The city woke before its people.
Pipes groaned in the walls of the apartment blocks, coughing up recycled air that tasted faintly of metal and regret. Lights blinked in ordered grids, pale and even, erasing the memory of darkness. From the roof of the Ministry dormitory, Erwin Ruyn watched the world ignite in greyscale.
He had long stopped expecting color. The manuals said light contained only utility now; wavelength modulation was considered wasteful. Even the sun itself seemed disciplined, its rays filtered through the smog dome until they became something obedient.
He sipped the morning ration, lukewarm nutrient broth, and tried to decide whether the ache behind his eyes meant hunger or grief. Neither word had much use in Somnalis anymore.
A horn blared below. Shift change. Lines of workers moved along the causeway, identical coats fluttering like the pages of a manual caught in wind. Erwin joined them, boots striking the metal in rhythm with a thousand others. No one spoke, language itself had been reduced to hand-codes and efficiency reports.
He worked in Sector C-7, Maintenance. A world of whispering generators and slow, patient machines. Every morning, he calibrated the resonance dampers that kept the city's dreams at bay. If the machinery faltered, the Ministry warned, stray emotions could leak into the streets. That had happened once, decades ago. They called it the Bloom, and the memory of it still haunted public training reels, men and women convulsing in sudden laughter, tears, desire, madness. Then came the culling squads, white masks, silent guns.
Erwin had been born after that, but the films were enough.
He entered the maintenance hall and felt the floor tremble slightly under the turbines. Rows of regulators pulsed with a dull, silver light. He preferred this place. here, even silence had texture.
He clocked in, signed his name in grey ink, and slipped on the resonance headset. His first task: realign the Noct-17 coil, a device that whispered just at the edge of hearing. When he tuned it wrong, he swore he could sense something beyond the whisper, like breathing pressed against glass.
He adjusted the dials. The whisper deepened. For a second, it felt as if the coil was not producing the tone but answering something.
He frowned and leaned closer. The metal casing reflected his face back at him, the same flat colors, the same lifeless eyes. And then,
A pulse.
Not whisper, not light, color. Faint, but unmistakable. A thread of crimson ran across the reflection, slicing through his cheek's ghost-image like a scar of living fire.
He jerked back so fast his headset clattered to the floor.
The color vanished.
He stared at the metal, breathing hard. Grey again. Only grey.
"Malfunction," he whispered. The word trembled. He glanced around, no one near enough to hear. He reset the coil, hands shaking.
The whisper returned to its usual pitch, the world steady once more. Still, his pulse refused to calm. He touched his cheek where the color had burned through the reflection. Nothing. Skin cold.
He worked the rest of the shift in silence, but every reflection he passed, polished pipe, puddle of condensate, surface of his tool case, seemed to flicker at the edge of perception.
By the time the siren marked shift end, his head was full of static.
He didn't go straight to the dormitory.
Instead, he took the maintenance elevator down, far below the hab levels, to where the air grew damp and the lights fewer. Officially these sub levels were sealed, but every technician knew a dozen ways to bypass the locks.
He needed to be quiet, real quiet, the kind that doesn't whispers back.
The corridor ended at an observation window. Beyond it lay the old Dreamveil reactor, decommissioned after the Bloom. The glass was fogged with years of condensation, but through it he could see the outline of the reactor core: a vast sphere, dormant, webbed with cracks.
It looked almost… organic.
He wiped the glass with his sleeve.
Behind the cracks, something moved.
A shimmer, like heat rising from asphalt, but darker, oil slick black shot with faint color. He leaned closer until his breath fogged the pane.
Then a hand pressed against the other side.
Human shape, but too thin, too long. The fingers trailed colors as they slid: blue, red, gold. The glass sizzled where they touched. Erwin stumbled back.
The hand withdrew.
For a heartbeat the core glowed crimson, the same shade he had seen in the reflection. The hum of the city wavered around him. the lights in the corridor flickered as if something enormous had exhaled.
When everything steadied again, the reactor was dark.
He ran.
---
Back in his dorm, he tried to convince himself it was exhaustion. He'd been working double shifts. The body hallucinates, the manuals said. Stress can simulate perception errors.
But when he washed his hands, the water running down the drain was pink.
He stared at it. It wasn't blood. It was light. Liquid color, fading as it touched metal.
He laughed once, a sharp, disbelieving sound, and wiped his face with a towel. The towel came away streaked with faint red.
He couldn't sleep.
When he finally closed his eyes, the hum of the turbines followed him into darkness. It grew louder, until it wasn't a sound but a heartbeat. Not his own.
Then the dream began.
The whisper became breath.
He knew he was dreaming, yet his body still felt the weight of the blanket, the pulse behind his eyes. The dorm walls dissolved, and the ceiling stretched upward until it turned into fog. The smell of metal stayed, everything else melted away.
A corridor unfolded beneath his feet, same pattern of panels, but slick, as if sweating. Drops fell from the ceiling and hissed when they hit the floor. Each drop left behind a trace of light that crawled like a worm and vanished.
He moved forward because stillness felt like drowning. The whisper thickened, slow and wet, and out of it came the outline of the reactor door. It was open now, bleeding dull red light.
He heard whispering. Not words, numbers, fragments of instructions, every phrase he had repeated in reports for years. The voice sounded like his own, but spoken by something learning how to use his mouth.
He reached the threshold.
Inside, the sphere floated, cracked along a thousand seams. From each break spilled threads of color, red, blue, gold, streaming upward like smoke in reverse. They bent around him, brushing his skin, sinking into it. Wherever they touched, his nerves woke.
Then he saw her.
A figure sat cross-legged at the center of the sphere, outlined in crimson. A woman, or the echo of one. Her face flickered through versions of others he half remembered, his mother, a stranger, his reflection. When she spoke, the light inside the sphere flared.
"You kept the machines running too long," she said. "Now they whisper to something that isn't there."
He wanted to step back, but the color on his skin tugged him forward.
"Who are you?", Erwin asked
"The part of you that stopped dreaming."
Her hand rose. Threads of light shot from her palm and laced through the cracks. The sphere groaned like a living thing. The sound tore through him, and the next breath he took tasted of iron and salt.
The whisper broke into a scream. The sphere shattered.
Color burst outward, not bright, but heavy, dense enough to feel. It hit him in the chest and drove him backward. He fell, expecting to hit the floor, but there was no floor, only endless grey mist pulling him down.
He tried to shout, but the color filled his mouth.
He woke on the dorm floor, gasping.
The lights buzzed overhead. His sheets were tangled around him, the clock on the wall blinked error codes. He tasted copper.
The mirror above the sink showed a smear of red across his lips.
He scrubbed at it until the skin went raw, then stared at his reflection. For one instant, the reflection smiled back while his real face did not.
He pressed his scarred palm against the glass. It was cold, solid, grey again.
But deep inside the mirror, behind his mirrored eyes, a spark of crimson still pulsed.