud—but this time it wasn’t him asking. It was them. The ledger, the river, the vanished.
I cleared my throat, fear anchoring each syllable. “Fifty-four souls, route to Assam, disappeared at river checkpoint. Ask who signed off.”
The voices answered in unison, a moan that bent the air. The water surged forward, pushing the boat like a hand. Pages fluttered. Another annotation rose, glowing: Block H, midnight transfer, thirty children, no return recorded.
I read it. The river roared. The objects in the water clattered, shoes knocking, chairs scraping, forming a path ahead.
The hooded man shouted, “Enough! You’ll drown us!” He lunged, snatching the ledger from my hands, but she was faster. She seized it, clutching it to her chest, face blazing with fury.
“They have waited years for someone to listen,” she snapped. “If he stops now, they’ll never let us out.”
The water bucked. The boat tilted. Figures in the river surged closer, arms rising, pale fingers reaching as if to tip us over unless we obeyed.
I grabbed the ledger back, heart hammering, and read another line: Warehouse 9, false manifests, listed as grain but contained breath.
The chorus of whistles turned into a scream, but the boat lurched forward, slicing through the darkness. A light flickered ahead—faint, golden, impossible. The end of the crossing.
Behind us, the whistle-voices began to fade, sinking back into black water, satisfied or spent. The objects scattered, breaking their formation, as if dissolving back into anonymity. Only one face remained close, eyes locked on mine: a boy’s, maybe twelve, lips moving silently. A single word formed. Home. Then he too slipped under.
The boat burst through the veil of black. Fog peeled away. The city’s skyline returned, fractured and distant, dawn smudging the horizon in gray. We had crossed.
The hooded man sagged, muttering curses. “You shouldn’t have read. You’ve woken them.”
She held my arm, trembling, her nails no longer claws but anchors. “No. He gave them back their voices. That’s why we’re alive.”
The boat coasted toward an abandoned jetty where weeds cracked the stone. The engine coughed back to life, guiding us in. My shoulder screamed from the bullet graze, but I barely noticed. All I could feel was the ledger, heavy now not with paper but with lives that demanded reckoning.
As we tied up, the hooded man finally pulled his hood down. His face was ordinary, too ordinary—like a placeholder face a computer would generate when asked for “citizen.” Forgettable, designed to vanish in crowds. But his eyes were sharp with anger.
“You’ve doomed us,” he said flatly. “Every ledger reader ends the same way: drowned, erased, made example of. That’s why we ferry, not testify. Survival is balance. You broke it.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but she cut in, voice low, fierce: “Balance was broken the night they used ledgers to erase people instead of count them. Nolan isn’t doomed. He’s chosen.”
“Chosen for what?” I asked, almost begging.
She looked at me, her face softer than it had been all night. “To finish what I couldn’t eight years ago.”
The city on the horizon stirred with sirens again, flashing lights crawling toward the river. The chase wasn’t over. If anything, it had only reset on the other side.
I closed the ledger, held it tight, and for the first time in years, felt the terrifying clarity of purpose.
We weren’t running anymore. We were carrying.
The jetty crumbled under our boots as if offended by our survival, stones giving way to weeds that curled like fingers trying to drag us back. The hooded man tied the boat with a practiced knot, then shouldered past without looking at either of us, muttering that his part was done, ferry complete. He vanished into the ruins of a riverside mill, and in a few steps he was gone, absorbed like a swallowed pill.
We stood alone, she and I, the ledger between us like a third presence breathing heavier than either of us. The city hummed on the horizon, alive with sirens and morning traffic, the oblivious churn of people who would never know the crossing or the faces in the water. My bullet wound throbbed like an impatient drummer.
She brushed my sleeve and whispered, “We can’t stay here.”
So we moved, slipping into alleys still drunk on night. The air smelled of fish scales and burnt oil, a reminder that the city doesn’t care what stories hide in its bloodstream. Every wall had ears—painted gods, election posters, windows cracked open to gossip. And somewhere out there, the suited man’s hunters were already recalibrating.
We ducked into a tea stall just opening its shutters, the owner too sleepy to notice us. She ordered two cutting chais in a voice so ordinary it hurt to hear. We sat in the corner, steam rising between us. For a moment we could have been anyone—two strays warming themselves on borrowed heat.
