White Noise Protocol

The city at three a.m. kept its secrets behind glass and hum. Streetlights in Glassford wore a tired yellow, pools of diluted gold on wet asphalt; the river beneath the bridge moved with a low, metallic syllable that pushed through Elena Raya's ribs like an argument. She had learned to read the city by its undernotes. Sounds carried meaning for her the way color might for another person: a freight train's brakes curdled blue, a far siren brightened at the edges, and the steady buzz of the transformer at the north end of the viaduct held the same shade as the small, stubborn grief she kept folded into a coin beneath her mattress.

Her recorder was heavy in her hands, a black compact unit scarred with stickers and tape where old stickers had been peeled away. She set it on the concrete bench that jutted from the ruined platform like a rib and took off her gloves. Cold worked through the fabric; her fingers had ached for an hour and then gone numb, a necessary price for listening. She placed the mic where the concourse's echo spiraled most clearly, angled it toward the mouth of the tunnel. The abandoned tram tracks hunched into darkness, a seam that swallowed light and promised certain kinds of truth.

When she pressed Record, Glassford rearranged itself into layers. There was the soft scrape of rats behind a boarded storefront, the distant thump of a generator somewhere under the hospital, a man coughing three blocks over. Her ears found rhythms her eyes could not. She let the machine swallow fifteen minutes; that was the habit, the ritual that had steadied her since she left the conservatory and started making a living selling night-soundscapes to advertising firms and to families who wanted to remember a street before it turned into glass. Night work paid better, and it left the city honest.

Halfway through the take, a voice cut through the static like a needle through silk. It wasn't loud; it threaded into the ambient hiss, an unlikely melody that threaded the low transformer hum and the scrape of wind over rust. "Elena?" The pitch was thin, as if whoever spoke were pressing their mouth to a grate. Her scalp tightened. She checked the levels instinctively. The voice came in under a soft blue frequency, one she had started to associate with human proximity. There was no reverb she expected from the tunnel mouth; instead it sounded as if the speaker were tilted sideways to the world, speaking through the wall of a dream.

She leaned forward so far the bench bit into her thighs. "Who is—" she started, but the recorder had already captured the word, and at play back the syllable crouched in the static: "—Raya." Not Elena; Raya. Her own name, spoken with a tenderness that she recognized like the curve of an old melody. The voice did not belong to anyone she could place by sight—too much rumble, a breath that crinkled like paper—but it had the easy weariness of someone who had been travelling a long distance inside themselves.

By the time the streetlamp to her left spat a gutter of rain, the voice had vanished. The tape kept its honest hiss. Elena rewound three times, then four. The waveform showed a slice of energy that threaded clean through the white noise band like a bright wire. She exported the file to her phone and, because she never trusted anything to ephemeral memory, set the original onto the bench beside the recorder as if a small relic might anchor the event. In her pocket her fingers closed around an old coin, and she felt the weight of the grief beneath the mattress—the brother she'd been looking for in the empty spaces of the city since he had disappeared, six years ago, like a note cut from a score.