The first time I heard music, I thought I was dying. It started with a vibration in my skull, a forbidden whisper slithering into my brain like a secret I wasn’t supposed to know. Then came the rhythm—a gentle tap-tap-tap against my ribs. And just as I was about to scream, the melody hit. I stood there, frozen, as an orchestra erupted in my head, colours bursting in front of my eyes. My feet betrayed me first, tapping along like they had been waiting for this moment their entire lives. My hands followed, drumming an invisible beat against my thighs. It was exhilarating. It was terrifying. It was— “Illegal!”
The voice jolted me back to reality. I turned to see the grim face of Officer Halloway, the city’s most feared enforcer of the Quiet Code. I swallowed hard. My heartbeat was still playing bass in my ears.
“I -I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied, which was a terrible idea because my body was still doing jazz hands.
“You’ve been infected,” he snarled. “Who gave you the Sound?”
I had two choices: sell out my dealer or make a run for it. I went with option three—pretend to faint.
Now, let me tell you, fainting on command is harder than movies make it seem. I dramatically flopped to the ground, but instead of going limp, I hit the pavement like a bag of frozen chickens. Officer Halloway was unimpressed.
“Nice try, Noise Rat,” he said, yanking me up by the collar. “You’re coming with me.“
Noise Rat. That’s what they called people like me—people who had heard sound and lived to tell the tale. According to the government, sound was a disease. A plague that could spread just by exposure. The Quiet Code was enforced after The Great Hush, an event so classified that even mentioning it could get you sent to the Silence Ward.
As Officer Halloway dragged me through the streets, I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in a shop window. My pupils were dilated, my face flushed. They said people who heard music never came back the same. They weren’t wrong.
I wasn’t just different. I was alive.
I was thrown into an interrogation room, where a stone-faced woman in a gray suit leaned forward and whispered, “Tell me who gave you the Sound, and we’ll make this easy.“
I smirked. “Define ‘easy.’”
She sighed and slid a small black device across the table. “This was found on you. Care to explain?“
I stared at it. A tiny earpiece, almost invisible, containing the most powerful contraband in the world: music. My ticket to another world.
I leaned back. “I’ve never seen that before in my life.”
She pressed a button, and the room filled with sound. A single note. Soft. Gentle. The kind of note that could change a person forever.
Her eyes widened. “Wait. I can—” She clutched her head, her breath hitching. “I can hear it.”
A slow smile crept across my face.
“Yeah,” I said. “And now, you’ll never be the same.“
For a moment, she just sat there. Then, slowly, her fingers tapped against the table. A rhythm. A beat. A rebellion.
Officer Halloway burst in, panic in his eyes. “Turn it off! It’s contagious!”
Too late.
The Sound had spread.
And for the first time in a long, long time, the world started to dance.