WolfsZone

Chapter 1: Pt 1.

The city blinks, and the dark does not blink back. In the four heartbeats after the first light dies, the air tastes like pennies and hot dust. Something hums, low and patient, as if it has been waiting for this breathless silence all its life.

The city is a bowl of glass set on the lip of night. Streets run like veins. Wires loop like sinews. People sleep, talk, argue, kiss, and do not look up. They trust the light. They trust the steady whine of machines, the click of fridges, the green dots on chargers, the white bars on phones. They trust the hospital to glow, the courthouse to glare, the subway to breathe on time. They trust the grid. It has never failed them all at once.

And then, at 9:17 p.m., the first block goes dark.

Mara Kline smells old coffee in paper cups and the bleach bite of scrubbed floors. Jace Rourke hears power in the bones of his truck, even when it is quiet. Bishop Harlan sits in a low-rent room and watches a candle make a black pool on the table, wax sliding like a slow white tongue. They do not know each other yet. They will. They do not know the circle is already closed around them. It is.

Outside, far above, clouds drift like heavy wool. Every window is a small star. Every star is about to be eaten.

—hush now hush now hush—

Mara: The Hour the Machines Forgot How to Breathe

The ER is a mouth that never closes. It takes in noise and spits out orders. The doors slide and sigh. The monitor alarms chirp like little birds in a green-lit forest. Mara moves through it all with her hands ready and her feet knowing where to go, even when her head is too tired to think. She has a coffee cooling by the charting station. The cup has her name on the side in a looping hand and a little heart. She has not touched it. She keeps forgetting it is there.

The first flicker is a wink. Lights dim, shiver, and pop back. Everyone looks up. Everyone looks back down again. A resident makes a joke about the budget. A patient coughs red into a tissue and turns away from his wife. The elevator dings. The triage printer chatters. The hum of air vents stays smooth and warm.

Then the lights go out.

It is not one bulb or one row. It is the ceiling and the walls and the machine faces and the little green birds on the monitors. All birds fall at once. It is not a blink. It is a drop. The sound of it is not silence but the gasp before a scream. Someone does scream. Another voice shouts, “Backup!” as if yelling will bring it faster.

The emergency lights crackle in, dingy and orange, like ash-stained halos fixed to the ceiling. The vents do not return right away. The air presses close. You can smell people now. Sweat and fear and wool jackets that were fine outside but wrong in here. You can smell the metal of wire. You can smell the stale bite of disinfectant turning sweet, like sugar burned in a pan.

“Ok,” Mara says to the nearest nurse. “Ok. Bag him.” Her voice is steady. Her hands are already on the Ambu bag. The boy on the bed is twelve. He has hair stuck to his forehead and a mouth that keeps trying to open wider than it should, like a fish. The ventilator is a dead face with a dark screen. She squeezes. The bag is smooth and cool in her fingers. His chest rises under her palm. It falls again.

“Where is the generator?” someone asks. The lights burn their tired orange. They do not get brighter. “Where is it?” the same voice asks. The question is foolish. The generator is downstairs where it always is. It should already be taking the load. It is not. The hospital is supposed to float on its own light when the street goes black. It is supposed to be a small, stubborn sun. It is not floating. It is sinking.

A stretcher bangs into a door. A doctor swears. In Room Six, a woman whose heart has been staggering finds a valley and stays in it. “Charge,” someone says out of habit, and then no one says anything because there is no charge.

The hum starts.

At first Mara thinks it is the vents waking. She cannot place the sound. It is low, like a truck idling a city block away. It has a taste. She can feel it against her teeth and in the back of her nose. It tastes like iron and the skin inside a battery. It pushes soft on the tiny bones of her ears. Her rubber band snaps against her wrist as she reaches for the boy’s chin. She did not mean to do it. She always snaps it when she needs to focus. The snap is too loud in the not-silence and she feels heat in her face as if she has done something rude in church.

