Page 28 - DivineSparkRising II-TheMirrorofSilenceFinal

Divine Spark Rising
meeting ended. A girl in Seoul filmed herself telling
her mother she had dropped out of university two
months earlier. The mother watched with her back
against a wall and did not speak for a long time.
Then she sat next to her daughter on the floor. They
ate cold noodles without talking.
Henry crossed the square near the cathedral as a
pickpocket apologized to a tourist and handed
back a wallet. The tourist checked the cash and
found all of it still there. He looked confused and
said thank you. The pickpocket shrugged and
walked away like someone who had burned a
bridge and was not sure he had wanted to keep it.
Under a balcony, an old man tuned his radio to a
channel that refused to play anything but silence in
twelve-minute loops. He kept listening as if waiting
for the music inside the silence to give itself a
name. A woman beside him hummed a broken
scale and then laughed at herself for humming.
At four, a short video shook the feeds. It showed
a woman in a lab under a river holding a mug with
a broken handle. The frame was blurry and the
timestamp wrong. It was up for two minutes before
every platform took it down. In the café where
Henry watched, three people saw it and did not say
the name that came to their mouths. They looked at
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