"Tell me what's happening," I whispered.
She swallowed. "I don't know. It's like… everything's too loud all of a sudden."
"Loud how?" I asked. "Like my voice right now, does it sound amplified to you?"
She nodded, the motion small and slightly pained.
I turned it over in my head. Enhanced hearing was part of the baseline, it came with the territory once a Symbiote fragment took root, the same way everything else sharpened up over time. The first few days of that adjustment were disorienting for everyone it happened to; your brain simply hadn't learned yet how to filter what mattered from what didn't, and the volume of incoming information was overwhelming until the system calibrated. But this felt like something beyond that. Something different in quality, not just degree.