“Dr. Kumar,” Mara says. The doctor looks at her. The doctor is sweating. He nods. He is thinking about a hundred rooms and a hundred lungs and a hundred rhythms falling out of time. “We need manual breaths in every vented patient,” Mara says. “Eyes on them. Now.” Her voice carries. It is not loud. It is made of command. Heads turn. People move. The nurse to her right starts counting out loud, soft and true: “One, two, three, four, five—”

In the hallway, a mother drags a small rolling suitcase behind her. The little wheel bumps every crack in the tile. The wheel sounds like a whispering animal. Mara does not look at it. She looks at the boy. She squeezes. She watches his chest rise. She listens for the hum again and hears it always, as if the ER is built around it the way a shell is built around a curl of air.

Back in the supply room, a stack of paper masks slides off a shelf by itself. It is a slow drift, as if someone has pushed the bottom box out one inch and then let gravity finish the trick. The masks spill, white and flimsy and useless against the wrong kind of deep breath. They look like fallen petals. Mara hates herself for thinking that more than she hates the spill.

...count your breaths, count them backward, offer them like coins...

“Where is Facilities?” the charge nurse says into a phone that does not work. She looks at the red call light as if she can frighten it into life. “Where is...”

“Here,” says a man in gray. His badge is on his sleeve. He is pale and sweating. He smells like machine oil and wet wool. “The generator fired,” he says, voice thin. “I heard the diesel catch, but the transfer switch won’t hold. It’s like the hospital is rejecting it. We feed in, and the load just… slides off.” He wipes his palms on his gray uniform, leaving wet prints. “Every time the coils engage, the controls spit nothing but static. One screen showed an eye. Just for a second. An eye.” He swallows. “The switch isn’t broken. It’s listening to something else.”

“Fix it,” the charge nurse says. “Please.”

Mara keeps counting with her hand. “In,” she says to the boy though he is asleep. “In, and hold, and out.” The hum shakes the plastic air inside the bag in the smallest way. Her bones know this. Her skin knows this. Somewhere under the tile, somewhere in the thick walls, something is singing to the metal that makes the hospital stand.

In Room Nine, the screen of a heart monitor flickers gray. For a breath it lights with a shape that is not a heartbeat. It is an eye, slit-pupiled and bright like an ember under ash. It opens and vanishes.

Mara does not see it. But later she will remember how the room felt colder for a second, and she will tell herself it was nothing, and then she will stop telling herself anything and just listen to the hum.

The emergency lights falter. A nurse says, “No,” like a child. The boy under Mara’s hands exhales a sound that is not air. It is a whisper made of static, the edge of a word in a language that tastes like copper.

The hospital is not floating. The hospital is falling.

Jace: The Line That Sang and Then Went Still

Jace Rourke has a habit of talking to poles. He stands under them and tilts his head and listens like a man listening to an old friend explain a hard night. He taps the wood with his knuckles. He puts his palm to the transformer housing the way a mechanic pets a hood. It calms him. It calms them. He believes that. He knows it is silly. He keeps doing it.

He is parked at the edge of a parking lot that used to be a factory and is now a flat field of nothing but lines painted on cracked black. His bucket truck is scarred and solid. The city stretches ahead like a grid drawn in chalk and lit from inside. He can pick out substations by the way the air over them shivers in summer. He can smell rain before the weather app wakes. He scratches his jaw and calls in a work order number. His radio crackles with a dispatcher who sounds tired and kind.

The first outage report is two blocks long, then six, then twelve. He watches the map on the cab screen repaint itself in slow, ugly gray. “Rolling?” he says to no one. The word sits in his mouth like a stone. Rolling means one part goes dark while another lights. Rolling is a mercy. Rolling is someone at a board flicking slices of city on and off, spreading the hurt. This is not rolling. This is a spill.

The parking lot lights flicker and drop. One by one the haloes above each pole go cold. A breeze moves across the lot and picks up loose receipts and a yellow snack bag. The bag skates, crackling over the asphalt like a dry leaf on a grave. Jace turns the key. The truck growls awake. He feels the engine in his ribs.

