Elisa Maza: Night Defender by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Elisa-Maza-Night-Defender-1268724585#image-1

Elisa Maza: Night Defender ANIMATION

Echoes on Broadway

The city's steel ribs sang, and Broadway tilted his stone head to catch a note no radio could play. It was not music exactly — not the practiced shine of a musical theater number or the rumble of a subway — but a thin, corrugated keening threaded through alleys and ventilations, as if someone had taken the city's leftover sounds, stitched them together, and teased out a melody meant to hold a mind open like a hand.

Elisa Maza smelled rain and fear. She had been a cop long enough to recognize patterns, and a lifetime of listening to people had taught her that the most dangerous lies often arrived as truths sung by a familiar voice. That night the familiar voice came through a broken payphone in a gutted storefront—her mother's lullaby, braided with the static of a busted transistor. The lullaby belonged nowhere but the past, and yet it circled the block, looping like a stuck record and pulling at the bones of anyone who heard it.

"That's not a woman, Elisa," Broadway said softly, each syllable making his granite jaw flex. He leaned his massive forearm against the lamppost, wings folded and still, night-grit dusting his shoulders like stage powder. His eyes were theatrical pools of blue that watched the city the way a poet watches a storm. "It's a pattern—arranged. Someone composing with the city's throats."

"Composing what?" Elisa asked. The detective in her moved in quick geometries: block maps, victim reports, CCTV anomalies. "We've had three sound-related incidents in twenty-four hours. People find shards of glass singing to them, a saxophone that hums words when it shouldn't, and a radio that repeats a name until the listener walks into traffic."

"Memory theft," Broadway said. He did not often use the clinical words of humans. He preferred metaphor, thespian flourishes. Tonight his voice was low and precise. "Sound, when arranged with enough intention, can pluck at the thread that ties a memory to a name. Singers know how to make an audience remember a face. This... this makes a person forget who they are, and remember what the sound asks them to become."

They had a suspect, but "suspect" was thin comfort under neon. The compressed reports described a pattern of victims drawn to rooftops, to cathedral stairwells, to subway grates. Each victim described an "answering voice" that loved them, calling them home. Some woke mute. One had gone to the river and been found with his hands cupped at his ears, cardboard tickets folded like prayers. No one had actually seen the singer. That was the problem: the predator was a chorus of absence.

Elisa tightened her jacket. "Where is this happening next?"

Broadway looked toward the theater district where old marquees blinked like tired sentinels. "Where the sound boards and souls are both thin—an old vaudeville house, the Lyric Royale."

The Lyric Royale had been a jewel once, some faded place with scalloped balconies, its mirrors dulled by cigar smoke and long goodbyes. No one used it anymore except for pigeons and ghosts. Theatre history stuck to its walls like plasters of lost applause.

They arrived to find the doors yawning open as if to receive an invisible chorus. The foyer smelled of mildew and old varnish. Elisa's hand hovered near the service revolver at her hip more out of habit than necessity; Broadway carried nothing but his bulk and a history of battles that taught him to trust force to buy a moment, not finish a story.

A piano in the orchestra pit had a string plucked constantly by a breeze that wasn't there; each note threaded a thin filament of sound that crawled the air. When Elisa crossed the threshold, she felt the sound—not with ears, but along the slick skin at the back of her neck—and a memory uncoiled inside her. For a breath she was a child again, curled on a couch with a television humming cartoons. A lullaby grazed her. She staggered, blinking.

Broadway put his hand to the small of her back. "Don't let the song tell you what you are," he said quietly. "You're more than the echoes of your childhood."

Elisa forced a laugh she didn't feel. "You sound like my therapist," she muttered. And then, louder, "Call it. If whoever's doing this can pluck memory, we need to find their instrument."

They moved through the Lyric like detectives threading a stanza. Where the stage collapsed into shadows, the audience chairs stood like teeth. The sound tightened around them, not like claws but
...(more at https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai).
For more supergirl, chun li, batgirl, tifa, lara croft, wonder woman, rogue and much more, please visit my page at www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai - Thanks for your support :)