The tunnel spat us out into a pocket of granite that did ugly things to sound. I heard it before I saw the towers proper — that particular deadness of a space with no soft surfaces anywhere, stone floor, stone walls, stone teeth of battlement overhead. A cough from up and to my right came back flat, no tail, absorbed by open air past the crenellations and nothing else. Rooms like this don't reverberate. They report. Every footfall we made got logged and returned to us dry. I stopped walking and let the room talk.

You hear a drawbridge before you understand it. That's the thing about a big mechanism — it announces itself in the low end first, a groan you feel in your sternum before your ears catch up. Chain over a windlass, iron on iron, each link surrendering to gravity in sequence. I counted them out of habit. Forty-one clicks of the pawl before the far edge kissed the lip of the crevice and the whole span settled with a boom that the granite threw back at us twice, flat and unforgiving. No absorption anywhere.

My name is Aaron Fischer.

The last clean sound I made in my own world was a fader coming up.

I remember it because I remember all of them — the little mechanical detents under my thumb, the minus 52 marking on the channel strip, the room tone of my own apartment at two in the morning, which had a low hum from the dead pierogi place's walk-in that no one had unplugged in a year. Forty cycles a second, roughly. I'd stopped hearing it consciously years ago and never once stopped hearing it. That's the job. You don't listen to the signal. You listen to what's under it.

Under this one was a name.