Then she pulled the ledger onto the chipped table.
“We can’t keep carrying this like luggage,” she said. “It’s not just record. It’s teeth. And if we don’t use it to bite, it’ll eat us instead.”
I flipped through the pages. Names. Codes. Margins alive with her handwriting. Some margins had grown darker since the crossing, as if ink itself had deepened. One entry glowed faintly even in daylight: Transfer 7B, central godown, unlisted arrival. Confirm handler: V.R.
“Who’s V.R.?” I asked.
Her jaw tightened. “Vikram Rao. Undersecretary. The man who gave me this book. He thought I’d bury it. He didn’t think I’d survive long enough to pass it on.”
“You trust him?”
She laughed, bitter. “I trusted his ambition. That’s different.”
The stall-owner banged down our glasses, chai sloshing over the rims. At that exact second, a scooter coughed to life outside, too close, too sharp. Her eyes snapped to the doorway. A man in plain clothes leaned on the scooter, not drinking tea, not waiting for anyone—just watching the stall’s reflection in the glass of a parked car.
We didn’t speak. We moved. Out the back door, through a courtyard where laundry flapped like startled birds. The ledger thumped in my bag with every step, heavier, louder, until I thought it might call the hunters itself.
Three turns later we slowed, breathless. She pressed me into the wall, her face inches from mine, whispering through clenched teeth: “They’ll never stop now. The crossing marked you. You read aloud. They know you carry the witnesses.”
I wanted to deny it, to say I was just a man caught in someone else’s unfinished war. But the ledger pulsed like a second heart. And deep inside I knew she was right.
We ducked into an abandoned cinema, its posters sun-bleached into ghost colors. Inside, dust thickened the air. The screen sagged like tired skin. Rows of broken seats faced nothing. It was the perfect grave for secrets.
She sat on the stage, legs dangling, ledger open on her lap. “We need to decide what to do with this. Leak it? Trade it? Burn it?”
“Burn it?” I asked, startled.
Her eyes met mine, raw with exhaustion. “Sometimes burning is the only way to make sure it can’t be twisted. You think exposure brings justice? It brings scavengers. Politicians will spin it. Corporations will buy silence. The ledger becomes currency instead of truth. That’s worse.”
I stared at her. Eight years gone, living under shadows, and this was what survival had taught her: not hope, but suspicion.
“No,” I said, surprising myself with the conviction in my voice. “We don’t burn voices. We don’t silence witnesses twice.”
Silence stretched between us. Then, softly, she said, “You still believe endings can be clean.”
“Not clean,” I answered. “But louder than erasure.”
Before she could reply, the cinema doors groaned. Footsteps echoed, careful, rehearsed. Not a gang. Professionals. The suited man’s patience had worn thin.
I dragged her behind the stage. Shadows moved across the dust-glow. I counted three, maybe four. They weren’t rushing. They knew we were here. One of them whistled, three notes, cruel mimicry.
She squeezed my hand once—hard, final. Then she whispered, “If they catch me, you run. You carry it. Promise me.”
I wanted to argue. But the footsteps came closer, and promises are sometimes faster than explanations. I nodded.
The first hunter stepped into view, silhouette sharp against the sagging screen. He carried not a gun but a knife, gleaming like punctuation. Another shadow flanked him. Two more followed. They spread out, herding us with the precision of butchers.
And then the ledger opened by itself. Pages fluttered, stopping on a margin I hadn’t seen before. Words scrawled in her handwriting, though she hadn’t touched a pen: Row 5, seat 12, lift cushion.
She gasped when she saw it. “That wasn’t there before.”
No time to think. We scrambled into the seats, counting rows. Bullets cracked overhead, plaster raining down. Row 5. Seat 12. I ripped the cushion free. Beneath, taped to the rusted frame, was a small black pouch. Inside: a revolver, six rounds loaded, oiled, waiting.
“Eight years,” she whispered, stunned. “I left this for myself.”
Another bullet sparked off metal. I grabbed the gun, heavy and alive. I had never wanted to fire a weapon in my life. But the ledger had chosen otherwise.
The hunters closed in. Their shadows lengthened across the broken seats. The suited man’s voice floated through the dust, calm and cutting: “Mr. Nolan. Read us another page.”
