L I R A

The frost on Mara’s camera hadn’t melted by morning. It veined the lens overnight, crawling over the glass like it wanted to stay. She keeps wiping at it, pretending it’s residue, but the more she rubs, the deeper it seems to set. None of us mention Theo’s face. We just follow the twins down the music wing, where the air still smells like hymnals and dust.

The choir lockers line both walls with metal grated fronts, half rusted, names from decades ago still etched across masking tape. Alma. Vio. Sister Margo’s ghost scribbles everywhere. The twins walk like they’re drawn by something. I trail after them with Mara clutching her camera close, red light off but still humming faintly.

“In here,” Vio says. Her voice echoes sharper than it should, like the hallway swallowed it wrong. She kneels by the lowest locker, spins the lock once, and it clicks open without a combo. Inside: a folded stack of sheet music, edges furred with frost.

“Tell me that’s not breathing,” Mara mutters.

The paper looks alive. The ink isn’t printed and it’s stitched, dark veins looping between the staff lines. When the twins pull the top page free, a thin puff of cold air spills out, whispering across my fingers. The temperature drops enough that my breath fogs.

I lean closer. “What year is that?”

Alma tilts the page toward the light. “Eighteen seventy-two.”

Her twin finishes softly, “The year the first bell was forged.”

The ink pulses faintly under the light, like a heartbeat. Mara lifts her camera. It blinks red once, then blue.. then static fuzzes the screen.

“Don’t,” I warn, but she’s already zooming in.

The footage skitters, freezing and reforming. Behind the staff lines, faint shapes crawl. Letters. Names.

“Wait,” Mara breathes. She taps the screen, and the image clears just enough to read two signatures looping at the bottom corner:

Alma Sorell. Vio Sorell.

The twins stare at the names. “That’s..”

“Us,” Alma finishes, whispering thin.

For a second, her reflection in the locker door wavers, split down the middle like glass under strain. Then it steadies, but her skin looks too pale in the flicker light.

“Why are the dates doubled?” Mara asks. The numbers shimmer, blurred over each other 1872 / 2025 like the ink can’t choose which year it belongs to.

The hum under my ribs rises, the same low frequency that comes before a toll. My chest tightens until it hurts.

“We were never the first,” I whisper. The air bites at my tongue. “This is just a repeat.”

The pages quiver, like they heard me.

Mara steadies her camera again, knuckles white. The screen keeps cutting between color and static, like it can’t decide which timeline to believe. “This isn’t just frost,” she says. “It’s… alive.”

The twins lean closer, breathing in sync. Their voices drop to the same note, a soft hum that sounds too practiced, too familiar. The ink trembles harder, black bleeding into blue.

“Stop,” I whisper, but they don’t.

Their harmony sharpens until the air ripples. The locker doors rattle in rhythm. A faint echo like another set of voices, older and thinner which threads through theirs. It’s coming from the sheet itself, whispering the same melody a beat behind.

Mara’s camera sputters to life, capturing the double harmony. The display shows two identical figures overlapping the twins, moving half a second out of sync. Their faces are smudged in frost, but one mouth curves upward. Smiling.

“That’s not a reflection,” Mara says, voice breaking.

Alma lowers the page slowly. “They were here. They sang this.”

Vio’s tone fades to a whisper. “Maybe we still are.”

The hum stops. The silence after feels wrong and too sudden, too empty.

I take the music from them. The paper is cold, heavier than it should be. Between the staff lines, the frost-ink veins twist and settle into a new shape. Notes rearranging. Words surfacing.

I can almost read them before they vanish again: LISTEN. DUE.

The melody echoes faintly in my head, a low dissonant hum that matches the toll buried in my bones. My pulse syncs to it whether I want it to or not.

Mara steps closer, whispering like she’s afraid to break the moment. “It’s the same handwriting as Sister Margo’s hymns.”

The name freezes the air between us.

I swallow hard, my voice barely sounds. “Then it’s not just history. It’s a ritual score.”

For a second, everything feels too still like the whole choir room is holding its breath. Then a single strip of frost crawls from the edge of the sheet to my fingertip and burns cold against my skin.

