KIRA

By the third morning, I'd named it.

Not out loud. Not to Dante, not to the healer, not to anyone. But in the quiet of my own mind, I'd started calling it the hum, because that was the closest word I had for it.

It wasn't pain. It wasn't dizziness, exactly, though sometimes it preceded both. It was more like — a frequency. Something sitting just beneath hearing, just beneath thought, vibrating at a pitch that made the edges of everything feel slightly less real than they should.

It ...