Listen City always sounded busiest before eight in the morning.
The city had a way of pretending it was ordinary.
The crosswalks blinked in neat white rows.
The buses knelt at the curb with mechanical sighs.
Students in navy blazers drifted toward school gates with convenience-store coffee, cheap lip tint, and sleep still caught in the corners of their eyes.
Office workers moved in gray and black streams.
Delivery scooters cut through the gaps like impatient drumbeats.
Ordinary, if you only looked.
If you listened, the city was impossible.
A train braking three blocks away scraped like an electric guitar dragged against concrete.
A bicycle bell chimed in perfect major thirds.
Rainwater dripping from an awning tapped out a shy little lo-fi rhythm against the lid of a vending machine.
Somewhere in the crowd, someone’s phone leaked half of a dance-pop chorus before the owner hurriedly turned the volume down.
Mina Lee heard everything at once and automatically started arranging it into layers in her head, the way other people solved math problems or memorized vocabulary.
The buses were the bass line.
Sneakers on wet pavement were hi-hats.
Someone laughing too loudly near the bakery added a bright, messy synth.
She knew this was weird.
Not hearing sounds.
Sorting them.
That was why she kept her music to herself.
Mina adjusted one earbud with cold fingers and walked faster toward Haedam Arts High School.
Her playlist shuffled from a furious guitar intro into a glittery idol track so sweet it would probably rot teeth, then swerved again into a low, sleepy beat built from vinyl crackle and midnight rain.
To Mina, the transition made perfect sense.
The song after anger should be something soft enough to survive it.
The song after sparkle should be something that let the heart cool down.
That was obvious.
To everyone else, apparently, it was a crime against taste.
A scooter splashed through a puddle.
Mina stepped back just in time, hugged her backpack closer, and stopped at the light with a group of first-years.
Their conversation floated toward her.
“Did you see Eunchae’s festival audition clip?” “She’s so good.”
“My brother said if your set list is inconsistent, judges think you don’t know yourself.” “That makes sense.
It means your identity is weak.”
Mina stared at the red hand on the traffic signal and resisted the urge to snort.
Identity is weak.
As if people were soda cans that had to come in one clean flavor.
The light changed.
The crowd moved.
Mina moved with them, her expression arranged into the quiet, harmless look she had perfected by age twelve: not unfriendly, not inviting, not enough to become anyone’s favorite target.
She was good at blending in until somebody asked what she actually liked.
That was always the dangerous part.
At the front gate of Haedam, students streamed beneath a banner that read HAEDAM SPRING SIGNAL FESTIVAL – FIND YOUR SOUND.
Pink and silver ribbons framed the sign.
Underneath, members of the broadcast club were filming cheerful clips for the school account.
Somebody from dance club posed with perfect confidence.
Somebody from vocal department laughed into the camera like they had practiced that exact laugh.
Mina slipped past them and headed for the side entrance.
Her phone buzzed.
Soomin: Are you coming to lunch on the rooftop later?
Mina: Maybe.
Soomin: That means yes.
Soomin: Also if you ghost me again I’ll assume you’ve joined a secret underground band.
Mina almost smiled.
Almost.
She typed, I can’t play anything.
Soomin sent a sticker of a cartoon cat playing three drums at once.
Mina tucked the phone away and climbed the stairs to the second floor.
Her classroom already hummed.
Desks scraped.
Pencil cases unzipped.
A girl near the windows practiced a high note under her breath and got shushed.
Somebody in the back was editing a dance cover on a tablet with the sound off, but Mina could practically hear the choreography anyway.
The room had its own weather each morning, and today it felt shiny, competitive, thin.
“Mina.”
She turned.
Hana Park leaned against the next row of desks, one brow raised.
Hana always looked polished before first period, like she traveled with a personal lighting team.
Her ribbon was tied perfectly.
Her eyeliner never smudged.
Even the boredom in her voice sounded styled.
“You finished the music history worksheet, right?” Mina nodded.
“Yeah.”
“Can I see number four?
I wrote baroque instead of romantic and now I don’t trust myself.”
Mina handed over the sheet.
Hana scanned it, copied the answer, and gave it back with a brief smile that didn’t quite arrive at warmth.
“Thanks.
Oh, by the way—festival submission’s tomorrow.
Are you doing anything this year?” “No.”
“You should,” said Yejin from two desks away, spinning in her chair.
“At least join one group stage.
Otherwise it’s depressing.”
“It’s not depressing to exist quietly,” Mina said before she could stop herself.
