The clinic was quiet by day, all white halls and disinfectant, but at night it felt wrong. The walls seemed to breathe.Siya had insisted on accompanying Asanda to the recovery facility after the military released them. It was private, hidden from the press, a place where silence was supposed to mean safety, but Siya didn’t believe in safety anymore. She walked the halls at night like a guard dog, half waiting for the hum to return.On the third night, just when you would think it had all passed, the hum began. Siya woke to the clock glowing on her bedside table: 2:17 AM. At first she thought it was the plumbing, or the old air ducts,a low vibration, but it grew. It wasn’t pipes. It wasn’t machines. The walls were humming.She swung her legs off the bed, bare feet on cold tile. The hum ran through her bones like a second pulse. She pressed her hand to the wall and it thrummed back at her. The sound wasn’t random, it carried a pitch, almost a note. Faint but precise.She checked on As

The blackout lasted less than two minutes, but it felt like an hour. When the lights flickered back, Siya’s heart was still hammering. Marks stood at the window, staring at the night outside. The city was glowing in patches, some streets dark, others alive with fractured power.“Not just here,” he said. His voice was tight and urgent. “I got alerts from five continents. Same time, same hum. 2:17.”Siya clutched her phone. The screen was littered with notifications, messages, panicked headlines: Hospitals evacuated. Mass hysteria. Patients chanting. Power outages.She whispered, “It’s global now. It’s a net closing around us.”Asanda stirred in bed, her face pale. “No,” she said weakly. “Not closing. Opening.”Siya froze. “What do you mean?”Her sister’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “The voices are pulling strings. Threads across the world. I can feel them tighten.”Marks looked back at Siya. “She’s describing a network.”They didn’t sleep. The hum had passed for the night, but thei

The clinic smelled of bleach and old flowers. Siya sat by her sister’s bed, waiting for Asanda to wake. The city outside still carried the strange silence that had replaced the nightly hum. It wasn’t relief, it was dread. A silence that felt too heavy, as if Cape Town itself was listening.Asanda stirred, her lips parting. Her eyes opened slowly, pupils wide, as if she had returned from someplace deep.“You’re not the only one,” she whispered.Siya leaned forward. “What do you mean?”Asanda’s voice was thin but sharp. “Others like me. Singers. Resonance doesn’t just belong to me. It belongs to many. Some found it by accident. Some were chosen. Some…” She trailed off, her eyes glassing, "never came back.”Siya felt her throat tighten. “Where are they?”Asanda turned her head toward the wall, where faint spirals had once appeared. “Scattered. Hidden. The world called them mad. Locked them in cells. Hospitals, prisons, asylums, but they weren’t mad. They were tuned.”Marks stood in the c

The world hadn’t been silent since the broadcast.Even after the tower was dismantled, after the transmitters were seized and the government called it a “terrorist interference event,” something had changed in the city’s air. The sound had gone underground, inside wiring, inside pipes, inside people.Siya felt it first in her teeth. A faint vibration that never quite stopped. She told herself it was stress, the adrenaline crash from everything that had happened, but when she pressed her hand to her throat, she could feel her pulse matching an inaudible, low yet steady rhythm, that was not her own.At the clinic, Asanda was still weak but stable. The staff were keeping her sedated now; she hummed even in her sleep. Dr. Sophie van der Merwe had moved into one of the unused consultation rooms, turning it into an impromptu lab. She worked through nights, analyzing waveforms from the pirate signal, from Asanda’s old recordings, from whatever scraps of resonance data Siya and Marks could sa

The classified archive was buried six levels beneath the Defence Intelligence complex in Pretoria, off-limits, sealed since the late 1990s.Marks had pulled strings he shouldn’t have, and Siya could see it in his face, the nervous flick of his cigarette lighter, the shadows under his eyes.“You realize,” he said quietly as they passed through the final checkpoint, “if we’re caught in here, we’re not walking out.”Siya adjusted the earpiece feeding her Asanda’s heart monitor in real time from the Cape Town clinic. “If what’s in there connects Groote Schuur, Threnody, and this Choir, then it’s worth it.”The elevator shuddered, descending into red-lit gloom. The hum of the motors throbbed faintly in Siya’s bones. She’d started feeling vibrations now, even in silence, like her body was tuning itself to some invisible signal.When the doors opened, a single line of text glowed above the entryway: PROJECT CANTOR – CLASSIFIED CLEARANCE: OMEGAThey passed through the corridor. The walls were