Silence was not the absence of sound.
It was a presence—a hum that pressed against the skin and wedged into the crevices between thoughts.
Avery Locke understood this. It was the one friend she could never shake.
Her apartment, on the fourth floor of a building that wasn't old enough to stand on its own, puffed quietly in the early morning. Pipes clattered in walls. The radiator wheezed into existence. A fading light over her sink flickered as if it remembered being a star.
Avery sat cross-legged on the edge of her writing desk, her back to the sweeping view of the city. The skyline outside the window stretched like a bony hand—glass fingers toward a fog-blurred moon.
She hadn't looked out in hours. There was nothing out there for her. There never had been.
Her own long, pale, sunless fingers hovered over the set of documents strewn upon the desk. No names marked the pages. No addresses. Only lines of symbols, drawn and printed—a series of tongues forgotten by years and recalled by those, as she, whose existence was that of deciphering the unlearned.
It had taken her three nights and the best part of a bottle of ink to crack the cipher now in shreds on the floor to her left. She had posted off the solution hours ago, with her bill. This kind of work paid extremely well, especially when clients did not ask questions at all and wanted she didn't ask questions either.
She grasped her teacup—now cold—and raised it absently to her lips before placing it untouched back on its saucer. Something tickled at the periphery of her consciousness. A murmur, not of noise, but of presence. A pressure shift.
She shifted her gaze by a degree.
The mirror on the other side of the room reflected her image. Her stern, angular face gazed back. But something out of sight to her rear felt amiss. A shadow. A form.
She abruptly got up and walked to the window, sweeping the curtain aside.
Nothing.
Only her night—so still it was stagnant.
She returned to the desk and tied herself down once again. Her fingers tied around her pen and began moving on their own, writing input without consciousness. She was thinking elsewhere. Drifting. Expanse.
Then, the phone beeped. Once.
She couldn't remember setting it down on the desk, but here it was, humming softly like it had some vital news to impart.
She picked it up.
Unknown Number
A message flashed onto the screen in immaculate black lettering on a white background:
"I speak without a mouth. I hear without ears. I have no body, but I come alive with fear. What am I?"
She stared at it for a long time.
Her heart beating faster, but her expression didn't change.
It was a puzzle.
An old one.
"An echo," she told herself.
Before she could reply with anything, a second message was sent.
"Correct."
Avery's fingers clenched the phone. She hadn't replied.
The third message arrived as a whisper along the spine.
"Hello, Avery. It's been a while."
She jerked up so suddenly her chair squeaked along the floor, crashing into the shelves behind.
The room began to shrink. Her eyes jumped to the corners, to the mirrors, to the open doorway at the other end of the hallway.
It was empty.
But the quiet had changed again.
It no longer was an ally.
It waited.
***
Twelve hours before
April 9 – 2:46 PM
Hollowbridge City, Central Precinct
Detective Elias Reed snapped the tip of his pen against the desk, the snap jarring in the quiet air of his office. Files lay out before him—photos clipped to pages, printed reports sprinkled with lines scratched out through redaction, and beneath it all, three envelopes.
One had arrived anonymously to each of them. Each of them had one printed page. And each of them had arrived before a murder.
The victims shared no apparent link—different neighborhoods, different backgrounds, even different social status. But they had all been found in their homes, unbroken by forced entry, with a puzzle in their hands.
He opened the most recent file.
Mouth sewn shut. Eyes open wide.
And carved into the flesh above the heart:
"L."
It was the second time a letter had been carved into a victim's chest.
The first had been an "A."
And though Reed was no literary man, he could see a pattern when it presented itself.
The knock on his door was tentative, as if whoever stood there would rather not disturb whatever weight resided there.
"Come in."
A junior officer poked his head in. "Detective… another one came in."
Reed was in front of the words even before they'd fallen.
"Same type of envelope?"
"Yes, sir."
"Where?"
The officer swallowed hard. "The morgue."
***
Present – 3:12 AM
Avery's Apartment
She hadn't so much as picked up the phone since. It remained on the desk, screen black. But the words scorched in her brain with a brightness that left her breathless.
She knew this feeling.
The cold splash of being watched.
Not by someone she liked.
Not by someone she knew.
But by someone who had been watching her with the patience of a spider.
She crossed over to her bookshelf. Her hands swept past first editions and study books until she found the thin red journal—marked nothing, ordinary, and inside, only codes that she and Alina had given each other. Ancient puzzles. Tokens shared between them like sacred money.
She opened the book to the middle. A line of words, written in a trembling hand:
"I begin as many, but end as one."
She had read it before.
No—they'd seen it before.
When they were small girls, their dad would turn them into riddle games. He'd leave them hidden in scavenger hunts, leave them on mirrors, write them on scrap napkins pushed under tea cups. He called it mental fencing. He said a mind that could unlock the world would never be trapped by it.
But that was centuries ago. Before Alina went missing.
Before everything fell apart.
Avery felt it again—the quiver. The change in the air.
And then: a sound.
Soft. Almost polite.
A knock.
She crept toward the door painstakingly, each step measured. Her hand hovered above the latch.
Another knock.
Louder this time.
She opened the door enough to see the figure on the other side.
A man, coat dripping with rain, his manner far too controlled for the hour.
"Miss Locke?" he asked.
"Yes."
He stood with the badge in one hand, the folder in the other. "Detective Elias Reed. I have to speak with you. May I enter?"
She studied him for a long time.
Then she opened the door wider.