I dropped the page.

Mara’s camera catches the fall with one perfect frame of the score mid-air, the notes rearranging again into something I can’t read.

Not yet.

By lunch, classes have blurred back into normal, if Hollowbrook ever had normal. The bell tower’s shadow spills through the choir loft windows, slicing the room into gold and gray, but Callen stays, sitting backward on one of the pews with his hood half down.

I should leave. I don’t.

The score lies open on the music stand between us, frost-ink glinting faintly like it’s breathing. Every few seconds, a soft vibration hums up through the wood and into my hands.

“Does it always do that?” I ask.

He looks up, one corner of his mouth lifting just slightly. “Only when it recognizes someone.”

“That’s comforting,” I mutter.

He doesn’t smile. “It shouldn’t be awake at all.” His fingers brush the edge of the page, careful and reverent. “This music was never meant to be sung. It was meant to be heard by the bell.”

The way he says the bell makes my pulse hitch. Like it’s a living thing that listens.

He hums then, low and tentative, a single chord that sounds wrong on purpose with dissonant and vibrating at the edges of hearing. The room itself seems to shift with it. Dust rises from the rafters.

The same hum ripples down my spine, sinking straight into bone. My breath stutters. “Don’t,” I whisper, but it comes out too late.

The score shivers. Notes bloom along the staff lines, rearranging to match his pitch.

Callen stops, startled. His voice drops to a rough whisper. “You felt that?”

“Felt it? It..” I press my palm against my chest, heart hammering out of rhythm. “It answered you.”

He’s silent for a moment, eyes dark and unreadable. “No. It answered you through me.”

The space between us feels too small now, air pulled tight like a string. He reaches toward the page again, and my hand moves before I can think, catching his wrist. His skin is colder than it should be.

“Callen..”

The hum builds again, this time from somewhere higher. The rafters tremble, and for one terrifying instant I think the bell is about to toll.

Then… silence.

He looks at me like he wants to say something and doesn’t. His pulse flickers beneath my fingers, matching mine exactly.

A soft sound drifts from the stairwell. Footsteps.

Ezra.

He stops just out of sight, frozen halfway up. I can feel him watching even before I turn.

Callen’s hand slips from mine. He closes the music gently, voice low. “You should go.”

When I glance toward the stairs again, Ezra’s gone.

The silence he leaves behind hums louder than the chord ever did.

I don’t remember leaving the loft. I just know the music followed me.

By the time I reach the practice room again, the score has slipped halfway off the stand, pages fluttering in a draft that shouldn’t exist. The air tastes metallic, cold enough to sting.

Mara’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, camera powered back on. The frost across the lens has melted into tiny silver beads. “It’s happening again,” she says.

“What is?”

“The notes are moving.”

She’s right. The ink threads between the staves twitch, pulling apart and curling back in slow, deliberate strokes. Staff lines bend like ribs flexing. The music is rewriting itself, soundless, but alive.

The twins hover by the door, faces pale. “It’s singing,” Alma whispers.

Vio shakes her head. “No. It’s remembering.”

The hum thickens until it presses against my skull. The same dissonant tone Callen hummed in the loft. My chest seizes in sync with it.

Mara lifts the camera again; the screen flickers through static, then steadies on the score. “It’s spelling something… look!”

The staff lines ripple. Notes realign. At the bottom corner, the signatures begin to melt, letters sliding apart like wax.

Alma Sorell blurs.
Vio Sorell smears.
And in their place, new frost ink blooms, bright enough to glow.

Lira Vesper.

My name burns in silver across the page, fresh and perfect.

The hum stops. The air stills.

Then, somewhere above the rafters, a single bell tone rings with soft, clean, too pure to be mechanical.

The frost on the page spreads, swallowing my name until only the faintest shimmer remains.

Mara lowers the camera, whispering trembling through the silence. “It just wrote to you.”

I can’t breathe. The room feels like the pause between heartbeats.

Then the score twitches once more
and one glowing note at the top edge blinks like an open eye.