#overnout

The scent hits first—sweet hay, a little sweat, a trace of smoke clinging to people’s jackets. The old restaurant’s been cleared out for the night, tables pushed aside, string lights stapled across the ceiling in sagging zigzags. Someone must’ve found them in a storage crate or traded batteries for them, because they flicker just enough to feel alive. Yellow light kisses the floor, warm against the patchy wood and the scuffed toes of boots that stamp and shuffle across it.

The music's loud, grainy, like it’s pushing through the dust of some long-dead decade. A vinyl record spins behind the counter—Dolly, maybe. Or something close enough. Fiddles and steel strings. Makes people laugh a little louder, lean in a little closer. It’s not perfect, but nothing here ever is.

Ellie stands near the edge of it all, cradling a tin mug of warm apple cider. Her flannel shirt is fresh—barely broken in—but soft enough to settle into. Underneath, a faded T-shirt with a wolf howling at some long-lost moon. It smells like detergent, like she washed it just for tonight.

She takes a slow sip. The cider’s sharp, almost spicy, and clings to the back of her tongue like a memory.

A memory of climbing the ladder too fast, of stretching out on her toes to reach a bruised red thing that split in her palm. Of sun-warm apples rotting sweet at the base of the trunks, drawing bees and the soft stomp of boots. Some of them had ripened so high up the branches, they had to shake the trees to bring them down—a thudding rain of fruit against the dirt. It was overripe, sticky, tangy, like the last good days before cold comes in.

And how her forearms burned for days after—flushed and stinging from too much noon sun, because she’d refused to wear anything over her tee. Too hot, too stubborn, too much like her. Even now, her skin’s still freckled there, a pale reminder that not every scar needs a story about blood.

She didn’t miss the irony.

Hands shaped by war—for fighting, for breaking—held something soft as orchard fruit. Violence in the lines of her palms, sweetness in the weight they bore.

How something meant to take can still be asked to carry.

Ellie smirks, lazily scanning the room.

Across it, couples twist and bounce to the rhythm; not polished, but joyful. Loose elbows, twirling skirts, someone hooting as their hat goes flying. The wood beneath them groans, the patched floorboards catching bits of gravel in the seams. Ellie watches a pair of kids try to copy the adults, stumbling through a line dance, hands too small to know what to do with each other. Someone’s laughing near the window, but Ellie doesn’t turn to check. The cider is too sweet now. She swallows it anyway.

The walls are draped in faded quilts and stitched banners from who-knows-when. There's a smell of fresh bread from somewhere, yeast blooming under the warmth, and candles flickering inside old glass jars on every table. She recognizes faces, some in better clothes than usual—jackets pressed flat, shirts tucked in like they were expecting photos. There are patches and mended sleeves everywhere, sure, but it all feels intentional. Like reverence.

She catches a glimpse of Tommy—sleeves rolled, hair damp with heat and effort—reaching out a hand toward Maria, who’s balancing a tray in one arm and something like a smile tugging at the edge of her mouth. He says something. Ellie can’t hear what, but she sees the tilt of his head, the exaggerated bow, the hand still extended like this is some old western, and they’re playing out the roles just for fun.

Maria shakes her head without breaking stride. That same tight half-smile. She doesn’t stop to explain herself—just moves past, already scanning the room for something only she can see. Always watching, always working. The party might be happening around her, but it isn’t for her. It never really is. Tommy clutches his chest like he’s wounded and grins at no one in particular.

Ellie watches the exchange, and something tugs—sharply, then low—at her chest. At that moment she thinks of Joel.

He’s not here. Not standing by the wall with a drink in his hand, not off to the side carving jokes into the night with Tommy. Not part of this small, warm echo of life. Someone would've asked him to play, too—they always did. Just a couple songs on that beat-up guitar. And he would’ve grumbled, muttered something about his fingers being too stiff, too old; but then he’d play anyway. Always did.

He stopped showing up to these kinds of nights. Maybe so Ellie wouldn’t feel watched, or held back, or like the weight between them had to follow her into the light. Maybe he didn’t want her to feel like she has to look over her shoulder every time she laughs too hard or drinks too fast.

He thought Ellie deserved the space to be young—to live.

But she didn’t know how to do that. Not really. And his absence didn’t give her more room to breathe—it only made the hole he left feel wider. She hated him for that too.

Some nights, she thinks these gatherings hurt him just as much as they do her. So he stays home. Leaves her to the music and company she isn’t sure how to keep.

She tries to picture what he might be doing now, and the image comes too quickly: these small funny glasses hang off his nose—the reminder that he’s not getting any younger, and she’s not beside him to watch it. His fingers steady on a block of wood, the shape of a horse just starting to emerge, its legs still too thick, the head not yet right. He’ll get it right. He always does.

She won’t see it, though. Not this one.

It presses down on her like the weight of snow on branches. The complicated ache of missing someone who still lives just down the road. Who raised her. Who lied. Who she can’t stop loving, even now—even after.

Grief that comes from childhood—from memories that can’t be relived—is a grief of time itself. It’s not just him Ellie misses. It’s her, back then with him. The feeling that the world was larger, warmer. The music they shared. The smell of sun-heated car seats. Mornings with tea before hitting the road. That strange, fragile sense of safety that never lasted, but felt like it could.

She misses the girl she was, the hopes she had. The versions of herself that might have existed. The things they’ll never get to do again.

That’s the part that never stops pulsing: the kind of loss that time only deepens, not heals.

Someone passes behind Ellie, laughter still blooming in the corners of the room. But it all sounds farther away; muted, like music through a wall.

She doesn’t move, just tightens her grip on the tin mug, knuckles paling. The warmth has faded, but she holds it like an anchor. Her jaw clenches. Ellie bites the inside of her cheek, a habit older than she can name. The copper taste that follows feels grounding, almost welcome.

It’s getting hard to breathe. Her eyes look darker now, shadowed—not from tears, but from the weight that gathers behind them. Brows drawn in, just enough to crack the mask she wore so easily minutes ago.

Ellie leans against the wall, lets her head rest there for a second. It's hot in here, even with the windows cracked. Her cheeks are flushed from light alcohol and candlelight.

The music keeps playing, muffled by the swell in Ellie’s chest. Voices blur into one another, laughter stitched through like a too-bright thread. The lights seem warmer than they should be. Someone knocks over a bottle and gets cheered for it. Somewhere across the room Dina moves like the music belongs to her. She’s caught in a loose orbit of friends, maybe dancing with someone, maybe just letting the night tug her along. It’s hard to tell. But she notices. She always does.

Unlike Ellie, who barely pays attention to anything in the room. Even in laughter, in that half-spun rhythm of joy and whiskey, Dina’s eyes find Ellie—how broken she is, how lost and lonely, watching life flow without being a part of it.

Ellie doesn't quite register her at first—just hears a familiar tone riding above the noise, cutting clean through the shadows. There’s too much hair in her face and not enough balance in her steps. She’s a little drunk. Maybe more than a little.

A second later, Dina catches her eyes—and grins like she’s just found the person she was performing for all along. She doesn't say a word, but mouths the lyrics in a way that leaves no doubt who they’re meant for:

“Your beauty is beyond compare

With flaming locks of auburn hair

Ivory skin and eyes of emerald green—”

She clutches an invisible mic to her chest like she’s Dolly herself, brows raised in mock desperation, tilting her head with a tragic look of longing. Then she twirls, stumbles into someone, and points dramatically at Ellie again—as if to say you. The whole thing is ridiculous.

Ellie exhales through her nose, lips tugging at the corners in spite of herself. The grin she gives back is a ghost of one. No teeth, no sparkle—just the kind of smile you offer when someone hands you something gentle while you’re breaking.

She shakes her head with pretentious exasperation, waving off the dedication with a small flick of her fingers. She hates this song. She always has. And Dina knows it. But maybe because of that, it works, just a little.

Dina’s already spun back into the crowd, caught in another joke, laughing too loudly at nothing. They get each other like that. No big gestures needed. No explanations. Just this strange, crooked kind of care.

By the time that godawful song finally fades out, Ellie has made it to the snack table, refilled her mug, had stupid banter with Jesse, and returned to the exact same spot she left. Her arms crossed over her chest again, body angled away from the dance floor.

She doesn’t feel like dancing. Never really did. It’s not something she sees herself doing—so she doesn’t ask anyone to, and no one asks her.

A new song starts. She’d hoped someone would flip the record, but the album plays on. She nods her head to the rhythm of it as she takes another sip.