On the screen, the outage field blooms. He can see the old factory district belly out. He can see a river of dark pour toward the hospital on the hill. “Don’t,” he says, as if the map is shy and might listen. “Don’t you do it.”

The truck climbs the hill. Houses lean close. Windows turn from light to mirror as their rooms die. Jace sees faces pressed to the glass like fish. He points two fingers at each house in a reflex salute. “We’ve got you,” he says to them through his windshield. “We’re coming.”

He hears it as he turns onto the hospital road. The hum. It does not come from the road. It does not come from the truck. It comes from the skin of the air, from the wire lids draped over the city, from the wound-up cores in metal cans that sit on poles like sleeping gray owls. It comes from the high lines and the low lines and the steel bones of the service corridors running under the streets. It coats his teeth. It tastes like when he licks a nine-volt on a dare, except this time he is not a kid and this time the dare is not a joke. He swallows and the hum swallows with him.

His radio spits a string of numbered feeders and instructions. “We’re black at Lakeside sub. We lost the ATS on Mercy Hill. Rourke, sit tight.”

“How tight,” he says, “is tight?” He should not be a smart mouth. He cannot help himself. Pain proves you are alive, he thinks. A bad saying. A true one. He reaches for the mic.

“Do not switch anything,” the dispatcher says. Someone in the background uses a word Jace does not say on duty. “We have unknown backfeed. We have phantom voltage on neutral. Stay off the metal, Rourke.”

“Copy,” Jace says. “Off the metal.” He parks a hundred yards from the hospital loading bay. The bay is dark. The emergency generator stack on the far side should be blowing a steady plume. It is quiet. A breath moves through the trees like a hand parting hair.

That is when the billboard across the street blazes.

He did not know it had power. It should not, with this much down. The face is a white rectangle broken by cracks and old rain streaks. For three seconds it becomes a bright red eye. Not painted. Not a logo. Not the pupil of a cat or a hawk. It is a wolf’s eye, slit and ember-bright, with a ragged outer ring like charred paper. It looks straight at him.

Jace flinches and smacks his head on the pillar of the cab. “Jesus,” he says, and then he laughs because the sound of his own voice is odd, high and thin. He rubs the sore spot and peers out. The billboard eye has gone to gray. Static snows down it. The snow looks thick, like ashes falling.

“Rourke,” the radio says. “You still on Mercy Hill?”

“Affirmative,” he says. He cannot stop looking at the dead billboard. He knows a trick of current when he sees one. He knows a glitch. This was not a glitch. This was intention. And that is a thing wires are not supposed to have.

“Don’t touch,” the voice says. “We’ve got crews chasing a harmonic from the east side.” There is a pause. Someone else speaks over the first person on his channel, low, as if not meant for him. He still hears it because the hum seems to carry words in it if he leans the right way. “not a standard harmonic, no, listen, listen.”

The hospital emergency lights glow that sick, old orange. Jace sees a nurse at the loading door pounding, then stopping, then pounding again as if the act itself is a comfort. The door does not open. He puts his hand out the truck window and feels the night. The hairs on his forearm stand straight. Static leaps from the mirror to his knuckles. It is not a sharp snap. It is a slow, deliberate brush, like a long tongue tasting him.

He pulls his hand back and stares at the faint white track the arc has left across his skin. It is already fading. He looks down at the keys on his ring, lined on a chain hung from the fuse panel. He has been collecting them for years, useless old keys he tells himself he keeps as tokens. One of them is stamped with the city’s old crest. It is black with grease. For a second it is warm. It hums. Very softly. A tiny wolf’s eye gleams along its bevel like a reflection. He blinks and it is only a key.

“Mercy Hill,” he says into the radio, because doing something is better than sitting. “I can be inside in two minutes. If the switch is hung up, I can pull.”

“Negative,” says Dispatch. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

Jace sets the mic down. He watches the orange lights inside the hospital tremble and settle. A man in gray crosses the dock and vanishes. A woman with a ponytail snaps on a battery headlamp that makes a flat, pale circle on the door. Her breath smokes. It should not. The night is not cold enough. He holds his own breath and hears the hum like a song through the hood, through the wheel, through the bones inside his wrist. It is not a tune he knows. That bothers him more than he will admit.

