They told him the wall was just concrete — just one of thousands that held up the city. Nothing sacred. Nothing strange.
But Arian Vale had touched it once, and he knew they were lying.
It was three in the morning when he stood before it again. Towering and grey, it stretched across the southern edge of Sector 9-West, where the streetlights ended and cameras stopped blinking. Behind it, nothing. A black zone. No data, no patrols, not even birds. The city ended here — or at least that's what they said.
He reached out a hand and laid it flat against the surface. The concrete was cold, and rough, and still… alive somehow. Like it remembered things.
He closed his eyes.
Boom.
A whisper.
Boom.
A scream.
Boom.
A name he couldn't quite hear.
Then the static returned, like always.
He pulled his hand back. His fingers tingled like they'd been burned. He looked around quickly — empty street, dead silence. No drones. No eyes. But the feeling didn't leave. The wall had watched him.
He stepped back, breathing slow. The voices never came in daylight. Only here, in the border-dark, where the city forgot its own limits.
The next morning, Arian sat at his usual desk in the Ministry of Reconciliation. Grey walls. Grey uniforms. Grey work.
He slipped on his headset. The screen lit up with a report:
SUBJECT: VERBAL OFFENSE — PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE.
SUSPECT: D-42-109, FEMALE, AGE 64.
VIOLATION: USE OF PHRASE "THE SKY REMEMBERS."
His job was to scrub it. Delete the phrase. Replace it with an approved one. Flag it if the offender had a history. Forward it if the words repeated.
It was mechanical, numbing work. But today, something caught his attention.
The message wasn't digital. It was handwritten. Scanned from old paper. There was something about the loops of the letters — shaky but urgent — that made him pause.
Arian blinked.
There. In the corner of the page. Faint, almost invisible. A smudge. No — a mark.
He leaned closer.
A circle. With a single crack down the center. He knew that symbol.
It was one of the ones he'd been sketching for years — without knowing why. Symbols that came to him in dreams, or carved themselves into the fog of his mind while he stared out windows.
His heart pounded.
He tapped the scanner. It didn't flag it. That meant it wasn't in the system. Which meant… it was real. Ancient. Forgotten. Or erased.
He marked the file for destruction. Then, in a single act of treason so small it barely felt real, he copied the image into the corner of his notebook and slipped it back into his pocket.
At lunch, he met Nima in the archive corridor. She always wore her hair in a sharp side-cut, like she was daring someone to comment. No one ever did.
"You're walking funny," she said without looking up from her data tablet.
"I'm not."
"You are. That means you're hiding something."
Arian smirked. "I work in state security. I hide everything."
She glanced at him. "But today you're doing a bad job."
He considered telling her. About the mark. The wall. The voices. But Nima had her own secrets. They all did. You couldn't survive in the Ministry without learning how to be a stranger, even to your friends.
Instead, he said, "Ever hear the phrase 'The sky remembers'?"
She stiffened.
A pause.
"Where'd you see that?" she asked, voice lower now.
"Old letter," Arian said casually. "From Sector D. Sixty-four-year-old woman. Probably nothing."
Nima didn't blink. "That phrase hasn't shown up in twenty years. Not since the Erasure."
Arian knew the word, but no one ever used it. The Erasure. Capital E. A myth. A threat. A scar.
"I thought that was propaganda," he said.
Nima shook her head. "It was real. And if that phrase is back, we're in danger."
That night, he returned to the wall.
This time, it was already waiting for him.
There was something new. A word. Scratched into the concrete, right at eye level.
"WHISPER."
Below it, fresh. Wet. Red.
Blood.
Arian froze. He looked around. No footsteps. No sound. But the message was meant for him. Someone had known he'd come back.
He turned to leave — and came face to face with a figure in a dark coat, standing just ten steps away.
The man didn't move. His face was hidden beneath a hood. But his presence hit like thunder.
"You hear it, don't you?" the man said.
Arian didn't respond.
"The wall. It breathes when the Republic forgets. It remembers what they try to erase."
"Who are you?" Arian asked.
The man tilted his head.
"I'm what's left when silence fails."
Then, without a sound, he was gone.
Arian walked home with trembling hands.
Inside his bedroom, he pulled out his notebook and flipped to the back page. There, between half-finished sketches and nonsense symbols, he drew the mark again.
A circle. Cracked.
Underneath it, he wrote one word:
"Whisper."
Then he whispered it aloud.
The lights in his room flickered.
And from the hallway outside… a radio crackled to life.