And maybe it’s the quiet of those first few notes—or maybe it’s the sudden tug inside her chest—but Ellie thinks of you. The thought is simple, a flick of memory, but it lands heavy in her ribcage.

i've had to think up a way to survive

since you said it's over, told me goodbye

Ellie thinks of how tired you sounded last time. How your voice got scratchier near the end, like you’d been talking too much, working too long. Ellie knows there is something that weighs on you, something that drains you slowly—and yet, the last drops of your energy, you still save for her.

You still listen to her ridiculous bedtime stories; still whisper “I’m here” whenever Ellie shows up, with the softest smile she has come to know by taste, hidden in the quiet between your words.

It’s as if the world outside that shared space simply didn’t exist—the daily things too meaningless to waste time on, too dull to be carried into the lines you held open for her. Neither of you wanted to make something so tender feel routine.

You said you had things to deal with, and some shifts coming up, so you’d talk again in two days. The day after tomorrow. Ellie said, “okay”.

i'm perfectly fine

and I don't miss you

But what she feels now isn’t okay. For Ellie, things have already begun to ache.

the sky is green

and the grass is blue

She catches herself scanning the room without meaning to, looking for something that’s not here, not even in her orbit.

As if she were haunting ghosts—or being haunted by them, Ellie catches your face hiding in the half-turn of someone else’s. In a certain curve of the cheek. A flicker of a familiar voice behind her. Sometimes she thinks she hears you. Thinks maybe you’re here, just out of reach, not real enough to touch—but near enough to feel.

And it gets harder, then. Because Ellie isn’t someone who reaches out. Not usually. Not first.

But tonight—she needs to believe in the weight of your body beside hers. Needs to believe you’re real enough to take shape in this room, in this life. Even if it’s only for a second, even if you disappear again the moment she finds you.

Otherwise, she’s not sure what’s left of her to stay.

Ellie’s gaze brushes over the crowd like wind over tall grass, soft and aimless, until it stumbles on a figure—just a girl, dancing. Hands moving through the air, carving loose, unthinking shapes, like she’s dancing for no one but the song itself. Not to be seen.

As if the world had folded inward, narrowed to the slow orbit of her limbs, to the dip and tilt of shoulders, the subtle drag of a palm through the air. She isn’t performing—she moves like the music is born from her body, not the other way around.

The song clings to her, adjusting itself to the curve of her arms, the stagger of her breath, the slight delay in her step as if each beat waits for her to arrive. The bend of her elbows traces some half-forgotten ritual, something sacred and wordless. Her hips shift not to provoke, but to obey—a quiet obedience, a surrender to gravity, to rhythm, to nothing at all.

And there’s no urgency in her—just the patient unspooling of movement, like a tide coming in, then out, then in again.

And Ellie watches—lets herself imagine:

Is that how you’d move?

A shadow against firelight. Not the flame itself, but only its warmth. A premonition of sensation. You are a dream Ellie forgets the moment she wakes.

Would you raise your arms just like that, elbows loose, fingers trailing? Would you toss your head a little when the chorus hits, or tuck your hair behind your ear before the verse?

Ellie watches the way the girl smiles, not wide—but small, like something secret is blooming inside her. Ellie wonders if you would smile like that, too, when no one’s watching. When she’s watching you from the farthest corner of the room.

Or if you’d close your eyes and lean into the melody, not saying a word, just being.

Ellie takes a big gulp that burns off her tongue. The space around her is stuffy, but she can’t stop the torture of imagining you there. For a moment she lets herself believe it. That maybe you're here—hidden in someone else's outlines, letting the music draw you out.

And then, as if pulled by instinct or fate or the simple gravity of being seen, the girl glances over her shoulder. Eyes catch. Just for a breath.

She sees Ellie looking, and the smile spreads, a slow, deliberate arc across her face. Someone else—someone looser, freer—might’ve caught the shine on her lips and known it for what it was:

an invitation.

A welcome.

Come stand beside me.

But Ellie isn’t someone else. She’s already turned away.

Something in the girl’s eyes dislodges the illusion. Confirms what Ellie already knows—that’s not you.

She leans back, shoulder brushing the wall, and lets her head fall gently against it. Her eyes slip shut. The music continues—another aching swell of steel guitar and longing. It filters through the din like steam, like memory.

how much can a heart and a troubled mind take

where is that fine line before it all breaks?

Ellie exhales, slowly. Her chest tightens not from grief, exactly, but from the press of wanting—something too soft to carry, too real to ignore. Her imagination is too vivid. It always has been.

So if you were here… if you showed up, pressed through the crowd, cutting through bodies like a knife through soft fruit, took the still-warm cup from her hands, sipped from it to the bottom—what then? If your fingers slipped around her wrist and tugged with a grip that said trust me, quiet and sure, pulling her somewhere she’s never been—the center of the room, the brightest part of the light—would she follow? To imagine a touch is the only way for her to live it.

can one in their sorrow, just cross over it

and into that realm of insanity’s bliss?

It’s too late to resist. With you, she would.

She pictures it without effort. You, with loose hair or maybe not, smiling like you know the end of the story. You turn to her, eyes bright and asking, and Ellie nods before her brain can argue. There are no words needed when you speak in touch. The song is wrapped around both of you, slow and curling, a ribbon caught in the wind.

Your hands find her shoulders. Resting lightly upon them, where tension always lives, you guide her. As if you knew. As if you’ve always known.

And hers—awkward, hesitant—settle on your waist, clumsily at first, then with a touch of reverence, like every line of fate on her palms has been drawn for this.

To land right there, at the curve of your body.

Like they were made to know it.

To ache for it.

You’re close. Closer than she can handle. Closer than the static and wires should allow. Closer than the distance she’s supposed to accept. Your chest brushes hers with every breath; your hips sway into place as if pulled by something older than music. You lead the dance—there is no way you wouldn’t, and Ellie loses it. Her body knows you already.

It isn’t the song that guides you.

It moves because you do.

It leans into the roll of your hips, follows the language written in the shifting of your weight, learns the slope of your body as Ellie does—slowly, reverently, with a hunger disguised as care.

There’s no audience here. No performance. Just heat and nearness and the unbearable tenderness of the space between breaths. Ellie’s hands tremble—the steadiest hands you’ve ever known. They tremble not out of fear—but because this is the closest she’s ever been to what she’s been longing for.

Your fingers brush her cheek.

A tender, unassuming gesture—except Ellie breaks under it. Her breath catches like a thread pulled too tight. A strand of hair has fallen from her low knot, soft against her temple. Your hand lingers there, not to fix it, but to know it. The heat of your palm stays on her skin like a secret. Like proof.

And Ellie—

Ellie looks at you the way no one’s ever been looked at. Not with hunger. Not with awe. But with a kind of softness that guts her from the inside out.

Her eyes shine under the strings of light. Her cheeks flush—slow, deep, blooming from the base of her neck to the tips of her ears. Her lips part around a smile that isn’t meant to return your attention, isn’t shaped by caution or charm. It’s real. Raw. Full of teeth and something she can’t name. A smile that reaches out, tries to hold your gaze like it’s the last warm thing on Earth.

And what she’s offering—

God, what she’s offering isn’t safe.

She’s offering her hands, clumsy and open, to hold whatever hurts. Her shoulders to carry what weighs. Her voice, frayed and small, to steady yours. She is offering herself—

not as a gift,

but as a place to stay.

Her gaze wraps you in moss-green velvet. The folds of it ripple like leaves after rain, smelling of dusk and something older. You’re close enough to hear her swallow, feel the catch of her chest, the way the world stills around you.

And you keep dancing, whirling between what’s real and what’s not. You sing under your breath the lines Ellie thought she never liked—and they fall into place just because it’s you who says them. The world narrows to this moment.

“If you were here…” Ellie says, voice caught in her throat, “…would you let me hold you like this?”

“I already am.”

You smile at her how she thinks you’d do. And it's not just words. It's presence. It's weight.

Ellie lets out a breath—broken, fragile. Her lips curve into a crooked, uneven smile. Not a smile made to be seen. A smile that wants to be seen by you.

“Bet you’d laugh at how bad I am at this,” she mutters.

You tilt your head. She imagines the glint in your eyes, the hush of your breath.

“Then dance worse. I’m not going anywhere.”

Ellie huffs something like a laugh, but a confused one, not sure how to deal with things. With you. “I’d still try,” she says, moving with you now, slowly. Her hands firm just slightly on your sides. “Just for you.”

“I know,” you answer.