I raised the revolver instead. The ledger in my other hand burned like scripture.
And in that ruin of a cinema, where stories once flickered but never lived, I realized I was holding two endings: one in paper, one in steel.
The choice was no longer if I would read. The choice was how many would live long enough to hear it.
Dust swirled like smoke across the torn screen, the air thick with silence that could break into thunder at any second. I had the revolver in one hand, the ledger in the other, absurd and holy, as if fate couldn’t decide whether it wanted me to be a priest or an executioner. The hunters advanced down the aisles with the patience of surgeons, their boots clicking in rhythm, guns low but certain.
The suited man’s silhouette lingered by the door, backlit by daylight slicing into the rotten cinema. He didn’t move like the others. He didn’t need to. His voice carried: “You read for the river. Now read for me. Or everyone here dies with no record.”
She crouched behind the seats beside me, her breath hot against my ear. “Don’t waste the bullets. They want a show. Give them a blackout instead.”
The ledger pulsed like a living thing, its pages fluttering without wind. Margins glowed faintly, words shifting into new instructions: Projection booth. Switch.
I pointed the revolver—not at them, but at the booth above. One shot. The old bulb inside shattered, sparks rained, and the screen caught fire where celluloid ghosts still clung. Flames licked up, blinding light filling the theater. Hunters cursed, shadows flailing.
We moved. She dragged me toward the side steps leading up behind the stage. Bullets cracked, seats splintered, but the fire had turned the hunters into blind men. The ledger glowed brighter, guiding. Door above, right corner.
We burst through it into the projection booth. Dust and reels, cobwebs thick as rope. She slammed the door, bolted it with a rusted bar. My shoulder throbbed like it was chewing itself alive, but adrenaline drowned the pain.
Below, the cinema roared with fire and gunfire tangled together. The suited man’s voice, still calm, floated up: “You cannot burn a ledger, Mr. Nolan. Fire is part of its design. It will not kill what is already witness.”
She leaned against the wall, sweat streaking her face. “He’s right. Burning doesn’t erase. It transforms.”
The revolver felt heavier, hotter. I checked—five rounds left. Enough to start a war, not enough to win one.
The ledger flipped again. New words scratched into the margin even as I watched: Roof exit. Jump two roofs south. Trust the red door.
I showed her. She didn’t even blink. “It’s writing us forward.”
“Or writing us into a trap,” I muttered.
“Same thing,” she said, and kicked the booth’s back window open.
We climbed out onto the roof. Heat from the fire below licked at our legs. Smoke curled into morning sky. The city stretched out indifferent, traffic moving, horns blaring, people living their unremarkable lives while we sprinted across cracked tar and rusted water tanks with death at our heels.
Two roofs down, just as the ledger promised, a door painted red sat incongruously on the third floor of a crumbling building. She shoved it open.
Inside was not a room but a stairwell leading into darkness. Stale air, faint hum of electricity. We slammed it shut behind us.
“What is this place?” I asked, panting.
She ran her hand along the wall until her fingers found a switch. Fluorescent lights flickered on, buzzing, revealing concrete steps descending into a bunker. The smell of damp archives, old ink, mildew.
The ledger vibrated in my grip, almost eager.
We went down. The stairwell ended in a corridor lined with metal cabinets, doors chained shut. On one door someone had painted in red letters: RECORDS DO NOT DIE.
Her face hardened. “I’ve been here before.”
The ledger flipped open by itself. A page glowed: Cabinet 7. Open. Insert ledger.
We found Cabinet 7. Chains rusted, padlock snapped under her boot. Inside: rows of ledgers identical to ours, hundreds stacked like bricks, spines black, bindings red-threaded. Some looked ancient, some fresh. Each hummed faintly, like bees asleep in winter.
“This is where they keep them,” she whispered. “Every disappearance, every silence. Not erased—filed.”
The instruction pulsed again: Insert ledger.
I hesitated. “If we put it back, doesn’t it vanish into the archive? Become another dead record?”
She shook her head. “Not if you’ve read it aloud. The river marked you. Your voice keeps it alive. This is how we copy it into the city’s bloodstream.”
I slid the ledger into the cabinet. The hum deepened, resonating through the floor. The other books stirred, pages fluttering though no wind blew. Lights overhead flickered.
