WolfsZone

Chpt 1: Pt 6.

The blackout has taken light. The hum has taken silence. Now it comes for names. Every city has one, the true name beneath maps and politics, older than streets, older than bricks. Tonight, in the dark, that name begins to rise. And the chosen hear it first.

Mara leans over the boy and realizes she’s whispering. Not to him, but with him. His lips move, faint, cracked. Her mouth shapes the same syllables without meaning to. She tastes iron and ash, and every time the Ambu bag compresses under her palm, another sound pushes out of him, notes that slide into words she doesn’t know but her throat somehow remembers.

The charge nurse is curled in a corner, rocking. The man in gray is shouting at the dead switchboard, but Mara barely hears them. The hum is too loud. It has become language, low vowels rising from the floor itself, consonants scraped into the walls.

The boy exhales, ...ash to ash, hush to hush...

Mara jerks her head back. Her ears ring. She wants to scream, but the hum eats her voice before it leaves her chest.

Jace pulls the truck to a stop in an intersection where every traffic light hangs dead. The wires above sway without wind. He opens the door, climbs out, and stands in the middle of the road, staring at the sky.

For a moment he thinks he sees shapes in the clouds. Not clouds at all lines, arcs, marks. Like sheet music scrawled across the firmament. Each pulse of the hum makes them glow faint ember-red.

His key ring rattles at his side. He grips the black one and hears it clearly this time. A word. Not English. Older. Sharp as a broken tooth.

He speaks it aloud before he can stop himself. The sound lances through his head. The streetlamps flicker, though no power feeds them.

The hum answers, pleased.

Bishop kneels on the floor, blood soaking through the bandage on his arm. The cassette lies in front of him. The tape door is open. The red plastic gleams faintly in the candle’s last stub of flame.

He tells himself not to touch it. He tells himself he is stronger than this. But his hand moves anyway, sliding the cassette into the deck.

Click.

The tape begins to turn though there is no power. The reels spin, whispering against the magnetic strip. The speaker breathes static that isn’t static. The hum has become a chant.

...sing the city still, sing the city still...

Bishop weeps. He knows the voice. It is his, recorded long ago, during the days when he still belonged to the Choir. He hears himself, younger, stronger, chanting the words that poisoned his life.

The reflection in the window smiles wider. Blood drips from its mouth, but the words are clear: You already gave it your name.

All across the city, the name of the song spreads.

In subway tunnels, commuters find themselves humming in unison. The rhythm rides their teeth, their breath, their bones. Some clamp their jaws shut, blood seeping between clenched lips, but the sound still leaks from them, muffled and inevitable.

In apartments, children scrawl on walls in crayon without knowing what they write. Parents yank the crayons away. The lines glow faintly, forming shapes like eyes and mouths, like notes on a staff.

In churches, bells that should be still ring once, twice, the sound bending into the hum’s cadence. Parishioners kneel without meaning to. Their knees strike stone in perfect rhythm.

...we breathe you, we bleed you, we sing you still...

Mara fights harder. She slaps her own mouth with one hand, keeps pressing the Ambu bag with the other. Tears streak her cheeks. She won’t let the song out of her lips. She won’t. But her chest burns, her lungs ache, and she knows if she breathes again it will carry the name.

The boy’s eyes flicker open. Ember glow. Slit pupils. His voice is not his own: ...say it, nurse, say it true...

She shakes her head, sobbing.

Jace drops the keys. They hit asphalt, ringing like struck bells. The sound doesn’t fade. It grows. He claps his hands over his ears, but it doesn’t matter. The name is inside him now, seared onto his tongue. He wants to spit it out, to shout it into the dead night. He knows if he does, something vast will answer.

Bishop claws at the cassette player, but the tape is stuck. His younger voice keeps chanting: Sing the city still. Louder, faster, building. The hum rises with it, layering until the room itself vibrates.

His reflection opens its mouth wide, wider, until its jaw unhinges. The ember-red wolf eye burns in the center of its throat.

Bishop slams his fist against the deck. The tape keeps turning.

The city itself begins to speak.

Billboards flicker with half-formed syllables. Neon signs blaze dead letters into new words. Manhole covers tremble as though lungs beneath them are ready to exhale.

From the river, steam rises in white ribbons. Each curl shapes into a letter before unraveling. From above, the bridges spell fragments across the water, shimmering in ember-glow.

The city is learning to sing its own name aloud.

Mara’s lungs ache to betray her.
  Jace’s tongue curls around a word not meant for human mouths.
  Bishop listens to his younger self chant the hymn that will raise the city’s true name.

The blackout was only silence. The hum was only prelude.

Now the song begins.

To be continued in Chapter Two.