Then, softer:

“I’d let you.”

You lean in—not quite ghost, not quite dream—and rest your head against her shoulder. Not for comfort. Not because you're tired. Just because you can, and Ellie’s letting you. She holds onto the weightless curve of your smile, the shape of you in her hands, the hush of your breath in the crook of her neck.

The music slows for you. The lights soften. The night will never end. The two of you are young forever, because Ellie can stop time.

Because you once read her a whole chapter about time. About relativity. About how light can bend it, and speed can cheat it. She only remembers the sound of your voice, and the way you laughed when she said she liked hearing you talk about impossible things. That was enough. That’s always been enough.

Someone brushes past her, the edge of their elbow catching awkwardly against her arm as they squeeze toward the table. A quiet “Sorry” mumbled in passing. Ellie flinches. And before she can stop herself—

She opens her eyes.

The crowded room. The fire is just dying embers. And you’re not here.

Because you never were.

Time never stopped for Ellie. Distance never closed itself. And dreams? Dreams don’t keep you warm. Dreams don’t hold your face in trembling hands. Dreams don’t stay.

She blinks. And you’re gone.

and I don't love you

and the grass is blue

It feels cruel, somehow. Like a joke told too late to be funny.

Ellie’s face tenses, her brows pulling in just enough to betray her. There’s no name to throw this anger at—no villain in the room—and yet it rises in her chest like it’s owed its place.

The anger flares. At the song. At the crowd. At herself, maybe.

Ellie looks around as if she’s seeing all these people for the first time. She rubs her forehead numbly. Her mouth twists, not in a smirk, not in pain (maybe just a little)—but in that raw, familiar shape her face makes when she’s trying not to feel too much all at once.

Without thinking, Ellie jerks her hand—flings the empty cup away from herself like it burns her, like it carries the dream still warm on her skin. It hits the table with a hollow, sharp sound, tips sideways, and rolls uselessly to a stop.

She pushes herself away from the wall with the kind of force that says stay down, and walks off—not fast, not loud, but with her shoulders pulled tight and her jaw locked, as if leaving now is the only thing keeping her from shattering entirely.

As if she can’t bear to stay where she is.

The air has teeth, but not sharp enough to bite yet. It still smells like summer—dry bark, dust, warm metal. No rot. No wet leaves curling like peeling paint. No sign of frost. Just that stretched-out warmth September sometimes wears, like a jacket it hasn’t realized is too small.

Ellie walks slowly. A dog barks somewhere far beyond the rows of creaking fences. Ellie recognizes this particular dog who personally doesn’t like her. She kicks loose gravel with the toe of a beat-up converse; canvas sun-bleached, seams fraying. They’ve seen better days. So has she.

Her gaze is sharp and it’s easy to cut. She drags a hand down her face, then bites the side of her fist—hard, just enough to feel it. Stupid. Embarrassing. The anger flared up like a match, and now it hangs around her, bitter and burnt-out.

“Jesus,” she mutters. “What the fuck was that.”

She hates that. Hates the feeling of after. Hates that she can’t tell if the burn in her throat is confusion or something else—worse. She shakes her head like that’ll fix it. Pushes the whole mess down to wherever she usually leaves it. Ignore. Detach. Move.

Ellie cuts across to the converted library, where the shelves are mostly empty now. But the chairs are soft and someone managed to hang up fairy lights. Needs her backpack. Her hands are cold.

Inside, the room is dim and echoes faintly with static and voices. Someone’s left the old player running; a couple of elderly ladies in armchairs are peacefully dozing, not having finished watching the film. Blue flashing lights illuminate their faces. The screen flickers, horizontal lines cutting across a man’s face as he stands in the rain. Middle of a breakdown. Melodramatic as hell. Ellie doesn’t stop. Just glances—and something in her stomach flinches, sharp and uninvited.

A breath escapes her, short through the nose. But the music under the scene catches her off-guard: soft, steady, a rhythm like a heartbeat muffled under blankets. Something smoky and low, like the after-smell of a fire that’s gone out.

She swings her backpack over one shoulder. The zipper catches on the strap. She doesn’t fix it. Her fingers tap the beat out on the canvas, absentminded. Again. And again. The sound follows her out the door. Like it knows where she’s going.

Like it’s already been there.

Ellie slips across the yard, cutting shadows and hugging fences, the air cool and damp against her skin. The building swallows her up—hers alone, this time of day—and she kicks the door shut behind her with a soft thud.

The bag drops with a heavy thump beside the desk. Here—here she is real. No posturing. No eyes watching. No jokes to cover the crackle under her skin. Just the weight of the day pressing into her shoulders, and the silence pressing harder.

And silence means thoughts. Thoughts always come louder when it’s quiet.

In the mirror above the sink, half-fogged and streaked from age, her face looks… off. Not wrong. Not exactly. Just not quite like hers.

Ellie leans in, studies her own reflection like it might explain something. She looks tired. Scared. She looks like someone trying very hard not to break apart.

Her face is clammy. The air outside clung to her skin like a film. Ellie runs the water until it’s cold and cups it in her hands, splashing it over her cheeks, her neck. The shock of it clears her head for a second.

The shirt she’s wearing—button-down, the decent one—feels too stiff on her skin now. Not hers. She peels it off with a tired exhale, tugging the damp tee underneath along with it. Her ribs rise sharp in the mirror. The bruises are fading.

She reaches for the hoodie hanging on the chair. It’s soft with age, the sleeves a little too short, the cuffs ragged—the kind of comfort nothing else quite replicates. Ellie pulls it on like armor.

At the table, she drops into the chair with a soft creak. The surface is a mess—but it’s her mess. Drawings taped haphazardly to the walls, curling at the edges. Torn paper corners. Doodles done in the margins of anything she could find. Scattered pens and half-snapped pencils, some chewed on at the ends. A capo for a guitar lies forgotten in the corner of the desk, dust clinging to the curve of it—salvaged on a trip months ago, tucked away like a secret.

Books are stacked unevenly at the edge—some old paperbacks, some scavenged textbooks, a battered comic with a ripped cover that she treats like treasure.

There’s still so much of the kid in Ellie. But it’s layered under dust and worry and things no one her age should’ve seen.

Her hand reaches for the radio without thinking. It sits where it always does, the paint around the buttons rubbed away, thinned to a ghost of itself. Worn smooth in the places her fingers always touch. Ellie swallows—she catches the tale of a ghost. As if you’re waiting for her to show up just behind this dial, waiting for her to switch on the right frequency. The feeling is itchy inside her chest, the desire is burning from the inside of it.

Ellie turns it over once. Twice.

Thumbs the dial.

Just holds it.

A breath. Long. Slow. Controlled.

Then she sets it back down. Not today.

Ellie stopped keeping track of the days when your voice started slipping into the quiet of her evenings.

It isn’t just a habit anymore. It’s how her nights begin.

Some nights, you didn’t say much—just a sigh, a soft laugh, a half-asleep whisper about the sky above your outpost. It was different from the one Ellie saw. Ellie had learnt to recognize your moods without needing words.

She’s not sure when it started. Maybe the third time you stayed on the line just to breathe together in silence. Maybe long before that.

Sometimes she hears you when she walks past an unusual tree or finds a half-empty coffee thermos. Not your voice exactly—the echo of how you’d react. And Ellie makes these mental notes to tell you about it later; tell you what might’ve made you snort, or what she noticed and wanted to know your opinion about. Like tonight.

Ellie wants to tell you how someone spiked the cider, and how Dina pretended to be Dolly Parton for a solid minute. How the decorations look nicer than last year—she’s made some of them with her hands. She wishes you could see it.

But not the music. Definitely not the music. That night, that song—it’s off-limits. It’s stored somewhere Ellie doesn’t want to go back to. Not yet.

But there’s a box that belongs to both of you. Half full already.

Some are tapes Ellie’d already had—the ones she dared to play, one by one, listening for the smallest signs of your smile or recognition. Others she’d picked up later, going back to the old school building like she had a reason—combing through whatever was left behind, prying open dusty drawers, shaking out old cases like they might still mean something. Some of them did.

She started setting aside the ones you liked. Scribbling little notes onto the plastic with whatever pen she had nearby. Sometimes just the ‘m’, but mostly—memories. Moments worth folding into the tape itself.