Yejin laughed.
“That sounded more dramatic than you intended, didn’t it?” Probably.
Mina sat down and opened her notebook.
The first bell rang.
Homeroom passed in announcements and reminders.
The student vice president talked about the importance of “presenting a consistent artistic image” for the festival.
The phrase made Mina’s shoulders inch upward.
Consistent.
There it was again.
Everywhere lately, people talked as if being one thing very clearly was the same as being real.
Pick a genre.
Pick a look.
Pick a mood.
Pick one side of yourself and market it until even your own reflection believed it.
Mina took notes automatically and let her playlist continue at low volume in one ear.
An old punk song hit its chorus—rough, bright, impossible to apologize for—and she lowered the volume further until she could barely hear it.
A second later she hated herself for doing that.
By break time the weather outside had cleared into a bright, chilly blue.
Sunlight stretched across the classroom floor in hard rectangles.
Mina stood to refill her water bottle before second period, but Yejin’s voice stopped her halfway.
“Wait, wait.
You actually listen to music while studying, right?” Mina paused.
“Sometimes.”
“What kind?”
The question was light.
Casual.
Not a trap on purpose.
That was how traps worked best.
Mina shifted the bottle in her hand.
“Whatever.” “Whatever is not a genre,” Yejin said.
“Give us one artist.”
Hana glanced up from her phone.
Two boys near the back stopped pretending not to listen.
Mina hated how heat climbed her neck so quickly.
“It changes.”
“That means guilty pleasure,” Yejin said.
“It means it changes.”
“So mysterious.” One of the boys laughed.
Mina should have walked away.
She knew that.
Instead, irritated at herself, irritated at them, irritated at the whole stupid morning of labels and consistency and polished certainty, she said, “Why do you care?”
Yejin grinned.
“Because taste says everything.”
No, Mina wanted to say.
Taste says many things.
That’s the point.
It’s supposed to.
But words moved slower than humiliation.
Before she could decide whether to lie, Hana held out a hand.
“Let me see.”
“What?”
“Your playlist.
I’m curious.” “You don’t need to be.”
“Oh, come on,” Yejin said.
“We won’t arrest you.” A few people laughed.
Not cruelly.
Not yet.
That somehow made it worse.
Mina should have refused.
She knew that too.
But another part of her—the exhausted, angry part—wanted proof that she wasn’t the only one making this whole thing weird.
Maybe they would glance at it, shrug, and move on.
Maybe the problem was inside her.
Maybe she was building a disaster out of nothing.
So she pulled out her phone, unlocked it, and opened the playlist she listened to most when she was too tired to lie to herself.
MIXED WEATHER.
Hana looked over before Mina could second-guess it.
For one heartbeat the classroom was silent.
Then Yejin made a sound like she had swallowed her own laugh and failed.
“No way.”
“Wait,” one of the boys said.
“Scroll back.” Mina didn’t move.
Hana, still looking, read aloud in disbelief.
“A hardcore punk track, then a girl-group summer song, then…” She blinked.
“Is this a three-hour lo-fi compilation called Rain on a Bus Window?”
A sharper burst of laughter answered her.
Mina snatched the phone back.
“Give it a rest.” But now everybody wanted a turn at the joke.
“Your playlist has an identity crisis.”
“No, it’s worse.
It’s like four separate people fighting in a food court.” “How do you go from screaming guitars to that cutesy chorus?” “Actually, the sad study beats after the idol song are killing me.” “Mina, are you okay?”
She tried for dry humor.
“Clearly not.”
It might have worked if they had let it end there.
Instead Yejin said, “Seriously, though.
How do you like all of this at once?
Isn’t that kind of… fake?” The room tilted very slightly.
“Fake?” Mina repeated.
“Like you don’t really have a taste.
You just collect vibes.” “Same,” one boy said.
“It’s giving algorithm panic.”
That one landed.
Mina felt it.
Because it touched the exact fear she never said aloud: maybe they were right.
Maybe the reason she moved between sounds so fast was because she lacked something solid in the middle.
Maybe everyone else had a clean melody and she was just static.
“It’s not fake,” she said, quieter now.
Yejin’s shrug was careless.
“Then what is it?”
Mina looked down at her phone screen.
The titles swam.
A punk track she had found during the winter her parents stopped speaking above a murmur.
A bright pop song she had played before exams because joy on purpose still counted as courage.
A lo-fi beat that reminded her of being nine and half asleep in the back seat while city lights slid by like little floating notes.
