Page 27

I stop at the edge when every instinct tells me to keep moving, but curiosity wins.

The ground is fucked.

Dirt has been thrown everywhere, rocks ripped loose, and several of the trees around the clearing are leaning at angles that tell me whatever happened here came with brutal force.

But it’s the fracture running through the middle that pulls me closer.

It’s mostly sealed now, the two sides of the earth shoved back together so hard the dirt has buckled along the edges. In some places, stone has cracked and fused. In others, there’s still a narrow split, barely wider than my finger.

And there’s light coming through it.

Amber and violet glow deep beneath the dirt, faint but impossible to miss in the dark. Now and then it pulses brighter, and a thin thread of light slips through before disappearing into the air.

I crouch a few feet away, and my throat hums instantly.

Something is buried in this place.

More than one signature.

One sits deep beneath the ground, low enough to make my teeth ache.

The other is all over the fucking clearing. Burned into the dirt, the broken rocks, and the trees. The same resonance that dragged a song out of me yesterday.

I stare at the thin glowing fracture.

Whatever opened this thing was powerful.

Whatever forced it shut was louder.

I press my hand against the nearest boulder, needing the solid weight of stone under my palm to stay upright against what’s rolling off this place.

Unfinished. That’s the only word close enough to what I’m standing in front of.

Every supernatural rupture I’ve ever come across, and I’ve come across more than my share running from the Conclave through every dark corner between here and the Gulf, closes cleanly behind itself.

This one hasn’t.

It’s still open, still leaking, a mouth that got slammed shut before it finished screaming.

I crouch at the lip of the tear and let my siren instincts do what they were built to do—listen. Underneath the noise, past the obvious violence of it, deep into what remains. It takes effort to peel back the layers without letting the raw force of it drag me under, but I find it eventually, buried at the center of all that churning amber-violet light.

A voice.

Not the roar itself, not the devastation that carved this scar into the earth, but the thing underneath it, the signature that made the roar what it is. My pulse stutters when I isolate it, because I’ve never heard anything built like this. It’s two frequencies fused when they should tear each other apart on contact, something scorched and furious threaded straight through with something clean and burning in an entirely different register. Holy in a way that has no business standing this close to something so obviously infernal.

Hellfire and something like Grace, twisted into a single sound.

Nobody sings like that.

Nobody exists like that.

My kind spend centuries perfecting a single register, sirens trained from birth to hold one note pure enough to bend a room, and here is proof, standing in the dirt in front of me, that something out there is doing what none of us were ever taught was possible.

I press my palm flat against the seam, and the vibration climbs up through my arm, a low current that doesn’t hurt so much as it recognizes something in me. My whole life I’ve been told what my voice is for—compulsion, leverage, a weapon the Conclave gets to point wherever they decide it’s useful. Standing here with my hand on a wound in the world, I feel something closer to a question than an answer.

What are you?

What made you?