The first time I heard the voice, I almost deleted it.
It came wrapped in a static file corrupted by time and neglect. I pressed play out of habit, ready to transcribe the mumble into something clear. But what came through wasn't just sound; it was a pulse, a breath, a tone so intimate it made my skin rise.
"You don't have to run anymore."
I didn't move at first. I said to the empty office. "No, that's not"
The waveform pulsed on the screen, the cursor wavering like a trapped moth. "Is it yours?" Lara's voice came through the phone speaker before I'd asked her to call. "You sound like you're muttering to ghosts."
"I thought it was noise." I kept my voice steady, but my thumb trembled on the spacebar. "Listen."
She clicked. "Maya?" she whispered seconds later. "That sounds exactly like you."
"That's what I said." I pulled the headphones off and laughed because laughing felt safer than saying anything else. "It's a corrupted file. People sound similar sometimes."
"Similar?" Lara scoffed. "That's your voice, May. The hitch. The breath. Don't tell me corruption, have copies of you now."
I rubbed my thumb against my teeth. "Then why is my name on the project file?"
Silence answered, long and useless. "Maybe someone mislabeled it," Lara offered. "Maybe the lab"
"Maybe." I'd heard maybe my whole life. They were good at settling things into neat, useless piles. I opened the file again. The voice came back softer, the small pause before 'run' that I recognized in mirrors, in late-night messages: mine.
A message popped up on my phone. Unknown number.
'Stop listening.'
"I'm getting a weird text." I read it aloud because saying it out loud made it exist away from my chest. "Unknown number. Stop listening."
"Delete it," Lara said. "Now."
I didn't delete it. I stared at the words like they might explain themselves. The office hummed around me with air vents, the distant clack of keys, the kind of white noise that pretends to be safe.
At home that night the city had the metallic taste of rain. I made coffee and tried to be practical. "It's someone messing with the files," I told myself, and then to the apartment: "It's a prank."
There was another voice in the recording when the file looped bare, patient, and then gone. "Maya," it said. "You shouldn't have come back."
My mug hit the desk hard enough to rattle. "Who said that?" I asked the room. No answer. The radiator sighed. The apartment felt small; the shadows in the hallway looked like people with their backs turned.
Someone knocked.
I stood up so fast my chair scraped. At the door, I kept to the edge of the peephole like a spy. A man stood under the stairwell light, coat soaked and hair plastered. Blue eyes, tired, polite as a careful apology.
"Maya Lorne?" he said when I cracked the door a fraction. "I'm Dr. Rowan Hale. I need to speak with you about a file."
"Why are you at my door?"
He rubbed a hand over his chest, nervous, human.
"Because the records say those samples were yours. Because someone wasn't careful. Because."
He drew a long, weighted breath.
"If that recording woke you, then whatever we thought was over isn't."
"Who gave you my address?" I asked, teeth tight. The rain had left him freckled with droplets; he looked less like a ghost and more like a man who'd been awake too long.
"I tracked it," he said. He stopped, then tried again. "I'm trying to fix what I broke."
"Fix?" I had work in my inbox and an extra file to process and a strange, sinking thought that someone was reading my face and cataloguing my fear. "What did you break?"
He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he looked past me into the hallway as if expecting someone else to be there. "Amelia," he said finally. "She's the name tied to that project."
"Amelia who?" I asked. "Why would her voice sound like mine?" My voice came out sharp. Vulnerability is sharp when you catch it by surprise.
"Because of the experiment" Rowan's words came cautious, like stepping on ice. "It sampled emotional signatures. People's speech patterns, memory triggers. If a file is corrupted, fragments can reassemble in odd ways. Sometimes it sounds like someone else."
"Sometimes?" I asked. "Sometimes my voice shows up and I get an anonymous text telling me to stop listening?"
He swallowed. "I can't explain everything." He glanced at my phone when it lit up, as if sensing the pulse. "May I come in?"
He smelled of cedar and faint antiseptic. He looked at me like a man holding ashes and told to smile. His hand trembled on the doorframe.
"Fine," I said. My hand closed around the knob and the apartment door clicked open. He stepped across the threshold as if entering a place that might reject him, and then he closed the door behind him with one steady movement.
"You shouldn't have opened that file," he said, setting his soaked coat on a chair. "People kept things hoping they'd stay buried."
"Who kept things?" I asked. My pulse was oddly loud. "Who is 'they'?"
He lowered himself onto the couch like a man in a confession booth. "We did," he said. "My team thought we were helping. We were studying memory, how voices are tied to feeling. There was an incident."
"An incident." I repeated, it tasted bad. "Two years ago?"
"Yes." He flinched, the word carrying a weight that bent him. "Amelia Thomas. She was part of a study. She" He stopped and for a second the air was so still I could hear the faucet in the next apartment. "She died."
I leaned against the bookshelf because my knees felt unsteady. "Died how?" My voice was smaller than I expected. "Accident?"
"There were complications," he said. "Things happened that were never meant to." His jaw tightened. "We thought we could control the echoes. We were wrong."
"You're telling me this now because?" My sentence broke and I let it. Vulnerability can be its own weapon if you use it carefully.
"Because the sample you found shouldn't exist," he said. "Because someone put it where you'd hear it. Because if people are digging for connections if someone is trying to pull that work back into the light then you being involved makes you vulnerable."
A distant horn sounded. Rain drummed on the window like fingers tapping for attention.
A message lit my phone again. Unknown number. This time it read: 'Be careful. She knows.'
Rowan's eyes went to the screen like it was a diagnosis. He reached for it before I could and then stopped, hand hovering. He looked at me hard, and there was something terrible and hopeful in the way he said my name: "Maya."
"I'm sorry," he said. His voice was a small thing. "I didn't know they would reach you."
"Who is they?" I asked. "Who wants to pull this up?"
He closed his eyes for a second and when he opened them there was a choice in his gaze, confession or protection. "People who loved Amelia and didn't get answers. People who lost faith in us. People who think someone should be held to blame." He folded his hands together until his knuckles whitened. "And maybe people who never stopped being afraid."
I pressed my palm flat on the kitchen counter as if grounding myself would keep me from falling into panic. "So what now?" I asked.
He met my eyes. "You stay away," he said, the sentence not a demand, but a plea. "You stop following the sound" He paused, then added, quieter, "or you let me show you everything. Honestly."
"Show me everything?" The words tasted like a dare. "You want me to trust you after midnight knocks on my door and some file that sounds like my own voice?"
He nodded. "I want you to decide with open eyes."
I thought about the voice, the breath, the pause, the way it said 'run' like someone had taught me that word with care. "One condition," I said finally. "If you let me see, you don't lie by omission. No ledgers kept from me."
He looked at me as if I'd just written the wrong word in the wrong place. Then he said, very slowly, "I can do that. I will do that."
There was another knock, softer this time, at the door. Both of us froze.
We listened. Footsteps in the hall faded. Silence thickened. The city outside seemed to hold its breath.
"Who was that?" I whispered.
Rowan checked the peephole, jaw tightening for a heartbeat before he masked it with a small, unreadable smile.
"Just someone passing by."
When he turned back, the phone on the coffee table buzzed again. Another unknown number. I felt the room tilt.
He picked it up with hands that no longer trembled. The message read: 'They know you found the voice.'
Rowan looked at me like we were two people who had just stepped onto a moving train. He said one word and it landed in the room like a verdict.
"Run."