They weren’t random.
They were a map.
But standing there under fluorescent classroom lights, with people waiting for an answer shaped like a slogan, she suddenly couldn’t explain any of that without sounding ridiculous.
“It’s just music,” she said.
“Then why are you defensive?”
The laugh that followed wasn’t vicious.
It was worse.
It was amused.
Easy.
The kind that made a person feel small because no one around them believed the moment mattered enough to wound.
The second bell rang.
Chairs scraped.
Bags moved.
Conversation broke apart.
Hana had already turned away.
“Anyway,” she said, “maybe don’t shuffle in public.
It’s stressful.” More laughter.
Smaller now.
Residual.
Mina sat down so carefully it felt like breaking.
She put her phone face down on her desk and kept her eyes on the wood grain until the teacher arrived.
Second period passed in fragments.
The teacher discussed rhythm structures.
Somebody answered a question about syncopation.
Pages turned.
Pens clicked.
Mina wrote notes that looked neat and meant nothing.
Inside her chest, a sentence replayed on a loop.
Your playlist has an identity crisis.
Maybe don’t shuffle in public.
Isn’t that kind of fake?
By lunch the screenshot had escaped the classroom.
She knew because her phone buzzed while she was standing in line for triangle kimbap and banana milk at the convenience store across from school.
A message preview flashed from a class group chat she barely used.
YEJIN: not mina’s cursed weather playlist going from rage to sparkle to rainy bus window UNKNOWN: mixed weather is crazy
UNKNOWN: somebody protect the queue button
Mina locked the phone without opening the thread.
Behind the register, the convenience store radio played a cheerful spring song with handclaps in the chorus.
Mina almost laughed at the cruelty.
She paid, stepped back outside, and stood under the awning while students moved around her in loud little islands.
She could still go to the rooftop.
Soomin would make room on the bench, complain about homework, maybe offer one perfect rude comment about everyone in the class.
The humiliation would shrink if she put normal conversation around it.
Instead Mina typed, Sorry.
Headache.
Rain check.
Soomin: You sure?
Mina: Yeah.
Soomin: Okay.
Don’t disappear too hard.
Don’t disappear too hard.
Mina tucked the phone away and took the long route to the old practice building behind the main hall.
Most students used the front courtyard at lunch, which left the back staircase nearly empty.
She liked it there because the walls held sound differently.
Voices from far away arrived softened, as if the building itself respected privacy.
She sat on the top step and unwrapped her kimbap.
For a while, she ate and told herself not to care.
This was not a tragedy.
Nobody had exposed a secret diary.
Nobody had ruined her life.
A few classmates had laughed at her playlist.
In a week, maybe in a day, they would move on to something else.
Then why did her throat still feel tight?
Mina set the kimbap aside and unlocked her phone again.
MIXED WEATHER.
The cover image was a blurry photo of city lights reflected in a puddle.
She had named it at one in the morning last autumn after realizing that all her favorite songs felt like different kinds of weather moving through the same sky.
She remembered lying on her stomach on the bedroom floor, chin on folded arms, adding track after track as if she were stitching a second heartbeat together.
Now the playlist looked childish.
Embarrassing.
She tapped the first song.
A burst of guitar flared into her ears—raw, bright, almost rude in its aliveness.
Too loud?
Good—that’s proof I’m alive.
The sentence came out of nowhere.
Not from the song.
From nowhere.
Mina yanked out one earbud and looked over her shoulder.
Nobody.
The stairwell remained washed in gray daylight.
A paper cup rolled in the corner whenever the breeze found it.
Somewhere below, a door closed.
She frowned and put the earbud back in.
Maybe someone had shouted outside.
The next track shuffled on its own.
A candy-sweet chorus bloomed, all ribboned melody and beating-heart synth.
Mina almost skipped it on reflex, then stopped.
Today of all days, skipping felt like agreeing with them.
She listened.
By the second verse, something inside her chest eased.
Not fully.
Just enough to breathe around.
She pictured Yejin hearing this and dismissing it as shallow.
She pictured Hana advising her to build a cleaner artistic image.
She pictured the whole class reducing every song to the costume it wore on the surface.
Maybe that was what hurt most.
Not that they laughed.
That they listened so lazily.
Mina lowered her gaze to the playlist again and scrolled.
A grinning summer track.
An angry basement-band anthem.
A warm instrumental with vinyl static.
A voice so fragile it sounded like a window on the edge of breaking.
A dance song built entirely for crowded nights and reckless confidence.