And then the suited man’s voice echoed down the stairwell, closer now: “You’ve fed it. Good. Now it belongs to us all. Step away and I’ll let you keep your breath.”
Boots clanged above. The hunters had followed.
She gripped my arm. “We’re cornered.”
The cabinet rattled. Pages burst open, flapping like wings. A gale whipped down the corridor though no door was open. The ledgers were alive, hundreds of voices rustling together. The annotations glowed red, bleeding across margins, forming sentences that weren’t hers, weren’t mine, but belonged to everyone lost.
We are not erased. We are record. Carry us.
The sound built into a roar, paper like thunder. The hunters spilled into the corridor, weapons raised, but the gale caught them, slamming them into walls, tearing coats, ripping masks. Bullets fired but bent midair, flattened against invisible pages.
The suited man walked calmly into the storm, coat snapping around him, eyes shining with triumph. “Yes,” he said, arms outstretched. “Finally awake. The archive breathes again.”
The paper gale circled him, didn’t strike. The ledgers seemed to recognize him.
She shouted over the storm, “He’s part of it—he was always part of it!”
I lifted the revolver, hand shaking. Four bullets left. Against him? Against the storm? Pointless.
But the ledger we’d carried pulsed brighter than the rest, red spilling across its cover, words scrawling: Voice required. Read.
I opened my mouth, throat raw, and shouted the first line my eyes found: Fifty-four souls, river checkpoint, erased in silence.
The gale screamed. The cabinets shook. The ledgers roared. The suited man staggered, smile breaking, hands clawing at the air as if trying to grab the words and shove them back into silence.
She grabbed the book, flipped to another page, shouted: Thirty children, midnight transfer, no return.
The hunters collapsed, hands over ears, faces twisted as though hearing the dead speak in their skulls.
The suited man fell to his knees. “Stop! You don’t know what you’re unleashing!”
But she did not stop. And neither did I. Page after page, we read, voices carrying, louder than the bullets, louder than the fire, louder than the city’s indifference.
The archive became a storm. The records did not die.
And for the first time since 02:17, I felt the city listening.
The storm wasn’t wind and rain, not fire or flood, but paper—pages ripping themselves from centuries of silence, margins glowing red like arteries finally unclogged. The sound was unbearable, a thousand pens scratching at once, every voice that had been erased demanding not only to be heard but to be carved into stone. The cabinets shook like beasts in cages. The corridor breathed with fury.
She stood beside me, hair whipping across her face, eyes wild, shouting into the storm, her voice braided with mine, both of us reading from the ledger at random: “Block H transfer, missing names.” “Twenty-seven women, listed as freight.” “Caravan rerouted, no return manifest.”
Every word pulled something from the air, shapes forming in the paper gale. Figures—not whole bodies, but impressions—faces half-drawn, hands outstretched, shadows of the missing. They flickered, overlapping, as if memory itself had been waiting for the breath of witness to coalesce.
The hunters dropped their guns, staggered back, clutching their heads. One screamed, “Make it stop!” before being swallowed into the paper flood, torn away like a note shredded mid-song.
But the suited man didn’t run. He staggered forward, hands bleeding from paper cuts, eyes alight with something between terror and ecstasy. “Yes!” he shouted over the roar. “Finally! This is the city’s second heartbeat! You’ve given it back!”
The ledger writhed in my hands, almost too hot to hold, pages turning on their own, demanding more voice, more testimony. My throat burned, but I kept reading, each word tearing loose from my mouth like a confession. She joined me, her voice stronger, steadier, until the two of us sounded like a choir against the storm.
And then the storm broke the walls.
The bunker ceiling cracked, concrete raining dust. The gale burst upward, ripping through the red door, spilling into the city like smoke that knew its way home. Pages fluttered into streets, alleys, markets. Margins glowing, red ink screaming. Pedestrians stopped, snatched at the papers, eyes widening as words burned themselves into memory. Taxi drivers. Shopkeepers. Children on their way to school. All of them reading margins that refused to be silenced.
From the bunker doorway, we saw the effect ripple outward: strangers staring at scraps of testimony, whispers colliding, voices multiplying. The city had been infected.
The suited man laughed, wild and broken. “It cannot be stopped now. Do you see? Every reader becomes a witness. Every witness becomes a ledger.”