—low and lower— name the night you feed—

He starts the truck again because a running engine is a votive candle in a hurricane. He leaves it idling. He keeps his hands off the metal. He listens to the city go grainy, as if the dark has teeth.

Bishop: The Candle, the Cassette, and the Wrong Note

Bishop Harlan does not like overhead light. He does not like fluorescent tubes or streetlamps or white even. In his room the ceiling fixture is dead on purpose. He has two lamps with yellow shades. He has a candle for when the lamps feel loud. Tonight the candle is a cheap thing that smells like vanilla if you press your nose to it and hold your breath. He did that when he lit it, a small old habit with no sense to it, and now the room smells like a cake that burned long ago and was hidden, still warm, under the bed.

The power dies. His lamps go black. The candle flame gulps and steadies as if pleased to have the stage. He listens to the building creak like a throat. He hears a woman down the hall swear. He hears a baby cry and then be quiet, not by comfort. He knows the difference. His chest tightens and he puts his palm there. His shirt is rough. His heart keeps time.

The tape recorder on the table is old. It is gray and it has a little window like a blind eye. Inside it he keeps a cassette with a label that says “HYMNS - FRAGMENTS.” He tells himself he keeps it for study. He tells himself he will burn it when he is finished. He has told himself that for a long time. He has not burned it. The recorder is plugged in, and now it is not. He looks at it. He reaches and his finger pads the Eject. The button does not move, but the tray opens anyway with a soft, damp pop, as if the machine swallows before it spits. The tape sits there, black and patient.

He does not touch it. He sets both hands on his knees like a man in a pew and he listens.

The hum comes through the floor first. It comes through the iron belly of the radiator and through the nails in the wall and through the little pins that hold the pictures in place. He does not keep many pictures. There is a photograph of a church with a broken bell. There is a mass card with his mother’s name. There is a sketch that a child did of a wolf’s head, which he should have thrown away and did not. The hum passes through all of it and leaves no dust.

It is a low note. It is a note that sits at the base of all other notes and says, I am home. There is a thing in it, though, a small shape like a hook. If you have never heard the hook before, you would not hear it now. If you have, you cannot not. Bishop hears it. His throat tightens the way it did the first time a Choir man spoke his name in a room where there were no doors. He reaches for his lighter. He does not smoke. He keeps the lighter because the weight in his hand is a comfort. It clicks open and shut, open and shut. He has done this so much the lining of his coat took a scorch once. He tells no one. He does not tell himself. He keeps doing it.

“Not possible,” he says to the candle. The candle flickers. Wax pools and shines like a small lake. He leans close. A thread of black rises from the wick and coins in the air. Tiny sparks pop in the smoke and vanish. Embers. He thinks of charred paper. He thinks of a book that did not burn all the way but fused instead, wire and ash and note-stems melted into a dead men’s choir mouth that still remembered how to hum.

He laughs once. It is not a kind sound. “Listen to me,” he says to no one. “Old fool, listen.”

The radio on the floor wakes by itself.

It is a cheap AM thing with a cracked antenna and a mouth full of dust. It shouldn’t run. When it does, the sound is not station chatter. It is the hum, closer, wound and unwound through like rope. Between the dark cloth and the plastic teeth of the speaker, words crawl. Not language. Not yet. But all words are somewhere inside it, all the names of streets and people and saints, waiting for the right throat.

“Turn it off,” Bishop says to himself, because saying it will make the hand move. He bends. His finger touches the dial. The hum swells and leans toward him as if it is coming to smell his face. Iron floods his mouth. His tongue aches. He jerks his hand away and knocks the tape out of the deck in the same motion.

The cassette hits the floor, plastic on wood, a clean little click. The label scrapes. A corner of the sticker lifts. Under the paper is a slice of red. He did not know this tape was red. He has had it for years. He holds the lighter open and the flame’s small bend tells him the hum is pushing the air.