“you said: ‘this part makes my ribs feel weird’—so now it’s yours”

Another had a half-faded doodle of a planet, with:

“jupiter song. you hummed through the whole bridge without noticing”

“‘i don’t know if i like it or if i just don’t want it to end.’—same”

Sometimes it was even simpler:

“you said i sound like this”

She drew stars and orbiting moons where the labels used to be. A quiet system emerged—the ones you’d rewind, the ones you’d hum after. Those Ellie kept in a separate box under her bed.

You stopped being just a voice. What once lived in the safety of night hours is bleeding into the day. Into her thoughts, into things she thought were only hers. But now you’re there. You understand her when she’s too tired to speak. You get it when her head is so loud with thoughts she could never shape into words—and you say them out loud without even meaning to, as if the things burning on her tongue were always just waiting for you to read. Sometimes, you know her better than she knows herself.

You’ve become more than she meant to hold.

This isn't just radio anymore. It's not pretend and not safe. It’s starting to mean something—maybe too much. So when you’re gone, even just for a night, Ellie feels like a part of her is gone with you. Like another cassette with ‘m’ above, marked by you, saved for you. And Ellie’s not sure if she wants it back.

Ellie exhales through her nose and leans forward to unzip the backpack. She digs through its loose innards—past a flashlight, a crushed snack wrapper, a sweater she never wears—and finally pulls out the journal.

It’s soft at the corners, the cover creased from being shoved into too many bags, too many times. Ellie’s fingers pause over the page like she’s asking permission to be honest.

She doesn't want to open it.

Ellie brushes a hand over the cover like it might burn her. She doesn’t like rereading things, seeing herself in the past tense. Doesn’t trust what she might find in something she once felt too much to say out loud.

But her fingers move anyway.

Pages are messy. The first few are static—empty margins, familiar lines, dead things. But then it begins: words stacked on top of each other like she couldn’t get them out fast enough. Some crossed out. Some circled twice.

A small drawing of a fist, knuckles pressed white, nails jagged. Beneath it, in slanted writing:

“she said it used to mean strength. now it just means holding on too long”

A sketch of a broken round wall clock—hands snapped off, numbers smeared. Her handwriting looks younger. Or maybe just braver.

“didn’t know it was that late until you were gone”

Under it, one word, etched deep: waited.

Ellie flips further. A few dark pen lines—looks like a knife or maybe just a shadow of one.  

A scribbled thought in the margin: “i say too much when i’m tired. or not enough. will i ever be enough?”

She flips further. A page with half a star chart. One with your name written three times, each in a different font. A sentence: “you said you didn’t like your voice. you were wrong”

Ellie exhales through her nose and keeps flipping.

Near the middle, there’s a drawing of a cat. Slightly crooked. One ear too big, tail curled like a question mark. Underneath it: “m”.

And fuck, she smiles.

The way you’d told her about that stray that wouldn’t leave you alone. How you’d rejected her first name suggestion, and gone:

“M.”

Ellie had clicked her tongue.  

“M after Megatron? Admit, you liked it.”

You snorted. “M after Megan Fox, obviously. God, I wanna watch Transformers just for her now.”

That night, the jokes kept spiraling. Ellie had leaned back in her chair, grinning at the ceiling like an idiot.

“I’ll pick you up at seven.”

“Do I have to wear something hot or just bring popcorn?”

“Both. It’s a date. I’m bringing my apocalypse-special DVD player.”

“I’m making us watch it twice. Once for Megan, once for the plot.”

Ellie didn’t say anything to that. She’d just written “M” at the bottom of the page and drawn stars around it like a fifth grader.

Now she looks at the sketch again. It’s dumb. The paws are uneven. The proportions are all wrong. Still, she smooths the page down like it matters.

Ellie flips to another page, a gallery of you in her unsteady life. Down there is a note she forgot ever writing:

“your favorite smell is rain on a highway at night”

And next to it, a sketch of streetlights blurred into watercolor, pavement wet with imagined storms.

“still don’t know what that means, but i wrote it down like i understood”

There’s a page filled edge to edge with the same thought, over and over:

“can i miss someone who’s still there”

“can i miss someone who’s still on the line”

“can i miss someone who still talks to me like nothing’s changed”

The last one is crossed out so hard the paper tears.

Ellie stops when she sees the wings. Off-balance, asymmetrical. Smudged charcoal feathers that trail off mid-stroke. At the bottom, in the smallest script:

“you said you had a dream you were flying. i didn’t ask if you fell”

It’s like finding bones in the backyard—things she buried without meaning to.

There’s a note in the corner of a page, barely legible:

“don’t forget: ask what she meant by ‘i was different before the flood’ ???”

She stares at it, heart twitching. She doesn’t remember you saying that. Was it real? A metaphor? A storm you never explained? The mystery only the pages now know about.

More fragments: one scrawled in the margins of a drawing she never finished: “she doesn’t like her birthday. didn’t ask why. forgot to.” And then, in the center of a page, bold like a headline:

“there’s something about your voice when you’re alone in the room. like it bends”

It’s circled twice. Below it:

“wish i’d recorded it. for me”

There’s a jar drawn in soft pencil, fireflies caught mid-glow.

“not real,” the caption says.

“but you said once you wanted to see them”

And nestled between all of it are unfinished sketches of your words, lines filled between with your silences, your shadows passing through her memory. Ellie wrote it down not so you’d see it—but so the feeling wouldn’t disappear. She wanted nothing from you; only that you keep existing, somewhere, in the light. There’s a kind of closeness that needs no presence, only understanding. But Ellie…Ellie needs you there.

The further she flips, the worse it gets. She does it before she can stop herself.

The page is the one Ellie usually skips—instinctively, religiously. The corner of the paper is dog-eared from the number of times she’s almost turned it, almost looked. But tonight, her fingers follow through. Tonight, there’s no one around to see her hesitate.

It’s still too early to sleep, and already too late to close the journal.

Her teeth catch on her bottom lip, rough with wind and old worry. She bites until the skin gives, tastes salt. Her thoughts are slow and heavy, as if moving through water or snow.

She hasn’t picked up the guitar since—

Well.

Since that thing with Joel. Since the silence afterward that didn’t end.

Her hands, now, hang useless at her sides. Rougher than they used to be. Less certain. They’ve forgotten how to hold what matters. The calluses on her fingertips have faded, leaving skin too soft and too raw. Her fingers crave the strings—an ache that feels stupid, almost pathetic. But it’s there. A familiar hunger for something sharp and real. That sting of steel biting into flesh, the burn of a chord held too long, shoulders stiff from hours bent over a body made of wood and memory.

When there’s no one left to speak to, when even the static on the radio turns its back—music is the only thing that’s ever answered.

The melody’s been eating at her for days now. Quietly. Relentlessly. Louder when you’re near. Unbearable when you’re not.

Ellie stands and walks to the closet.

Pulls open the door and reaches for the case she buried behind jackets, secrets, and other things she thought she was done with. The hinges creak. The zipper resists. But there it is—her guitar. Worn, chipped at the edges. The strap still smells like last summer’s heat and old sweat and pine.

She cradles it like something that’s always known her weight. Her shoulders drop, barely. Her breath slows, a fraction. She sits on the floor, knees up, guitar resting between them, and tilts her head just enough to listen.

The strings are out of tune, of course. It’s been months.

She tightens and loosens by ear. Fingers moving cautiously, then quicker. She plucks and twists until the sound settles—imperfect, but close enough. The room holds its breath.

Ellie holds it too. One pause, one exhale.

Then there’s sound. Not polished and not smooth. Just three chords, a rough beginning to remember. Her palm moves in slow rhythm, then falters. She tries again and catches it. And with it, something in her chest unclenches.

She doesn’t think about you.

That’s a lie.

She does.

You’re in the rhythm. In the way her thumb brushes the strings too softly the first time. In the catch of her breath as the memory of yours cuts too sharp. In the way she glances toward the radio on the desk, then looks away.

And maybe, these lyrics in her notebook, these crooked rhymes and uncertain handwriting—they are not for anyone. Not even for Ellie. Maybe it’s a song for you?

Ellie doesn’t plan to sing. Her voice is hoarse, so she has to clear her throat. But the words are already there—on the page she didn’t mean to turn to. Scrawled in ink, margins crowded. As if writing them down might make them true. Or escape them from reality, hide them as her guitar in that closet, as she hides herself. Ellie doesn’t need to look at the words—they screwed themselves into her memory like nails.

It’s not even a song yet. Just fragments she’s reworded a hundred times, chasing something that won’t land right. Every line makes her squirm a little, like she’s trying too hard, like she’s not the kind of person who writes this kind of thing.

