Page 113 - DivineSparkRising II-TheMirrorofSilenceFinal

Nicholas Boothman
Zhara hissed through her teeth. “I’ve seen
sieges. Nothing moves like this.”
3. Cities on Mute
Tangier held—stuttering, swaying, arguing with
itself—but holding.
Elsewhere, the field fell like a soft wall. In a
Berlin library, everyone stood with the same book
open to the same page and could not remember
what chapter meant. In a Tokyo kindergarten, a
teacher clapped rhythm to hold the room together;
the children clapped back and the rhythm
survived, thin as thread. In Toronto, a woman
wrote love on a whiteboard, left the room for
coffee, and returned to find the board clean and her
marker cap in her pocket and her hands shaking.
Carolina patched emergency feeds through the
old transmitters. Silent video of a Cairo street
where traffic rules collapsed without anger. A
Lagos radio DJ who stayed on air saying I am here
into a dead microphone for twenty minutes and
later could not recall he had done it.
Henry felt helplessness try to drain him of
voltage. He remembered Sofia once telling him in
Coimbra: helplessness is a choice, too. He hated
how even now the sentence was elegant.
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