“Names are power,” he whispers, and his voice slips. It drops a half step and a second voice speaks under it, his own shadow. “Names are power and so is silence.” He closes the lighter. The click is a neat period.

The candle’s flame leans to one side, clearly and calmly, as if a door has opened on the far wall. A thin gray ash curls up from the wick and hangs there like a writing. For one heartbeat Bishop sees it as words. He sees the word hush. He blinks and it is only smoke.

He looks at the radio. The cloth over the speaker bulges. For a moment it is not cloth. It is a membrane, dark and wet, and something pushes against it from the other side, as if the radio is a throat and the throat is about to speak a name he does not want to hear. The candle backlights everything until the room looks like a church that has been dragged underwater.

He reaches down and pulls the radio plug from the wall even though he knows it should not matter. The plug comes out with a fat blue spark that jumps to his knuckle and licks him. The hum drops to a lower note for one beat, like a dog growling when you put your hand too near its bowl. Then it returns to its patient level. His knuckle stings. He smells meat, clean and wrong.

Bishop sits very still. He picks up the cassette. He holds it to the candle as if heat could sterilize the thing inside. He sees his own face in the little shiny window, stretched and dark. For a breath the window is an eye. A wolf’s eye. A slit of ember. He closes his own eyes and the hum does not stop and the window is still an eye behind his lids.

He says a prayer without words. When he opens his eyes he turns the cassette over. On the back, in his own handwriting, are four words that were not there yesterday.

Sing the city still.

His throat closes. He puts the tape down very gently. He does not touch the recorder. He does not breathe for three beats. He listens to the hum pour down the building’s pipes like a choir descending a stair, slow and slow, voices carrying the weight of old earth.

...do you hear how deep the note can go... deeper, deeper...

He opens his eyes and the candle gutter dances. Something outside on the street moves. It does not have footsteps. It does not have wheels. It has the hush of something huge moving very close. He looks at the door. The hum is in the knob.

He whispers, “Not possible,” again, and the hum answers, which is the worst part. It answers by not changing at all. It answers by being the same as it was a moment ago, and a year ago, and a hundred years ago under the first wooden pole, and under the stone before that. It says: I have always been here. You were busy.

The candle burns low and sends off a sharp little spark that pops and vanishes like a seed.

The City: Thin Lights, Thick Dark

Streetlamps in a row wink out and leave a tail of afterglow like comets cut short. A bus pulls to the curb and the doors fold open and refuse to fold closed again. The ceiling light over the bus driver’s head dies and reveals the shape of the old gum stuck there, gray and dry like the tongue of something sleeping. Passengers mutter. Someone laughs, then stops when no one follows. The driver says, “Stay calm,” and hears how thin it sounds, like a wire with too much weight on it.

An elevator in a tall building shudders and sighs to a halt between floors. Inside are a man in a suit, a woman in scrubs, a boy with a skateboard tucked under his arm, and an old woman with a scarf tied under her chin and a canvas bag in her lap. The emergency light comes on and turns all their faces the color of apricots. The boy says, “I can pry the doors,” because children think knives and fingers can always force the world. The woman says, “Don’t.” The old woman pats the bag and hums to herself, tuneless. The man presses the red button. It does not answer. After a while the four of them breathe in sync. They do not mean to. It happens anyway. The sound of their breathing matches the hum in the cable overhead exactly. They do not notice. They will dream of it later and think: odd dream.

Dogs in backyards lay their ears flat and press their chests to the dirt. Cats go to high places and stare at the corners of rooms as if corners are the real doors. Pigeons fly in a tight circle and hit a glass facade as one soft, heavy hand. They slide down and leave dark kisses that look like smudges of ash. A raccoon pauses in a gutter and dips both front paws as if washing in a stream that is not there. It tilts its head in time with the hum, curious, then pulls its head back fast and bares its teeth at nothing.