The page is worn soft in places from how often she’s flipped back to it, like maybe this time the words will sit right. Like maybe this time they'll make it easier.

They don’t.

Still, Ellie can’t throw them away. She doesn’t even want to finish it, wants to live through them. Note by note. Until the ache is spelled out in full.

Her voice breaks the silence like a whisper through frost. The melody goes by one-two-three rhythm, simple and tender, something like waltz. Ellie’s hands go numb and her cheeks burn. A draft is creeping across the floor.

“here are

my strings and your rhymes”

A quiet strum. Her expression softens.

“my melodies — your name on the signs”

Ellie stares out the half-covered window. Her breath fogs in the dark. She shifts her grip, fingers fumbling from C to G—the callus on her ring finger stings, but it’s a good kind of pain. The next chord hums low and hesitant, matching the way her voice wavers just beneath it.

“my arms spread open wide

touch the skies

to land by your side”

The chords are steady. Ellie’s fingers remembering more than she thought they would. It starts to feel like flying. Like coming home. The rhythm increases.

“you’re the hush in the pines

the current that bends all my lines”

She closes her eyes and slightly tilts her head to the ceiling.

“you’re the wingbeat I find

the paths crossed and twined

lead you lie by my side”

Ellie doesn’t cry—she’s not sure she remembers how. She just lets the last chord of an unfinished writing ring out and fade, and fade, and fade.

Her eyes stay shut. Her lips part, but she doesn’t speak again.

You’re everywhere.

And you were never really there.

The noise isn’t sharp—it’s soft, layered, like a memory returning out of order. Static weaves into the edge of Ellie’s sleep, slips between dream and waking like light through blinds. It hums low, steady, almost lulls her deeper.

“Hey, loser.”

Your voice cuts through, covering with tenderness despite everything—even the dumb nickname. Ellie doesn’t mind; her hand tightens instinctively around the radio, like muscle memory. The speaker’s so close to her cheek that the sound of your breath—your voice—makes her eyes open.

“Hey,” she responds a bit slow, rubbing her face just to wake up. Her voice is a little hoarse, yours—is softer than usual.

She lies on her back, hood up, sleeves tugged over her hands, swallowed by the oversized hoodie. The room feels colder than autumn should allow. Or maybe that’s just her.

Ellie pushes herself up slowly, drags the chair closer to the desk, then sinks into it cross-legged. The surface is cluttered: a few scattered screws, a knotted cord, a chipped mug half-full of something undrinkable, a folded map of the county with circles in red and blue ink, and in the corner, a note in someone’s scrawl:

“EL, bring this to Marlon before next patrol. Don’t forget the damn batteries.”

She flips it over absently, reaches for a pen, and starts drawing spirals on the back.

“You’re alive,” she says eventually, voice low, a small tilt of teasing in it.

“I am,” you answer, as if squinting at Ellie. “Barely. Two night shifts back to back. I think I forgot how to sleep with my eyes closed.”

Ellie smiles, faintly. “Didn’t even know that was possible.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised. I hallucinated a dog today. Pretty sure she winked at me.”

Ellie laughs softly, the sound more breath than voice. She draws a lopsided dog with too many legs. She gathers her hair into a loose half-bun, fingers moving on autopilot, just enough to keep it out of her eyes while she talks and lets her pen wander across the page.

“Glad you’re back,” she says, softer now.

“I never left.”

The thing is—when all you have is a voice, you get good at hearing things most people miss. The breath between words. The hesitation before a name. The way someone clears their throat, or says “yeah” like they mean “no.”

Ellie starts picking up on it, out of habit. She knows the hum of a room that isn’t hers but becomes familiar through repetition. Ellie can tell when you lean closer to the mic, can hear the rustle of sleeves or the clink of a cup on some metal table far away. She can tell when you’re distracted, or nervous, or—like now—tired in a way that sinks deeper than bones.

But what she can’t do is read your mind. To say—

“did you miss it the way i did?”

Ellie scribbles near the edge of the paper in small, barely visible handwriting. What she says is different.

“Didn’t think you’d call tonight,” she says, trying to sound casual. Her pen taps quietly on the desk. “Figured you’d be passed out.”

“I almost was. Then I remembered you trash-talking my radio static, and it woke me right up.”

“That static is a war crime.”

“It’s character.”

“Yeah, well. So is mold.”

Your laughter comes through, quiet and a little delayed by the signal, but it hits Ellie right in the ribs. She holds still for a second, like she can feel the echo of it.

She lets the pen drift, drawing half a face she doesn’t finish, a speech bubble she doesn’t fill in. The silence stretches, but not uncomfortably. Like you are sitting on the same porch somewhere, waiting for the sun to go down.

Your voice comes thoughtful, softer. Because it isn’t one-sided. Because you’ve learnt to see her too.

“You sound different.”

“Do I?”

The response is a bit rushed. Ellie’s own voice lingers in the air for a second too long—warmer, quieter, like it’s been sanded down by the nights without you. She clears her throat, tries to play it off, but the moment’s already there, breathing between you. Maybe it’s the way her words hold a little more weight now. Or how she doesn’t rush to fill the silence like she used to.

“Yeah,” you let the topic fall, then add, way quieter, the words curling heavily down Ellie’s spine. “I missed…this.”

You’re braver than her.

Ellie bites the inside of her cheek, her fingers release the dial. She sighs deep and slow, alone. Her eyes fall back to the note, now nearly blacked out with doodles. She flips it over again. Reads the same words like they’ve changed in the past minute. Then she presses the dial again, as if nothing happened.

“Me too,” Ellie says, almost under her breath.

She means it more than she knows how to say.

“Can I ask you something?”

The question from you is soft, but there’s something steadier in it now. Ellie shifts, her shoulders tighten. She has nothing to hide from you, but she still gets tense. This is the kind of question that always leaves tension in the afterthought.

But Ellie hums, the sound more like a breath than a word.

“You never asked what I look like.”

A pause. Then—

“Why? I mean, ain’t you curious? Even a little?”

Ellie leans back in her chair, lets the pen roll out of her hand.

“You think that’s ‘cause I’m not curious?”

A small chuckle from you, or maybe it’s just static twisting into shape.

“Are you?”

Ellie looks down at something meant to be a portrait. It has one chance in a million to resemble your features.

“As hell.”

She expects that to land like a joke, but it doesn’t. The silence that follows isn’t playful. It stretches. Waits.

“Why then?”

You just breathe, like you’re waiting for something real. And Ellie—

Ellie feels the weight of that.

Her hand absently slides through her hair, fingers snagging in a tangle she’s too tired to care about. The hood of her sweatshirt slips down her shoulder as she moves, fabric soft against skin. She stares at the scratched table surface, at a pen mark she doesn’t remember making.

She could lie—say she never thought about it, say it doesn’t matter. But it does. Not to find out if someone’s pretty or not, but just to fill the void when she thinks of you.

So she exhales, low and uneven. The kind that drags something out with it. Then speaks—slowly, carefully, like the words might tear if she handles them wrong.

“Do the blind ask what the sun looks like?” she says, “What color the sky is?”

A beat. She fights herself for keeping telling things too loud for 2 am. But maybe this is the only time for things like these. For confessions and broken hearts.

“Descriptions wouldn’t change anything. Wouldn’t make it easier. They’d just make you ache for it more. Yearn for something you’ll never get to see.”

Ellie’s throat tightens, but she doesn’t stop. If she stops, she definitely won’t continue.

“The blind don’t need to know what the sun looks like. They just feel it. How it warms them. And that should be enough.”

Ellie clenches her fist as she releases the dial again. Her face is a broken mirror.

There’s a breath on the other end of the line—soft, unsteady. Your voice, a splinter of what had been broken once.

“I’m such a greedy blind,” you say, quiet as confession. “It’s not enough for me.”

Ellie doesn’t speak.

For a long, fragile moment, all that exists is your breath and hers, suspended across the wire like a thread that could snap at the slightest pull—almost like a kiss. The silence isn’t empty—it's thick with everything she won’t say, everything you still feel.

She presses her thumb to the edge of the page, smudging graphite. She draws eyes that see no sun. A sting above her shoulders—a nameless weight. You don’t push, maybe because you feel it too.

So you do what people do when things get too close; you change the subject.

“But wait,” you whisper softly, like you’re afraid to break her. “What if I have a scar across my whole face?”

It catches Ellie off guard. She exhales with a smile, the corners of her mouth twitching like muscle memory.

“Badass,” she says, voice lower now, warmer.

