Maya said, "Nope."
Luis said, "Nope nope nope."
More lines followed, indifferent to their panic.
INITIALIZING RESONANCE INTERPRETER
SEARCHING FOR AUTHORIZED VOICE
"Shut it down," Dr. Chen said. "Hard. Pull the main."
Luis yanked the breaker lever on the wall.
The lab went dark monitors, work lights, even the emergency exit sign.
The noise stayed.
One by one, phones in pockets lit up of their own accord.
Ethan's vibrated in his hand.
The same text crawled across his lock screen, then across Maya's, then Luis's.
"Did you install a lab-wide prank?" Maya whispered.
"I can't even get the printer to listen to me," Ethan said.
The text kept going.
AUTHORIZED VOICE: SEARCHING…
AUTHORIZED VOICE: FOUND
IDENTIFIER: VA'RUNA
STATUS: INCARNATION CONFIRMED
Everything stopped.
They stared at him.
Luis broke the silence. "Dude. Did your phone just call you a Roman senator?"
Ethan's mouth was dry.
His phone wasn't showing a notification.
It was showing a command line that didn't exist on any OS he knew.
"Okay," Dr. Chen said, voice too calm. "No one panic. This is a hallucination we are all sharing because the coffee was cursed."
Alarms woke up then, finally deciding this was their moment.
A siren wailed.
Red strobes flashed.
The speaker ring hummed louder.
"Out," Dr. Chen snapped. "Now."
They moved.
Luis got the door.
Maya grabbed a hard drive with both hands like it was a cat she loved.
Ethan grabbed his laptop and that cursed coffee.
The hallway was a strobe of red and white.
Other doors opened.
Heads popped out.
The building joined the panic economy.
They reached the stairwell.
Ethan's phone buzzed again. His thumb, traitor, looked.
One line, bigger than the rest.
SPEAK
He told his thumb to stop being an idiot. His thumb didn't listen.
He felt it again that pressure to shape a sound you haven't learned yet.
A syllable sat at the base of his skull like a coin someone had pushed into his brain for a magic trick.
"Ethan," Maya said, grabbing his sleeve. "Hey. Stay with us."
"I am," he said.
He was lying.
A bright white popped behind his eyes.
The stairwell shook.
Somewhere below, something metal screamed.
The building thought about not being a building anymore.
"Down!" Dr. Chen shouted.
They ran. On the second landing, a fluorescent tube exploded.
Glass rained.
A shard kissed Ethan's cheek.
He flinched and tasted copper.
Another buzz.
Another line.
SPEAK // ROOT ACCESS AWAITING
"I don't know what you want," he muttered.
"Who are you talking to?" Luis said.
"No one," Ethan lied again.
They spilled into the ground floor corridor.
The exit doors were twenty yards away.
The alarm had decided to compete with itself by getting louder.
People streamed around them.
Some were crying. Some were filming, because people are always filming.
The noise followed them, attached like a leash.
The ring of speakers upstairs he could feel it was still counting.
"Go," Dr. Chen said. "Outside. Now."
They hit the push bar.
The door gave.
Cold rain slapped faces.
Fire trucks were already turning onto the street like the future had texted them.
They ran out under the awning.
Ethan turned back, because of course he did.
The lab windows on the third floor glowed faintly, a pulse behind glass.
He felt the syllable again, bigger now. He could almost say it.
He didn't know what it meant, but he knew what it would do.
"Don't," Maya said, reading him. "Please. Don't be the guy who says the magic word at the exploding building."
He laughed, choking on it. "I… won't."
A bolt of lightning jumped between two clouds and decided the building was an okay friend.
The strike didn't hit a rod.
It hit the ring above the chamber.
He knew it did. He felt it land.
The shockwave slapped the street like a god clapped once.
People screamed.
He dropped to a knee.
His phone flew out of his hand, skittered, and stopped face-up in a puddle, still glowing.
He crawled for it without thinking. He reached. His fingers closed.
The screen filled with text that wasn't text, lines that were lines only because his head couldn't handle what they were.
For a second, the rain stopped hitting him.
Not because it stopped raining.
Because the drops curved around him like the air had been told a rule and agreed to obey.
The line on the screen simplified for him like a teacher talking to a student who wanted to believe.
SPEAK // LIFE // SOUL // TRUE
His mouth opened of its own accord. He said, "Tha—"
Maya slammed into him like a linebacker, tackling him back under the awning.
The syllable died on his tongue. The air snapped back.
Rain hit him like it had been offended.
"Are you insane?" she shouted, over the sirens. "Do not say weird syllables while lightning is happening!"
He nodded, dazed. "Yeah. Yeah. Sorry."
A chunk of something heavy fell somewhere close enough to have opinions about his head.
He looked at Dr. Chen.
She was on her phone, barking at someone with authority in her spine.
"Everyone out," she was saying. "Evacuate the whole block. I don't care if the dean's in the bathroom get him out too."
Luis crouched in front of Ethan. "Your face is bleeding."
"Occupational hazard," Ethan said.
"Of what?"
"Being me."
The sirens doubled. The ground shook again, softer. The lab windows browned with smoke.
Ethan's phone buzzed one last time. He looked.
The letters were calmer now, like a parent kneeling to eye level.
VA'RUNA // WE HEAR YOU
"Who's 'we'?" he whispered.
No answer.
The screen went black. The rain got louder or his head got quieter, he couldn't tell which.
EMTs moved toward them with a stretcher. One of them said, "Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine," he started to say.
His chest squeezed like a fist had wrapped around his heart and decided to check how squeezable it was.
The world tunneled.
For a stupid moment he thought, I should not have skipped the chicken curry.
He dropped.
The EMT caught his head. Maya's face hovered and blurred. "Ethan. Hey. Stay with me."
He tried.
He did.
He wanted to make a joke but couldn't find a word that wasn't heavy.
The sirens blurred into a long tone.
His phone lit without his touch.
One final line.
IDENTIFIER CONFIRMED // INCARNATION PROTOCOL READY
He didn't understand what incarnation was supposed to mean in a parking lot in the rain with a hole punching his chest from the inside.
"Ethan!" Maya's voice, scared now. "Hold on."
He thought of his mother and the shelves of Tupperware.
Of Riya flipping him off with affection.
Of Luis and his chips.
Of Dr. Chen pretending not to care as much as she did.
Of the ring of speakers that had been waiting for a century for the wrong person to walk into the right room.
Something warm and impossible touched the base of his skull.
It felt like someone leaned close and whispered in a language he did not know and absolutely understood.
A word.
Not an English word.
Not any word he'd ever heard. But it fit him.
It seated into him like a key finally turned.