On the river, the water looks like black cloth pulled over something that keeps moving under it. A tour boat sits awkward and blind, a house set loose. A man on its deck listens hard and scowls as if trying to recall a tune he heard when he was small. His mother used to hum when she ironed. He has not thought of that in years. He begins to hum with the river. The other passengers do not notice. They all have their phones out like votive candles that went dead. Some keep swiping as if the act of the finger will bring the world back.

In a deli, a woman with a hairnet stands in front of the meat slicer with her arms folded like a guard at a tomb. The slicer’s blade turns once with no power. It is a slow turn, like a coin rolling and falling flat. She swallows and turns the thing off even though it is already off. She sees a smear on the blade that looks like a slit eye. She wipes it. It comes back in the same place. She turns away and says a name under her breath, the name of someone who left her long ago. The hum holds the name like a stone in a river, and the water goes around it.

Fire escapes tremble. Neon signs cough and die and leave their last letters hanging like teeth. Somewhere a wedding band still tries to play on battery amps and the bride laughs too loudly and covers it with her hand and looks at the groom and sees the groom is already far away, face turned toward something none of them can see yet.

On an overpass, a line of cars burns its brake-light red and then drops it. People step out and become silhouettes. The noise that should be a city going wrong never rises. It is as if the dark has put a pillow over the mouth of the sky.

The courthouse clock tower stops and the hour hand sits at the place where a throat swallows. In the basement of the courthouse, a printer in a locked office spits one page and then goes still. The page is blank except for a red oval in the center with a darker slit inside it. A draft moves although there are no open windows. The page slides to the floor. It still looks warm.

The school playground has a swing that moves and stops and moves again, not with wind, but with the slow, patient push of a hand that is not there. Chalk lines on the blacktop glow for a moment like embers breathed back to life and then go dull.

A theater marquee goes dark and shows its old bones for the first time in years: rust, screws, flakes that come off like soot. Inside, the screen is a white bedspread in a silent room. If anyone had been there to watch, the spread would have rippled. It would have looked like a chest taking a shallow breath.

In an alley, a stray catches a new smell. It freezes and stares at the blank brick as if someone inside the wall has spoken its secret name. It crouches. It breathes. It whines once. The sound is swallowed at the first inch.

Up on the hill, the hospital tries to light itself from the inside, fails, and leans heavier into the dark. The emergency lights give off a tired, emberish glow. They paint the halls in a color that should be warm and is not. It is the color left in a fireplace the morning after.

All the while the hum spreads like water through dry cloth. It seeps into copper. It finds old splices and old solder and the little faults that come from decades of fixes no one wrote down. It threads itself through old iron bones and new fiber like a patient snake. It does not rise yet. It holds the note it has chosen. The city is a mouth. The hum is a tongue pressed to the roof of that mouth, waiting for the word.

...not yet, not yet, hold...

Ash on the Tongue, Breath on the Wire

Back in the ER, the boy’s chest rises and falls because Mara refuses to let it stop. Sweat runs down her spine. The rubber band on her wrist leaves a red track. She thinks of the child patients whose names have taken root under her skin. She is not thinking of them on purpose. They come now like moths to the low light. She says one of the names under her breath. It fits into the hum and vanishes. It does not echo. It should echo inside her skull. It does not. That frightens her more than the dark.

“Okay,” Dr. Kumar says. His face is a map of worry; the lines on it are deep. “We’re moving to manual protocols.” He swallows. His mouth looks dry. His eyes are wet. He looks at the ceiling as if it might speak. It does not. He looks back at Mara and nods to the boy. It is permission and also thanks and also the smallest surrender she has ever seen him make.

The emergency lights waver and recover. The hum does not waver. Somewhere far away, a small machine tries to start and fails. The failure is a tin cough that clicks like a bad prayer. A tray tips. A metal bowl rolls in a circle on the floor and then settles with a sound like a coin making up its mind.

“Facilities?” the charge nurse says to the man in gray. “Tell me ‘five minutes.’ Lie if you have to. I need something to say.”

The man in gray stares at her. “I cannot lie,” he says, not as virtue but as fact, as if lying requires a certain amount of power and he is out. He rubs his forehead with the heel of his hand. “The switch will not take the generator,” he says. “It will not accept it. We feed in and the load slides off as if the hospital is not” He stops. He does not know the word. Alive is the word. He does not want to say it.