A beat for rainy bus rides.
A chorus for surviving yourself.
Not random, she thought fiercely.
Not fake.
I just—
The thought stopped there because she still didn’t know how to finish it.
A burst of voices drifted up from below.
Mina locked the phone and shoved it back into her blazer pocket.
The rest of lunch passed.
Classes resumed.
The day kept moving because days always did, even when a person wanted time to hold still long enough for dignity to return.
In literature, the teacher asked them to write about a line that felt true before they fully understood it.
Mina stared at the page for almost five minutes before writing, I think contradiction is just honesty without good public relations.
She tore the page out afterward and shoved it deep into her bag.
In dance appreciation, students were asked to propose songs for an improvisation assignment.
The room turned into a market of clean self-branding.
“R&B only.” “House.
Obviously.”
“I’m doing only live acoustic tracks this month.”
“If your music doesn’t fit your image, the performance gets muddy.” Mina sat very still and said nothing.
Twice she caught someone glancing toward her phone with a barely hidden smile.
By the final bell, embarrassment had fermented into something denser.
Not exactly anger.
Not exactly shame.
A tired, metallic thing.
The kind that made a person want to peel off their own skin and come back simpler.
Students poured into the hallway.
Lockers slammed.
Weekend plans began forming out loud.
The spring sun had lowered enough to spill amber strips across the floor tiles.
The festival banner in the courtyard fluttered through the windows like a dare.
Find your sound.
As if it were lying on the ground somewhere intact, waiting to be picked up.
Mina took longer than necessary packing her bag.
She waited until the classroom thinned out, until even the loud people had somewhere else to be.
When she finally stepped into the hallway, only a few club members remained on the floor, drifting toward practice rooms.
Her phone buzzed once more.
A direct message this time.
Unknown number: honestly if you liked one thing properly you might actually seem cool No name.
No profile photo she recognized.
Mina stared at the message until the screen dimmed.
Then she locked it, inhaled once through her nose, and started walking.
The main stairwell was crowded, so she cut through the older academic wing, where the hallway lights always came on a little too early and the windows faced west toward the river.
Here the building felt emptier, worn at
the edges.
Trophy cases lined the wall—dance medals, choir certificates, glossy photos of graduating seniors smiling in perfected rows.
Beneath them, Mina’s reflection moved in dark fragments across the glass.
She didn’t look cool.
She didn’t look like someone with a brand.
She looked like a girl with one earbud in and a face she had forgotten to arrange.
The hallway ended in a narrow alcove with tall windows and a dead vending machine no one had replaced in years.
Mina stopped there because she suddenly could not bear one more step toward the front gate, one more chance of running into laughter dressed as casual conversation.
Outside, the sky over Listen City deepened from blue into pale gold.
Apartment windows caught the light.
Far off, traffic thickened into evening rhythm.
Mina leaned against the wall and pulled out her phone.
MIXED WEATHER glowed up at her.
Your taste says everything.
Maybe don’t shuffle in public.
If you liked one thing properly you might actually seem cool.
Her thumb hovered over the playlist options.
Rename.
Edit.
Duplicate.
Delete.
A ridiculous pressure built behind her eyes.
Mina blinked hard and resented the sting of tears immediately.
Crying over this would be obscene.
People were hungry somewhere.
People failed auditions.
People lost things that mattered.
This was just a playlist.
Then why did it feel like someone had pressed a hand around the softest part of her life and called it embarrassing?
Because it wasn’t just songs.
It was mornings survived.
Bus rides endured.
Nights when silence felt too sharp to sit in.
It was the version of herself she never defended properly because by the time anyone asked, she was already apologizing.
Delete playlist?
The pop-up appeared in cold white letters.
This action cannot be undone.
Mina let out a short laugh that sounded wrong in the empty hall.
Maybe that was the point.
Maybe she would feel cleaner if she started over.
Build something presentable.
Something with one genre, one mood, one neat explanation.
A playlist other people could hear without looking at her like she had failed some invisible test.
Her thumb moved down.
Then stopped.
From somewhere nearby came a low crackle.
Mina lifted her head.
The dead vending machine at the end of the alcove glowed for half a second, flickered, and went dark again.
She stared at it.
“Okay,” she muttered.
“Sure.” Her thumb lowered once more.
The hallway lights buzzed.
Not the normal electrical hum.
Something jagged.
Irregular.
Like a speaker dying in slow motion.
Mina froze.
The windows on her left shivered with reflected distortion.
