The scratched words on Ethan's desk seemed to pulse with a faint silver light. TOWER RISES AGAIN. Lily had been gone for several minutes, taken back to bed by Sarah, but the chill lingered in the study. Ethan stared at the message, particularly at the word "Conductor," which had somehow transformed before his eyes. Unlike the roughly carved letters around it, "Conductor" now appeared as if burned into the wood with light—a faint sigil embedded within its curves and lines.
The silence felt heavy, expectant. Ethan moved to shut down his laptop when a sound emerged from its speakers—a faint, backward whisper that he hadn't initiated. The hair on his arms stood on end as the sound continued, growing neither louder nor softer, just persistently present.
Without conscious effort, his mind began to translate the reversed audio. Notes formed in his thoughts, arranging themselves into a familiar pattern—Lily's lullaby, but played in reverse. The same lullaby that had summoned the smoke-child.
His system interface flickered to life unbidden, text scrolling across his vision:
[EXTERNAL ECHO DETECTED]
[ENTITY SIGNATURE LOGGED]
[TRACING RESONANCE PATTERNS...]
[IDENTITY FRAGMENT RECOVERED: "MIRE"]
[CLASSIFICATION: ANOMALOUS STUDENT]
"Mire?" Ethan whispered, the name unfamiliar yet striking something deep within his memory.
The study around him warped suddenly—reality bending like heated glass. Books lifted from their shelves, hanging suspended in midair as if time itself had frozen around them. The temperature dropped sharply, frost forming along the edges of the window in intricate, mathematical patterns.
Ethan's gaze drifted to a small snow globe on his desk—a souvenir from some forgotten vacation. The liquid inside began to swirl on its own, unnaturally slow, reflecting his face. Then—his eye. He couldn't tell if it was his left or right, but one of them seemed to twist, distorting in the reflection, pulled into the center of the vortex like a whirlpool consuming itself. From within the tiny glass sphere came a voice—high, cold, and crystalline:
"You shouldn't have rewritten the score, Conductor."
The books crashed back to the shelves, and the room snapped back to normal, leaving Ethan gasping, clutching the edge of his desk to steady himself.
----
Sarah sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor, surrounded by old flash drives and external hard drives. After putting Lily back to bed, sleep had become impossible. Instead, she'd pulled out their digital archives, searching for answers in the past.
Her laptop displayed footage from three years ago—Lily at eighteen months old, singing nonsense syllables while playing with colored blocks. Sarah watched intently, comparing the audio signature with recordings she'd made just days ago of Lily's newer songs.
The differences were subtle but unmistakable. Using audio analysis software from her university days, Sarah isolated the frequency patterns. The toddler Lily's voice produced normal, expected harmonic patterns. But recent recordings showed something else entirely—a low-frequency overlay that shouldn't have been possible from a child's vocal cords.
"What is this?" she murmured, zooming in on the spectral display.
The recent audio samples didn't produce consistent sine waves. Instead, they generated shifting spiral patterns, mathematical structures that reminded Sarah of complex equations she'd studied in her theoretical physics courses. But these weren't random—they were responsive, changing with Lily's emotional state as she sang.
Sarah grabbed her notebook, jotting frantically:
Is Lily channeling something that responds to emotional state? A waveform-based intelligence? Some kind of feedback loop between her and Ethan?
She paused, tapping her pen against the paper.
The more she sings, the stronger the effect. The stronger the effect, the more Ethan changes. The more Ethan changes...
Sarah couldn't finish the thought. Something about it terrified her—the logical conclusion seemed too enormous to face.
The ceramic mug beside her computer suddenly splintered with a network of fine cracks, coffee seeping through the fractures. Sarah gasped, jerking back—but when she blinked, the mug was whole again, the liquid contained.
Heart pounding, she reached for the video controls, rewinding the footage of Lily singing. As the audio played backward, Sarah heard something that made her blood freeze—her own voice, whispering clearly through the speakers:
"Don't let her reach 90%."
She slammed the laptop shut, breathing hard in the sudden silence.
----
Lily sat on her bedroom floor, surrounded by crayons and paper in the warm glow of her night light. She should have been sleeping, but sleep meant dreams, and dreams meant seeing the tower again. Drawing was safer.
Her small hand moved across the paper with surprising precision. First, she drew herself—a stick figure with yellow hair and a blue dress. Next to her, she drew her dad—tall with brown hair and strange silver lines coming from his fingers like sparklers. Then her mum—curly hair and glasses, holding what looked like a tablet or phone.
Lily paused, crayon hovering over the paper. Her eyes grew distant, unfocused. When she began drawing again, it was with sharp, confident strokes unusual for a child her age. The fourth figure took shape—unnaturally tall and thin, with elongated fingers and no face, just a blank oval where features should be. In its hands, she drew what appeared to be a violin, but the instrument's body spiraled impossibly, its neck extending into a corkscrew shape.
Finally, behind all the figures, she drew the tower—a massive black structure reaching beyond the page's edge, with red crayon streaks bleeding from its top into the sky.
The bedroom door creaked open. Lily hurriedly flipped the drawing face-down and grabbed a clean sheet as Sarah peered in.
"Lily? You should be asleep, sweetheart."
