Chapter 2: The First Note of the New Song

Chapter 2: The First Note of the New Song

Elias burst from the stairwell onto the street, the concrete feeling unnervingly soft beneath his worn leather shoes, like packed earth. The profound silence he’d fled had been replaced by a single, pervasive hum that wasn't a sound but a pressure against his eardrums. The air was thick with the metallic tang of ozone, like the aftermath of a lightning strike, mingled with an indescribable scent—something like cold, wet stone and blooming flowers that had no name.

The street was a gallery of serene madness. A taxi was half-submerged in the asphalt, its nose pointed toward the sky as if it were a monument. People moved through the chaos not with panic, but with a strange, balletic purpose. A man in a business suit walked in a slow, perfect circle around a fire hydrant, his head tilted back, a blissful smile on his face. A group of teenagers sat cross-legged on the pavement, arranging shattered pieces of a storefront window into a shimmering mosaic that caught the colorless, reality-bleeding light from above.

They were the Changed. They were everywhere.

He forced himself not to look up, keeping his eyes locked on the far end of the street where Lily’s apartment building stood. Its familiar brick facade seemed to ripple at the edges, its right angles appearing momentarily, impossibly, curved. He broke into a run, a frantic, jagged line through the placid, geometric movements of the crowd. No one tried to stop him. They simply flowed around him, their eyes empty of recognition, full of the void.

Lily’s building lobby was open, the glass of the main door gone, leaving behind a neat, empty frame. He pounded up the four flights of stairs, his breath catching in his throat, his mind a frantic reel of horrifying possibilities. He reached her apartment, number 4B, and found the door ajar.

“Lily!” he yelled, shoving it open.

And there she was.

She was standing in the middle of her small, paint-splattered studio, not screaming, not crying, not even afraid. Her back was to him, her slender frame silhouetted against the large window that overlooked the city. She was staring up at the Aperture, her head tilted in rapt attention, as if listening to a beautiful symphony.

Relief and terror warred inside him. She was alive. She was unharmed. But she was not okay.

From her throat came a sound that froze the blood in his veins. She was humming. It wasn't one of her usual, melancholic tunes. This was a discordant, alien melody of disjointed notes that seemed to follow a logic his mind couldn't grasp. It was a sequence of tones that felt both random and mathematically precise, and it made the air in the room feel thin and sharp. It was the first note of a new and terrible song.

“Lily, get away from the window,” he said, his voice trembling.

She didn't turn. “It’s beautiful, Eli,” she whispered, her voice filled with a dreamy, ecstatic wonder he hadn't heard in years. “Can you hear it?”

“Hear what? Lily, we have to go. Something is wrong.” He crossed the room, grabbing her arm. Her skin was cool to the touch.

She finally turned to look at him, and his heart stopped. Her eyes, usually a warm, expressive brown, seemed deeper, darker. They weren't focused on him, but through him, as if he were made of glass. A serene, unnerving smile played on her lips.

“The colors,” she breathed, her voice a reverent hush. “I can hear the new colors. They have voices.”

The words were nonsense, the ravings of a mind untethered. But he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the marrow, that she meant them. The signal that had turned the people outside into serene automatons had found a perfect receiver in his artistic, sensitive sister.

“There are no new colors,” he said, his voice harsh with fear. He pulled her, dragging her away from the window, away from the mesmerizing poison in the sky. “We’re going underground. To the subway. It’ll be shielded down there.” It was a desperate guess, a physicist's Hail Mary. If this was a form of radiation, then earth and concrete were their only hope.

She didn't resist, allowing him to pull her along like a doll, her feet shuffling on the floor. Her strange, off-key humming never ceased. It was the only sound she made as he led her out of the apartment and back down into the warped streets.

The entrance to the Franklin Street station gaped like a mouth leading into the earth. Elias pulled Lily down the steps, into the flickering, electric gloom. The pressure in his ears intensified here, the alien hum a constant, physical presence. The station was deserted, the usual rush-hour crowds replaced by a silent, echoing emptiness. Long, untrustworthy shadows danced in the intermittent light of the emergency fixtures.

“This way,” he muttered, pulling her toward the platform for the downtown train. The plan was simple: get on a train, ride it as far into the tunnels as it would go, and wait. Wait for this to end.

They ran down a long, tiled corridor, the exit sign at the far end a distant green beacon. The air grew colder. Lily’s humming shifted in pitch, a low, resonant thrum that seemed to make his teeth vibrate. They passed a large, spray-painted mural of a snarling wolf.

He kept running, his lungs burning, his grip on Lily’s hand slick with sweat. But the green sign wasn’t getting any closer. It remained a fixed point, impossibly distant. A cold knot of dread tightened in his stomach. He risked a glance behind them. The corridor stretched back into darkness, just as it should.

And then they passed the snarling wolf mural again.

Elias stumbled to a halt, his mind refusing to process what his eyes were seeing. He looked back and forth. It was the same graffiti, identical down to the last drip of red paint from the wolf’s fangs. A loop. They were in an impossible, repeating loop. The laws of physics, the simple, reliable rules of A-to-B-to-C, were fraying down here, too.

“Eli?” Lily’s voice was clear, the first time she had spoken his name since the apartment.

He turned to her, a flicker of hope igniting in his chest. “Lily?”

She wasn't looking at him. She was staring at a large, grimy puddle of standing water on the platform floor. A perfect mirror in the gloom.

He followed her gaze and his blood ran cold.

He saw his own reflection, gaunt and terrified under the flickering lights. And he saw Lily’s reflection next to his. But her reflection was not mimicking her. While the real Lily stood placidly beside him, her reflection was looking up, its head tilted as if staring out of the puddle directly at him. Its face was split by a wide, silent, ecstatic grin.

He jerked her away from the puddle, his breath catching in a sob of pure terror. He stared at his sister’s real face. It was calm, her expression unchanged, her lips still forming the notes of that terrible, alien song.

He had thought the danger was the sky. He had believed that if he could just get her away from the Aperture, shield her from the colorless light, he could save her. But looking into her serene, lost eyes, seeing the ghost of that impossible reflection, he finally understood.

The horror wasn't just outside. He hadn't been dragging his sister to safety. He had been dragging the danger with them all along. It was already inside her. It was wearing her face and humming its first beautiful, world-ending tune.