For one dizzy instant the sunset outside stretched into liquid bands of pink and violet, as if the sky had become a glitched screen.
The floor beneath her shoes gave a subtle pulse.
Not movement.
More like rhythm made physical.
No one else was there to notice.
“Hello?” Mina called, before pride could stop her.
No answer.
The crackle sharpened.
Then the sound arrived.
A whisper at first, close to her ear and impossibly far away.
Weird.
Another voice, overlapping it.
Messy.
Then more, multiplying, layered like comments flooding a live stream.
Your taste is lame.
Pick one.
Fake.
Algorithm panic.
Stressful.
Not cool.
Not real.
Not real.
Not real.
Mina jerked backward so hard her shoulder hit the wall.
The phone nearly slipped from her hand.
The hallway did not remain a hallway.
The fluorescent lights burst into strips of wavering color that hung in the air like torn ribbons of neon.
The glass of the trophy case darkened, then filled from within with static-gray particles swirling like ash in water.
Hairline fractures raced across the tiles beneath Mina’s shoes, but instead of splitting open, they glowed with pulsing waveform patterns—up, down, up, down—like the floor itself had become a sound editor’s screen.
At the far end of the corridor, the dead vending machine exhaled black vapor.
Not smoke.
Ink.
It spilled out in threads and droplets, gathered in the air, and shaped itself around a center Mina could not see.
Broken speaker faces surfaced inside it, mask-like and flat-eyed.
Distorted sound rippled from the mass in sick waves that made her teeth hurt.
Mina forgot how to breathe.
The thing moved without legs, gliding forward.
Every inch it advanced left the air grayer.
No one had prepared her for monsters because monsters were not real.
Hallucinations, on the other hand, were extremely real and probably a medical emergency.
Mina tried to step sideways, but the glowing lines on the floor tightened like bars around her feet.
The voices rose.
Erase it.
Delete it.
Make it match.
Make it clean.
Make it quiet.
Her phone screen flashed white in her hand.
DELETE PLAYLIST?
The pop-up had doubled, tripled, multiplied until the entire display was layered with the same sentence.
Underneath it, album covers bled into glitchy static.
Track titles stretched and broke apart.
Mina squeezed the phone so hard her fingers hurt.
“This isn’t happening,” she whispered.
The black mass tilted as if listening.
Then one of the broken speaker-faces cracked open where a mouth should have been and screamed.
The sound hit her like a dropped building.
Mina clapped both hands over her ears.
The phone hit the floor and skidded.
Light exploded behind her eyes in violent bars.
She tasted metal.
And through all of that, absurdly clear, another voice cut in.
“Oh, that thing is so ugly.” Pink light flashed above her.
Mina looked up.
Something small shot out of the air near the ceiling and collided with the black mass like a star falling sideways.
The impact scattered ribbons of pale gold and heart-bright sparks.
The thing recoiled, shrieking in digital static.
A second figure dropped between Mina and the creature with the force of a thrown blade.
Tiny.
Sharp-edged silhouette.
Black and neon.
Headphones like horns.
A little body wrapped in punk attitude and impossible confidence.
It planted itself wide-legged on the glowing tile and pointed at the black mass like it had been waiting all day for a reason.
“Back off,” it snapped.
“She’s not deleting anything.” Mina stared.
Because the thing talking was barely the size of her forearm.
Because it looked like a furious charm doll styled by a rock band.
Because this should have made the situation less terrifying and somehow did not.
The pink-lit one hovered to the left now, all ribbons, sparkle, and bright worried eyes.
It turned toward Mina with immediate alarm.
“Oh no.
Oh no, she can see us.”
“Of course she can see us,” the punk one said.
“The whole Sound Layer opened.” Sound Layer.
The words meant nothing.
Mina opened her mouth.
No sound came out.
A third voice yawned from somewhere above.
“Well,” it said lazily, “that’s one way to meet your human.”
A sneakered little figure dropped from the top of the trophy case and landed in a crouch atop Mina’s fallen phone.
Violet, mint, and easy mischief.
Headphones around the neck.
Smile sharp at the corners.
Where the first one bristled and the second glowed, this one leaned.
Cool as if reality bending around him were mildly entertaining.
He looked up at Mina and tipped an invisible cap.
“Hey,” he said.
“Rough day?”
The black mass screamed again and surged forward.
The tiny punk one bared its teeth.
“Flux, stop flirting and move.” “I’m not flirting.
I’m establishing atmosphere.”