Lily looked up with innocent eyes. "I had to draw something I saw, Mummy."
Sarah stepped into the room, crouching beside her daughter. "What did you see?"
Instead of answering, Lily began to hum—the familiar melody that had become Ethan's lullaby for her. Sarah relaxed slightly at the familiar tune, but halfway through, the song transformed. The notes twisted, folding into each other, creating dissonant harmonies that shouldn't have been possible from a child's voice.
A sharp pain lanced through Sarah's head. She clutched her temples, vision blurring as the sound seemed to physically reverberate inside her skull. The dissonance lasted only seconds before Lily returned to the original melody, ending on a perfect, innocent note.
When Sarah could focus again, she found her daughter staring at her with unsettling intensity.
"That song makes the bad man real," Lily said matter-of-factly.
"What bad man, Lily?" Sarah asked, struggling to keep her voice steady.
Lily pointed to the overturned drawing. Now, the blank face had black spirals for eyes. "The one who Daddy hurt."
----
Ethan paced his study, phone pressed to his ear. After the incident with the snow globe, he needed expertise beyond his own fractured memories.
"James, I know it sounds crazy," he said, "but I need to understand how backward harmonic encoding works."
On the other end of the line, Dr. James Chen—a friend from university and an expert in acoustic physics—sighed audibly.
"Ethan, reversed harmonics aren't just sound played backward. They're inversions of the original mathematical structure. In theory, they could create..." James paused. "Well, some fringe researchers believe they create connections to alternate harmonic realities."
"What does that mean in practice?" Ethan pressed.
"It means reversing music potentially pulls things from the place it echoes back from," James replied, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. "Sound isn't safe when it loops, Ethan. It creates standing waves, resonance patterns that can—"
The lights flickered violently, cutting James off mid-sentence. From elsewhere in the house, Ethan could hear Lily humming. The house lights pulsed in perfect synchronization with her melody, dimming and brightening with each note change.
"James? You still there?"
"—hearing me? Ethan, whatever you're doing with sound, be careful. There are theories about quantum—"
The call dissolved into static. Through it, Ethan heard something impossible—multiple versions of Lily's voice, singing the same song but at different tempos, layered over each other like an echo chamber stretching across time itself.
His phone's screen flickered, the display replaced by the now-familiar system interface:
[INCOMING HARMONIC INTERFERENCE]
[IDENTITY: UNKNOWN]
[WARNING: FAMILIAL RESONANCE COMPROMISED BY EXTERNAL SIGNAL]
[INITIATING DEFENSIVE PROTOCOLS...]
The layered singing abruptly stopped. So did the lights, plunging the house into darkness for three heartbeats before power returned. In the sudden silence, Ethan heard a single, perfect note—like a tuning fork being struck—coming from the direction of Lily's room.
Sarah jolted awake, heart racing, though she couldn't remember what had disturbed her sleep. The digital clock read 3:17 AM, its red numbers casting a faint glow across the empty space beside her where Ethan should have been. He hadn't come to bed at all.
An inexplicable urge drew her from beneath the covers. The hallway outside their bedroom was dark, but she didn't reach for the light switch. Instead, she moved silently toward Lily's room, drawn by an inaudible sound—a vibration more felt than heard.
The door to Lily's room was ajar, a sliver of unnatural light spilling onto the hallway carpet. Not the warm yellow of Lily's night light, but something colder, with a bluish tinge. Sarah pushed the door open wider.
Lily slept peacefully in her bed, her chest rising and falling with deep, even breaths. But the wall beside her bed...
Sarah's breath caught in her throat. A fissure had appeared in the plaster—a jagged black line about two feet long that seemed to absorb rather than reflect light. It vibrated subtly, emitting that same tuning-fork hum she'd felt rather than heard.
As she approached, the crack appeared to widen slightly. The humming intensified, becoming almost musical—a sustained note that made her teeth ache. Despite every instinct warning her away, Sarah reached out, her fingertips drawn to the darkness.
The moment she touched the crack, reality fractured.
For a heartbeat, Sarah saw not one but many versions of herself, overlapping like imperfectly stacked photographs. One Sarah wept uncontrollably, dressed in black, clutching what appeared to be Ethan's silver-streaked scarf. Another Sarah stood tall, her eyes glowing with an inner light, patterns of energy flowing from her fingertips as she shaped something invisible. A third Sarah turned toward her with a smile that was too wide, too sharp, her eyes black from lid to lid. This one felt familiar, like something she'd buried. A version of her that had chosen power instead of love.
Sarah jerked her hand back with a strangled cry. The visions vanished instantly, but the crack remained, pulsing gently like a living thing.
A small sound made her turn. Lily was sitting up in bed, watching her with wide, alert eyes that shouldn't belong to a child her age.
"Don't let him sing it, Mummy," Lily whispered, her voice oddly doubled, as if two children spoke in perfect unison. "He'll forget who we are again."
"Who, Lily? Who will forget?" Sarah asked, her voice trembling.
Lily's gaze shifted to the crack in the wall, then back to her mother. "Daddy. If the spiral man makes him sing the ending."
Outside, the wind picked up suddenly, whistling through the trees with a sound that, to Sarah's overtaxed senses, sounded almost like distant, mocking laughter.
In the wall, the crack widened.