“And what if I have one eye?”

Ellie leans back a little in her chair, dragging a thumb over her lip.

“Pirate,” she replies, a small snort escaping before she can help it.

“Okay, then what if I’m the ugliest shambler out there?” you tease, tone climbing. “With a mushroom instead of a head?”

That gets her. Ellie drops her pen, head tipping forward with a real, unguarded laugh—short, but full.

“Baby,” she murmurs, like it’s obvious, like it’s written in her bones.

“I’m immune.”

Half-joke, half-not. Not a joke at all.

The laughter fades slow, like ripples settling on water. The line stays open a while longer—not for words, but for the quiet comfort of presence, for rustling and soft breath and pauses that don’t need filling.

Eventually, you say you should go. Something about rounds, a shift change, your voice reluctant, like you wish you didn’t have to say it at all.

Ellie nods even though you can’t see. She gets it.

“Be safe,” you say, because you always do. Because Ellie always answers with something crooked and half-sarcastic—and she does this time too.

The static dips. The line clicks. It ends with a soft goodbye that sounds more like a promise.

The room folds in around her again, quiet in that familiar, empty way. Ellie leans back, arms slung over the back of the chair, and lets her head tip toward the ceiling. Her mouth is still curved in a lingering half-smile—not giddy, but warm. Grounded.

And then it hits her.

She never told you her name.

She’d meant to—thought about it at least three times since you came back on the radio. It felt like a natural next step, something simple and small but important. Something honest. Something like “I’m Ellie, by the way.”

It slips her mind like a leaf off a branch—so easy to forget when things feel like they’ll go on forever.

She shrugs it off with a quiet laugh. Next time, she thinks. Tomorrow, or the day after. There’s time. There’s always time.

Until there isn’t.

By the day after you don’t come on.

Ellie stands on the porch, guitar cradled in her arms like a fragile truth. The air feels thick, heavy with things left unsaid. She’s unsure she came to the right place—or if she even has the right to be here. The door is closed, the light inside dim, like someone inside is sleeping, someone who stopped waiting a long time ago.

But he’s there—silent, in an armchair as always, eyes slowly moving to her figure. Her gaze is sharp, guarded, like she’s bracing against a storm she’s carrying alone. His look is patient, quietly knowing, like he’s been waiting for this moment without needing to speak.

Her breath catches, voice rough but firm.

“I want to try a song.”

The one constant thing about the broadcast room in the Great Falls quarantine zone is that it’s freezing cold no matter what. This chill has been dwelling deep inside your bones for years. Not the kind that bites, but the kind that settles over your skin like a breath held too long.

And yet, sometimes you keep forgetting to bring a threadbare sweater on your night shifts. Like tonight. But there are nights in which you don’t need any of it, because the world you’re forced to live in doesn’t let you feel comfort too often. It wants you to keep in mind that given life is fragile, and might be taken back whenever the world pleases. Your blood runs cold every time the sent patrols go silent.

Like tonight, again.

Outside the narrow window, evening fades away and coming night stretches wide and endless, clinging to window frame like wet lining. The air has that strange, waiting stillness—too quiet, too heavy—that lingers in your lungs and makes it hard to breathe. Crickets hum faintly in the grass (you can hear them even from your radio cell on the highest floor), but even they sound unsure, like something’s pressing down on them from above. Birds are hovering in the low sky, almost bruising tree crowns with their angled wings. Their calls warn you. A bug cracks with all its tiny power into the glass of the windowpane, attracted by the lamp’s light. You flinch.

The pine trees don’t move. Not yet.

They stand stiff and dark against the horizon, their needles limp in the air, knowing what’s coming.

You can feel it too—not in sound, but in pressure, like something biding just beyond the edge of hearing. For days, the weather’s been thick with it—heat that doesn’t lift even after sunset, that makes the floors sweat and tempers run short. Checking the weather is one of your responsibilities too—radio signals are capricious with changes in the air, and with years it became a sense, not a science. You’ve learned that from the specific shapes of clouds—or their absence, the shade that sun has at the dawn; you’ve been watching birds and stray cats, as they are the first early harbingers of storms. You like to think they share sacred knowledge with you. Leaving your post on grey mornings, you can tell if it’s going to rain just by looking at the dew. And that definitely won’t be modest to claim that you have some skills in handling forecasting tools. Smartass, they call you.

So now you keep thinking the sky will crack open and bleed it all out.

But it doesn’t. Not yet.

The radio crackles softly beside you, calming like an old friend, warming like embers popping in a dying fire. Yes, in four walls of the radio station there is still cold.

And still no sign of the patrol.

You lean forward, elbow on the desk, the familiar ache of exhaustion in your shoulders. Something’s telling you it’s going to be a long shift. The transmission button is worn smooth, paint rubbed away years ago by hands just like yours, probably older. The headset squeezes your head—a relic that somehow survived the outbreak. You forgive it the discomfort. Most nights. You adjust it out of habit—the ear padding still crooked from the last shift.

You press the button down.

“This is Homebase calling AA40B. Do you copy?” A heartbeat-long pause. “AA40B, check-in, you’re two hours overdue. Report your position.”

You count to five. Then ten. Dead air. This is the first radio term you ever learned—not from a book, not from a manual, but in the heavy silence beside someone older, more practiced. You must’ve been sixteen. Maybe younger. Watching, listening and realizing that sometimes, absence speaks louder than any broadcast.

Dead air means something has gone wrong. Someone important, who never spoke through the white noise again.

It stays with you—static coiling around your ribs, slow and taut like wire. You’ve never forgotten the weight of it, because now it’s here again.

Flipping to a fresh page in the logbook, you scribble the call sign again, even though the page already looks like a graveyard of unanswered calls:

18:04 — AA40B — 94.7MHz — Received scheduled check-in from AA40B. Background static, but no incidents reported.

18:15 — AA40B — 94.7MHz — Attempted contact with AA40B. Negative. Assumed out of range unit. Logged for follow-up.

18:24 — AA40B — 94.7MHz — Logged inactivity. Next scheduled check-in ???

20:02 — AA40B — 94.7MHz — No response.

Silence. It is always about silence at the end. You’ve faced the same ends of different stories too many times. However, you’re just a radio operator, aren’t you? A messenger. The one whose face people barely remember. They know you for your voice. They hate you for it; they hate to hear it in moments of another acknowledgement of things going wrong. But this is not your fault, right? You receive news—then you report. Bad news—report. No news? Report. So you file the report like always. No sirens. No raised voices. Just protocol, neat and quiet. Loss isn’t rare enough to stop the day. Or night. Collateral damage, they call it. Lives.

The last entry in the logbook is smudged—ink dragged by the heel of your palm in a moment of distraction. You underline the status. Twice. You want to breathe, really breathe. Tear off the headset, heavy and too tight; let your pulse settle in open air, feel your shoulders drop for once. Shake off the weight of duty.

But protocol says stay.

So you do.

Anchored in your chair (as old as the headset), waiting for something. Or nothing.

The clock on the wall is old, its plastic yellowed with age, but it still ticks with rude efficiency. Every second lands like a drop of water in an empty basin.

You count minutes by it — minutes left until the next scheduled check-in. The last one for the night. The one you’re not expecting to go any differently.

A small glass jar sits near the base of the radio, filled with dried wildflowers you picked earlier that summer. Yarrow, tansy, bluebells gone brittle in the heat. It doesn’t belong here—not among the grey buttons, frayed wires, and institutional gloom—but you brought it anyway. Something to look at while the hours crawl.

You clear your throat. You don’t bother sounding official anymore.

“This is Homebase. Again. Check-in.” You swirl a faded yellow petal in your fingers. Squeeze it until your fingertips are covered with its sticky powder. “I repeat—AA40B, answer my call. Report the situation. Have you got any troubles? This is channel ninety-four point seven, if you’re suddenly unaware. Be advised, Lisa, if you don’t respond your mother will fucking murder me. Slowly.”

You let the words trail off, resting your fingers lightly on the worn edge of the desk.

The kind of joke born from routine.

Lisa and you had planned to grab dinner after her shift next week—you weren’t close; maybe you would’ve been. It was supposed to be the first. A small thing. And now just…undone. Silence folds back over the room like a heavy blanket. Your peripheral vision catches something alike with a flick of lightning far away. Just a second that might be a play of your overwhelmed mind. Just a second. Then—

Click.

Soft; barely there. But unmistakable—not static. Not interference.

Someone pressed something.