In the truck, Jace leans back and breathes through his mouth. He pictures the substation guts in his head and runs his hand in the air over phantom parts, tracing a path, as if he could repair the grid by mime. He hears the dispatcher argue with someone not on his channel. “We should island the hospital.” “We tried.” “Try again.” “It won’t hold.” “Won’t is not an answer.” “Not won’t,” the second voice says, and Jace strains to hear. “Can’t.” The word is soft and heavy, a stone dropped in a fountain.

He thumbs the keys on the ring again. One is warm. He makes up stories for each key. It is a habit that keeps his head from breaking under too much noise. This one, the black one with the crest, is a gate key. The kind that opens an old yard. The kind that opens a door you pass every day and do not notice because you think it is welded shut. He closes his fingers around the keys and the hum runs through the metal like a song through a throat. He lets go and it stops. He does it again. It comes. He laughs, short, and there is no humor in it.

On the table, Bishop’s candle lowers. The wick makes a tiny ember at its tip that looks like an eye deep in soot. He cannot stop staring. He thinks of the Choir’s old diagrams that showed a city like a skull with lines drawn not for power but for song. They had laid notes over streets and written words no one was meant to say over rooftops that held pigeons. He rubs his chest once and feels the hum answer like a cat arching under a palm. He hates the image. He cannot un-think it.

He pulls his chair out and it scrapes. The scrape is a small bright noise under the bass of the hum. It comforts him the way flint striking does. He opens the cassette case like a man opening a coffin. He does not put the tape in. He only looks at it. He thinks of his voice as a younger man, loud and sure, when he told someone: I can pull you out. He pulls no one out of anything now. He sits and listens and decides where to place each word like a candle on a step, careful of the wax.

Across the city, the hum presses harder on teeth and bones. People touch their mouths without knowing why. The taste of pennies rides the air. Fog that is not fog laces low along the curb lines and spreads like spilled milk.

In the hospital, a screen flickers. In the truck, a billboard remembers a bright, red slit. In Bishop’s room, the lighter clicks open on its own and shows no flame, only the cold spark of flint, a vision of heat without heat.

On the river, a passenger on the blind boat whispers, “Do you hear that?” The person next to him says, “Hear what?” though she hears it too. It is easier to not name it yet. Names are doors. Names are knives that cut loose things you did not notice were holding you together.

...hold...hold... the mouth fills...

Someone in the ER laughs high and thin. She claps a hand over her mouth. The sound leaks between her fingers anyway, a small white bird that flutters its last wing and dies. No one looks at her. No one looks at anyone. They look at machines, even dead, as if still in them there is hope.

Mara keeps squeezing the bag. The boy’s breath moves. She says, “In,” and the word is a stone. She says, “Out,” and the word drops next to the first one. The hum runs around them like water running around rocks. She wants to turn and run down the hall and out the door and into the night and find the quietest park in the city and lie down and press her ear to the grass and hear if the earth under all this is still the earth she knows. She does not move. She is the one who stays with the breath. That is her job. That is her oath. That is her curse.

The orange emergency lights hesitate, then flicker once, twice, like candles at the end of a very long night.

The city holds its breath with them. One second long. Two. Three. The emergency lights in the ER gutter and go dim as if a thumb has pressed on their throats. In the truck, Jace watches the hospital go from ember to ash and feels the hum curl low and sweet under the engine’s rumble as if it has found the right note at last. In his room, Bishop reaches for the radio and stops with his fingers one inch from the cloth because the cloth swells again and he knows if he touches it, it will speak his name in a voice made of wires and stone dust and someone else’s breath.

The hum drops one more step. It is almost language.

...hush now hush...

The emergency lights go out.

The dark does not fall. It rises, patient and sure, like a tide that knows this shore by heart.

Somewhere, far below the center of the city, something opens its ember eye and listens for the first real word.

To be continued in Article 2 ... “The Hum.”