But then his laugh cracked, and he staggered, clutching his chest. Blood seeped between his fingers, not from a wound we gave him, but from within, as if the storm itself punished him for being archivist and eraser both. He collapsed onto the floor, eyes locked on me. “Remember this, Nolan. Records don’t save lives. They end them.” And then his breath guttered out like a candle.
The paper storm quieted inside the bunker, but outside the city roared. We stumbled into daylight.
And there it was—pages everywhere. Stuck to lamp posts, tangled in tree branches, plastered against cars. People tearing them down, shouting names, demanding answers. Police sirens wailed but not toward us—they swerved toward the growing crowds where paper testified in hands that wouldn’t let go.
She gripped my wrist, eyes fierce. “We did it. The city’s awake.”
But I wasn’t sure. Awake wasn’t the same as alive. Awake could mean panic, violence, chaos. Already I heard shouts mixing with sirens, the beginnings of a riot.
We slipped into the side streets, trying to vanish before someone made us symbols instead of survivors. My wound burned with every step, but adrenaline still carried me. We found an abandoned apartment block, climbed six flights, collapsed on the dusty floor of a room with no door. From there, we watched the city writhe under its new inheritance.
She sat with her back against the wall, ledger across her knees. “This is only the beginning. The archive was never about one book. Every crossing, every ledger connects. We woke them all.”
I wiped sweat from my eyes. “So what happens now?”
Her laugh was hollow. “Now the city has to choose whether it wants to be haunted or to change.”
The streets below boiled with movement. Crowds carried pages like torches, chanting names I didn’t know, names the city had buried. Police lines cracked, barricades broke, tear gas failed because you can’t blind the already-sighted. The air was alive with words.
And then I saw them—faces in the crowd, the same faces I’d glimpsed in the crossing. The boy with the silent mouth. The women listed as freight. Their shadows threaded through the living, indistinguishable unless you knew to look. The city was carrying its dead alongside its breathing.
I whispered, “We unleashed something we can’t control.”
She leaned her head against the wall, eyes closed. “Good. Control is what killed them in the first place.”
Night bled into day and back into night again. We didn’t move. The city rioted, grieved, remembered. News anchors stuttered live on screen, papers flapping behind them. Politicians issued statements but couldn’t drown out the chorus of names.
On the second dawn, we left the apartment. The streets were littered with burned cars, broken glass, torn banners—but also with people reading aloud from scraps, holding vigils, refusing silence. The ledger still pulsed faintly, quieter now, as though its burden had been shared.
We reached a crossing of two wide streets. At the center, a crowd had gathered around a single page nailed to a lamppost. The boy’s face stared from it, drawn in ink that wasn’t ours. Below, one word glowed red: Home.
Her breath caught. She squeezed my hand. “They’re writing back.”
And in that moment, I realized the ledger was no longer ours. It belonged to the city now. To everyone. Which meant it could never be stopped.
But it also meant we had painted targets on our backs larger than ever.
I turned to her. “Where do we go from here?”
She smiled faintly, almost sadly. “Forward. Always forward. Until the next ledger finds us.”
Sirens wailed again. This time they weren’t chasing the crowd. They were hunting us.
She looked me in the eye. “We run again, Nolan. But this time, not away. This time, into the fire.”
And with the city howling behind us, and the ledger’s teeth sunk deep into history, we ran.
We ran through streets that had stopped pretending to be streets, more like veins spilling blood and smoke, the city convulsing under the weight of all the names it had buried. Sirens wailed without direction. Fires climbed walls like desperate hands. Crowds surged, chanting lists that grew longer by the minute. And everywhere, pages—fluttering, glowing, breathing—refused to be ignored.
She held my hand tighter than she had the night she vanished eight years ago, as if the river itself still tugged at her ankles, and I realized this was not escape anymore; this was pilgrimage.
A barricade ahead, police in riot gear forming a line, shields locked, batons raised. Behind them, armored vans with loudspeakers blaring: “Return to your homes. This is misinformation. Do not spread unverified documents.” The absurdity rang louder than the sirens—documents written by the vanished were more real than any press release.
The crowd surged against the barricade. Tear gas hissed. Rocks flew. A man climbed onto a van, waving a page like a flag. The line broke.
