The Hum of Auralis

I ride through Auralis like someone threading a needle. The city is seams and gutters, alleys that hold warm air and memory in equal measure, and my bicycle is the only compass I can trust when the map is just noise. At night the Spire keeps its low voice—so low you feel it more in the bones than in the ears—a constant, patient hum that sets the whole place in a kind of slow motion. It is not music, exactly. It is a suggestion: remember this, don't let it slip. Things settle into the hum and become part of the city fabric. The baker's laugh, the exact way steam curls off a pothole, a child's first word. Those threads spool into the Spire and back out again with a softness that made Auralis easy to live in.

My name is Iris Vega. I deliver parcels at night and catalog recordings by morning. My job is tidy in a way people rarely see: I collect people's little audible truths and file them for the archive. Lovers send me last nights' whispers, old men hand me cassette tins of market cries, and a woman from the riverbank gives me jars of wind to press into her daughter's pillow during storms. I keep these things because someone must. There are lines of human sound that cannot be rewritten. There are songs that live only in the mouths of those who still remember. I keep them in a rented room above a noodle shop that smells of ginger and the oil of other people's cooking. My bed is a rolled blanket and a stack of battered field recorders. Against the window a battered set of headphones waits like a faithful animal.

Tonight the Spire is thinner in one place. I notice it first because my recorder catches a gap where there should have been a steady trough of frequency. The city hum is a kind of ocean; a missing dip is like finding a rabbit-sized hole in the sand where you know a crab should be. As I coast past the square, the neon sign over the laundry flickers and a man hunches as if some small, important stitch in his memory has been tugged away. He stops mid-step and stares at the laundry list in his hand as if the words are strange things. The air tastes faintly of ozone and frying garlic. I pedal harder because a courier's instinct is to move toward irregularities. They have a way of becoming big problems if ignored.