Your body reacts before your mind does—a tightening in the chest, a shift in the gut. The way this familiar frequency is talking to you now: you can recognize its hiss among the thousands of others. And this one is totally different. Something unusual is happening.

This isn’t protocol, isn’t your patrol.

And there’s no call sign.

Just a breath, maybe. A small, ambient shuffle of noise—a movement. Someone is there. And then, at last—a voice cuts through. You will think about it many times later; you’ll try to replay this moment like an old tape, always returning to the second she spoke to you. You will lie for that voice. And you will—

“Who the hell is Lisa? And…who the hell are you?”

A beat. Long pause. The silence stretches, tense, uncertain. She’s close to the mic. No headset, no filter. Unmistakably not Lisa. But someone who’s used to surviving, not asking questions.

The voice doesn’t match anything you were expecting—sharp and low, with a slow drawl that sounds like it's been roughened by time and too many cold mornings. She doesn't sound scared, but she sure as hell sounds like someone who’s ready to pull a knife if you so much as breathe wrong. And as for your breathe…it’s more than wrong. Something about her makes you sit up straighter. You glance down at the console, thumb hovering over the mic: 94.7.

That should be right. That’s the patrol’s frequency; it has been for months. You double-check the band anyway, twisting the dial just enough to hear the edge of the next channel before snapping it back.

How the hell—?

Maybe the storm’s fucking up with the signals. That happens sometimes. Reflections bouncing off mountains. Electromagnetic interference. Whatever excuse science likes to throw at you when something strange happens in the middle of the goddamn night.

Your understanding of fate is called science.

“Are you ghosting me now?” Your stomach dips with another question from her. You forgot to reply. Do you really have to do it? Probably not. But damn—curiosity and boredom are louder than reason. And you want it. Badly.

You clear your throat, shift your weight in the creaky chair, and press the button.

“Uhm…Hello.” Suddenly, you don’t know what to say. You—the person who spent years talking to strangers over the radio—and now you’re mute. “I’m here. But you’re not supposed to be on this channel, are you?”

A soft scrape of fabric brushes the mic—like something is shifting on the other edge. Another pause. You can hear the smile in her voice before she even speaks.

“Nope. Definitely not.”

Her voice sounds younger now, almost smug. The way she says it—calm, sure, like she has a knife in one hand and her finger on the trigger with the other, makes your pulse skip. Calm. Dry. Like she’s holding back either a laugh or a warning. On the edge of your mind you wonder how old she is. Could you be peers? Some people define age by looking at someone’s palms. Your trained hearing doesn’t require watching to see things.

You pull a thin blanket tighter around your shoulders; you keep it here special for night shifts and instead of forgotten jackets. Moths ate through its fabric; holes stare at you like frightened eyes or twisted mouths.

You’re suddenly hyper-aware of the low hum of the equipment, the way twilight sky is fading navy, and your lamp is the only source of light. There’s no one else in the room: just you, just her. And the strange, thin thread of static connecting your two points of the map.

She doesn’t break the silence again, allowing you to take your time and think. Lead the dialogue or end it. She gives you choice.

You don’t even know her name.

But somehow, in this moment, that feels like the least important part.

“So…first of all, I must ask: do you need any urgent help?”

The question comes out too formal, like you’re reading off protocol.

“Do I sound like I need help?” The mic chuckles faintly with the sound of her voice. You knew the answer, but you had to ask. Just in case.

“Right now I’m not sure if I should answer at all,” you say. Does she hear the smile curving in the corners of your lips? “You’re not in danger, looking for signal to save you?”

“Save me? No way.” Her tone dips low, husky at the edges. A pause. There’s a smirk—quick and barbed—but it doesn’t soften fully. You figure out that she speaks like someone who’s used to being heard but never really listened to; that happens to people who don’t speak much.

Each of her words clipped just enough to sound in control, laced with amusement sharp around it. There’s warmth in it, sure, but distant warmth, like fire through glass. You catch the tail end of a sigh. “I’m fine. No danger. And even if I were, what’d you do? Send a helicopter?”

This. Even in her irony, something stays braced, like she’s talking with her back still against the wall.

You huff a soft laugh. Involuntary. You better think on what the hell you are even doing. You better think twice before the answer. But you choose to play her game.

“Just a helicopter? I have a whole rescue team for losers like you.” probably you don’t think even once, replying.

“Enjoy saving losers?” She baits.

“I’m here daily for it.” You bite.

She doesn’t miss a beat.

“What ‘bout nights?”

You lean back slightly, flexing your aching fingers. The headset hums with a tiny echo of her voice and some static. There’s a rhythm forming here—and it isn’t protocol. You’re treading on thin ice. Almost dancing.

You glance at the faint, flickering bulb above you—the only company in this concrete box you’ve half-started calling home. The air smells like warm dust and coil-burned wire. Silence is hovering, like she’s waiting for you to laugh or shoot back some banter, because she has no idea how long it’s been since anyone spoke to you like that.

Your finger lingers over the transmit button. You press it, slower this time.

“Nights are for ghosts and dead batteries,” you realize how desperate that must’ve sounded, and add, “You fit right in.”

The girl scoffs. You’re not sure if she’s smiling or offended. Or just listening. A low crackle fills the space between you. If you close your eyes, will she remain on the border of your signal? Or will she vanish into the white noise?

You don’t want to know, so your eyes are open. Surreal night.

The connection falls quiet again. That particular silence that means someone is thinking. You interrupt it with another question:

“How did you catch this frequency?”

The response comes, broken and crackling:

“By random? I was—”

The rest is swallowed by static. Not loud, but needling. Noise spilling through the line like wind through the flung open window.

You wait, leaning toward the console, squinting as if that might help decipher the pattern in the interference. You try again, more precisely this time.

“Take on the headset. Your sound is shit.”

A pause. Some fumbling on her end. You hear what might be a soft grunt, the clang of something metal.

“Didn’t think it’d make any difference,” she mutters, half-off mic. “Hold on… I don’t see any— Oh. Here it is. Looks terrible.”

Only God knows what’s going on over there. Something to do with wires and dust, maybe. There is a clumsy thud, then a hiss, then the faintest muttered curse. Whatever it is—they’re putting up one hell of a fight. You smirk silently.

Finally, a low rustle, then—click.

“Well. Fine. Do you hear me now?”

And just like that, you do. You almost regret the suggestion.

Her voice lands crisp, close—like it’s suddenly right behind your ear, not scattered across states. The line is clear enough to catch the curve of her vowels, the scrape of dry amusement under the words.

Oh, you do.

It’s the kind of voice that makes you forget the question. The kind that holds back more than it gives—something low, a little rough, but sharpened and steady, like she’s watching you through the wire and dares you to blink first.

So you blink. Swallow.

“Yes.”

No more, no less. You decide to keep your freaky thoughts to yourself.

She hums, then moves: now you can hear it perfectly well, trying to imagine this natural movement. You fail.

A shift in your seat, the chair creaks. The room suddenly feels smaller. Warmer?

She’s the first to speak.

“What’s with your, how did you call it, AA40C?”

You correct her out of habit—and to buy time.

“Forty-B.”

A beat. Your ink-stained finger hovers the transmit button a moment too long. The clock mocks you—shame prickles beneath your collar. You’d completely lost track of time. And of the patrol.

“I can’t share this information with someone from beyond.”

You hesitate to call her a stranger. You must be losing your fucking mind. You add a half-smile into the mic, though she can’t see it. The words aren’t harsh, but there is a line in them—clear, official, practiced. One you’ve been taught to hold. You almost feel like apologizing—which is absurd. Unfamiliar. Not like you.

Her reply is quick, clipped.

“Fair enough.”

But something in her tone curls at the edge. Like she’s testing you, just to see how far the signal stretches. It’s not like she’s interested in all your military secrets, but like she has some interest in you. Or you’re just fantasizing things.

Her voice lingers in the headset—that grainy warmth, half static, half smirk. She doesn’t let it drop.

“Where are you talking from then?”

You freeze for a breath. The words are simple, innocent-sounding, but they land sharp. You’re not supposed to—

“I can’t—“

“Jesus. C'mon.” A scoff, close to the mic. Her voice crackles at the edges. “Such coincidences happen once in a lifetime. Ain’t you curious?”

You are, and this is the problem.

You hesitate, eyes fixed on the dull glow of the frequency dial. You’ve followed protocol a hundred times before. But it doesn’t feel like protocol—not anymore. You tell yourself it’s fine. Montana’s a big place. Nobody would guess.

“Ugh… Montana.”