“Riot!” cried the pink one.
“Please!” Riot.
Flux.
The names struck Mina’s mind and stuck there without permission, as if some other part of her had always known them.
Riot lunged first.
Electric red tore through the gray air in a jagged arc.
The black mass reeled.
Bell—because of course the pink one was Bell, Mina somehow knew that too—threw out both hands, and a wash of warm melody flooded the corridor, turning the harsh fluorescent glare into something softer, almost gold.
The static around Mina’s feet loosened enough for her to stumble backward.
Flux kicked her phone up off the floor with one smooth motion, caught it, and flipped it to glance at the screen.
He whistled.
“Wow.
Your playlist really is mixed weather.”
Mina finally found her voice.
“This,” she said hoarsely, “is not the time.” Flux looked delighted.
“She talks back.
Nice.”
The black creature re-formed faster than seemed possible.
Broken speaker-mouths stacked inside each other.
Gray particles thickened.
The hallway around them warped again, the windows now showing not the river but endless lines of comment bubbles scrolling upward in black text.
Cringe.
Pick one.
Too much.
Too random.
Too loud.
Too soft.
Who even are you?
Mina felt each phrase strike somewhere under her ribs.
Bell turned in alarm.
“It’s feeding on what they said to her.” “No kidding,” Riot snapped.
Mina pressed back against the wall.
“What are you?”
All three of them looked at her for exactly one distracted second.
Bell answered first.
“A-MUSEs.”
Riot answered at the same time.
“Busy.”
Flux added, “Tiny disasters with excellent taste.” The creature lunged again.
Riot met it head-on, all neon fury.
Bell’s light threaded around the blows, trying to soften the distortion.
Flux skimmed along the side, striking at weak points in the rhythm of the thing rather than its body, if it even had a body.
Their movements were impossible in different ways: too fast, too light, too intentional, like music translated into combat.
They clashed constantly even in the middle of fighting.
“Left side!” Bell cried.
“I know what left is,” Riot shot back.
“Your definition of strategy is yelling louder,” Flux said.
“My definition of strategy is not chatting while evil printer static eats the hallway!”
Mina should have been screaming.
Running.
Fainting.
Instead she stood there with her heart beating against her throat and noticed the strangest detail of all:
They were not random either.
Riot hit like the first second of deciding not to apologize.
Bell moved like the part of a chorus that arrived just when a person thought they might break.
Flux bent time around pauses, turning awkwardness into rhythm before it could become shame.
Different.
Contradictory.
Somehow working.
The black mass shuddered and swung one long tendril of ink toward Mina.
Bell saw it first.
“Mina!”
The tendril whipped forward.
Mina ducked on instinct.
It struck the wall behind her with a burst of shattered waveform light.
The impact sprayed gray particles across her blazer.
Wherever they touched fabric, cold spread instantly.
Mina gasped.
The whispering voices flooded her head again.
Delete it.
Make it easier.
Make yourself smaller.
Make it make sense.
Stop being embarrassing.
Her knees nearly gave out.
Bell flew toward her at once, horrified.
“Your heart didn’t shrink,” she said urgently, voice bright even through panic.
“The sound just blurred for a moment.”
Riot slashed through the tendril before it could wrap around Mina’s wrist.
“Don’t listen to it!” “Kind of impossible not to!” Mina shouted.
For a second everybody froze.
The black mass pulsed.
The corridor dimmed.
Flux’s gaze sharpened.
“Yo.
She can hear it directly.”
Bell looked from Mina to the creature and back again.
“That means—” “That means later,” Riot snapped.
But later had already cracked open.
Because Mina’s phone, still in Flux’s hand, suddenly blazed with light.
Not white.
Color.
The playlist screen broke apart into floating bars, each track becoming a line of pure sound suspended in air: angry red guitar, silver-gray rain beat, pink-gold chorus, blue midnight hum.
They circled upward around Mina in widening rings.
The three tiny beings turned as one.
Flux lowered the phone slowly.
“Okay,” he said.
“That’s new.” Bell’s eyes went huge.
“No way.”
Riot actually stopped moving long enough to stare.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” The black mass screamed loud enough to rattle the windows.
Then it rushed them all at once.
And Mina, shaking from head to toe, with humiliation still alive in her chest and fear climbing over it, looked at the songs orbiting her like pieces of a self she had almost erased—
and understood, with the absolute clarity that only arrives in impossible moments, that if she pressed delete now, something far bigger than a playlist would disappear.
The hallway filled with light.