She tugged me sideways, into a side street, away from the crush. “We can’t get trapped. They’ll want us alive now, not dead. Alive means leverage.”
We ducked into a half-collapsed warehouse. Inside, shadows shifted—figures already there. Not hunters this time. Civilians, maybe twenty, men and women clutching ledgers like ours, some old, some new, bindings frayed, covers cracked. They turned as one when we entered, eyes fever-bright.
An old woman stepped forward, her hair white as paper. She touched our ledger with reverence. “The storm reached us. We knew another would come.”
“They?” I asked, breathless.
She nodded. “Every crossing has keepers. We’ve been waiting for voices strong enough to survive the reading. Now the archive breathes aboveground.”
The others murmured, lifting their ledgers like prayer books. The sound was unsettling—hope mixed with fanatic hunger.
She whispered to me, “This is bigger than we imagined. It’s not just us. It never was.”
The old woman looked directly at me. “The ledger chose you. That means you speak at the fire.”
“What fire?”
Her hand trembled as she pointed toward the city center. “The square. They’re gathering there already. A pyre built from the state’s own lies. You’ll carry the true record into the flames.”
I thought of her earlier words—sometimes burning is the only way—and shivered. But the ledger pulsed, agreeing.
We followed them out, merging with streams of people moving toward the square. The closer we got, the hotter the air, not from fire alone but from anger thick as fuel. At the center of the square rose a towering stack of files, folders, shredded papers—the government’s attempt to erase itself. Flames already licked the edges, fed by the crowd.
Police tried to hold the perimeter but were swallowed. Loudspeakers crackled then died. The crowd carried us forward, chanting names, shouting margins, each page read aloud amplifying the storm.
At the foot of the pyre, she turned to me. “This is it. Either we throw the ledger into their fire, or we hold it and let the fire consume us.”
I looked at her, at the crowd, at the faces of the vanished threaded among them like faint smoke. “If we burn it, do we kill it?”
She shook her head. “If we burn it now, it multiplies. Fire carries words further than ink. The archive wants release, not burial.”
The old woman from the warehouse pressed her hand into mine, steadying the revolver still there, forgotten until now. “If the hunters come, use this. But remember—your voice is sharper than any bullet.”
The crowd parted suddenly, a murmur rippling. The suited man—alive? No, impossible. But there he was, staggering into the square, bloodied yet upright, coat torn, eyes glowing with fanatic fire. He raised his arms, shouting, “Do you fools think records free you? Records chain you! Without silence, you are nothing but noise!”
Hunters spilled behind him, weapons raised. The crowd screamed, scattered, but not far. They weren’t afraid anymore. They wanted to see what would happen.
He pointed at me. “Nolan! You opened it! You gave them voices! Only you can end it!”
I lifted the ledger high. It burned in my hands, edges glowing like coals, pages alive with red fire script. My throat tore as I shouted over the square: “Fifty-four souls at the river. Thirty children at midnight. Women freighted as cargo. These are the names you buried—these are the names that burn you now!”
The pyre roared, flames leaping, swallowing the tower of false files. I hurled the ledger into the blaze.
It did not vanish. It exploded.
Pages burst upward, scattering into the sky, flaming yet unburned. They drifted over the city like fiery birds, landing on rooftops, in hands, on windshields, in gutters. Every page still legible, margins still red. The city itself became archive.
The suited man screamed, clutching his head, staggering into the flames as if trying to seize the ledger back. Fire wrapped him. His voice turned into a whistle, three notes high and broken, then silenced.
The hunters dropped their weapons, fled, or collapsed as the crowd surged. The square became a cathedral of fire and testimony.
Beside me, she wept, not from fear but from release. “It’s done,” she whispered.
But I shook my head. “No. It’s only begun.”
Because I could feel it—every page carried not just witness but instruction, maps to other crossings, other archives, other ledgers waiting. The storm hadn’t ended; it had scattered seeds.
She leaned into me, exhausted, her body trembling. “Then we go forward. Always forward.”
The fire painted her face in gold and red. The city howled, alive with its dead and its living, carrying them together into morning.
And I, Nolan—once a reporter, once a ghost—stood at the center, knowing I would never be only myself again. I was ledger. I was record. I was voice.
The city had no more silence.
And it would never sleep again.
End