There’s a bit of silence on the other end, then a click of her tongue.

“That’s it?”

“What?”

“Girl, you're so fucking paranoid.”

You huff through your nose—not quite a laugh. She’s not wrong. You hadn’t realized how tight you were holding the line—like names could unravel something if spoken too clearly.

“Why shouldn’t I be?” you answer, steadier than you feel. “It’s safer. For both of us.”

“Let it be.”

There’s a shift in her tone that might come with leaning back, chin tilted, daring you.

“Then you can call me…” A beat. A mock-dramatic sigh. “Damn Jackson.”

You blink at the console, then laugh before you can stop it. It catches in your throat. The name drops like a pebble in a well. Small, almost casual. Echoing. You know the name. Most do. A settlement too far south. Rumored to be peaceful. Overgrown with good soil and better people. Rumored, at least.

You let yourself savor the answer. Like you need to place her somewhere on a map just to stay grounded. Small details start to shape her features in your mind.

“Jackson’s not even a state, dumbass.”

“Wyoming doesn’t sound cool at all.”

Her voice flattens with false seriousness. You imagine a shrug. A smirk, maybe. Something self-aware but distant—like she’s drawing lines in the sand just to rub them out a moment later.

The words slip out without thinking.

“It kinda does.”

Are you still talking about names?

You slightly frown, eyes scanning your table, though there’s nothing to see. You raise an eyebrow.

“And why would you tell me your place?”

“It’s not really mine, is it?” A pause. “Just a name.”

You bite your lip. She’s still playing. Still keeping her real cards hidden, just like you. But the word Jackson settles into your memory heavy. Like it matters.

Like you’ll be writing it down later, in a space not meant for records.

There’s a lull again. Not awkward—just stretched thin. Like neither of you wants to admit the conversation has no more ground to stand on.

You glance at the clock. It’s later than you’d thought. Your logbook lies open beside you, the last line still unfinished.

“You should go,” you say, your voice barely above a breath.

You don’t add what you’ve begun to notice—how her breathing has slowed between sentences, how the edges of her voice soften, just slightly, like the weight of the night is finally catching up to her.

She’s clearly not home.

Not even on watch. Just… out there.

Wherever she is, it’s not where she’s supposed to be. You hear it in the way she pauses more often now; in how the static doesn’t quite hide her quiet exhale. The kind people let out only when they’ve been running too long.

She’s lost. For now.

And somehow, you don’t want to keep her any longer. Not out of duty—but because something in you wants her to rest. Just a few hours. Just until dawn.

Even if you’ll never know where she lays her head.

Even if she never calls again.

“You gonna report me?”

It’s half a joke. Maybe.

You answer before thinking.

“Not if you promise not to show up again.”

Do you want her to show up again? That’s another question. The one you’re not going to think on.

“Harsh.” You hear her shift—maybe the creak of a table beneath her elbow. “Guess I’ll just get lost then.”

Her tone is light, but something flickers underneath.

You hesitate, then add—

“Batteries don’t last forever anyway.”

That earns you a breath of static shaped like a laugh.

“Neither do ghosts.”

The silence that follows is different. Not quite goodbye. Just long enough to say something without needing words. The button waits beneath your touch, untouched. You sigh.

“Well, Jackson. Over and out?”

You try to make it sound casual, like it doesn’t matter if she answers.

But she snorts — soft, amused.

“What does that mean?”

“Uhmm… it’s like ‘bye’ in radio slang. Some kind of etiquette.”

Another pause. This one warmer.

“Then over and out, Montana.”

You smile—not that she can see it. But feel, maybe.

Your hand slips from the button. You expect silence. Expect her to vanish into space, like she was never there.

But then, you remember something:

“Oh. Wait.”

There’s a second you think she’s gone. You hold your breath, unintentionally. Your knuckles brush the edge of the transmitter, hesitating. Her voice comes through quiet, no louder than an exhale.

“Yeah?”

“Storm’s coming. Stay safe.”

You wait—half-expecting her to follow it with a joke, or some snide comment about the clear skies.

But she doesn’t. You wonder if she hears it too—that strange pressure in the air. That breathless weight.

Her answer is simple.

“I will.”

And somehow… that’s enough.

The line goes quiet. Not with a pop or sudden crackle—just…softer. As if her breath was still caught in the waves of signals, and then even that lets go. An act of disappearing without curtain call.

You don’t realize how much noise she’d brought with her until it’s gone.

Now there’s only the faint hum of the equipment; the low buzz in your skull, and underneath it—a hush that finally feels real. It presses against your ribs. Wraps around the base of your neck. Heavy, still. Known.

You lean back slowly, letting the weight of it all settle in. Shoulders drop, the holey blanket slips onto the floor—loud in the absence of her voice. Your body reminds you that it’s late. That your eyes sting. You haven’t moved for too long. And you sit there, still, another minute, or maybe more. You don’t know why.

You haven’t touched the dial since she stopped talking. Since that sharp and guarded voice cut through the wrong frequency and landed in your hands like something not meant to be held.

You should log it.

You should log everything.

You reach for the journal and stare at it for a long time. The pen dangles on a piece of string, tied to the corner of the desk. You’ve lost too many not to do it this way. It hovers in your hand. No idea what to write. A few entries above, your own writing stares back at you—neat, all-caps block letters. You draw a line underneath it, slow, deliberate. Then glance back at the console, the frequency is still open. But she’s gone. You press the pen to the paper.

20:27 — Unknown signal —

You pause, biting your lip. Hell. No words come. You don’t write what she said. Or what you said back. Instead, you cross this line out and turn to the next page. A blank one, cleaner. Further from truth.

20:28 — atmospheric interference — ghost frequency spill. No contact established.

You underline it once; like that will make it true. Then you flip the page, just in case someone else reads it in the morning.

You know it’s not procedure. But you also know how it works: unofficial frequencies are monitored sometimes. If the others find out you spoke to someone from another city—someone who shouldn’t have been there—they’ll shut it down. Change the band. Pull your shift. Maybe worse.

You close the book and push it at the edge of the desk. Your fingers tingle, thumb is awkwardly ink-stained as before. You don’t bother to wipe it. Just tilt your head back and close your eyes.

The silence hums, her voice lingering in your mind—

and it’s yours to keep.

Ellie doesn’t remember the walk back.

Morning mist obscures the sound of her steps, hides her uneven silhouette. She’s smoke, a breath of wind in the ferns. She’s at the edge of there and nowhere.

By the time she’s near the gates behind the west trail, the trees whisper above, restless with the wind that hadn’t been there an hour ago. She swears it wasn't. Light spills over the treeline—pale and uncertain, like it’s not sure it should be here yet.

Jackson's lights bloom like low, tired fireflies. The gates creak open just past dawn. Someone nods to Ellie from the watchtower. She lifts a hand, doesn’t stop walking.

As she reaches home, the door groans as she pushes it open. Inside, the air is still—cooler than outside. Ellie doesn’t bother turning on the light. Her shoes leave dark shapes on the floor, soles soaked from dirt. She shrugs off the backpack, peels off the outer jacket, and kicks at her converse until one tumbles sideways and stays that way. No sign of Joel. She doesn’t check. The weight of everything settles in the quiet. The shirt—one of her favorites—clings to her back, damp with sweat and dust. She scratches at her wrist, smearing a thin line of dried mud. She’ll shower later. Maybe. Exhaustion pulls her to the ground.

She has a couple of hours before they will need her.

Ellie sinks onto the couch like the bones have gone out of her. Face-down, arm tucked under her head, too tired to change. Her knuckles sting a little—a scraped corner from earlier—but it barely registers. Her brain floats somewhere shallow. Not asleep. Not fully awake. Just drifting.

She blinks once. Twice. Between those blinks, a voice brushes the edge of her thoughts, like a skipped page in a journal. It’s not clear at first—just a wordless shape, like a whisper behind closed doors. But then it forms: “you’re not supposed to be on this channel, are you?”

Ellie doesn’t smile. But she doesn’t not smile either.

She hears it before she sees it—the soft tap-tap-tap on the glass. That type of rain that starts tentative, as if asking permission. She turns her head, watches the droplets race each other down the pane.

Ellie exhales, low and long, and lets her eyes close.

After a day of unrelenting rage, the weather finally showed mercy.

Ellie had slept through the morning, wrapped in the hush of rain. The storm softened into a lullaby against the roof. Wind curled at the corners of the house like a tired animal settling down beside her.

When she woke, her neck aching from the unmoving posture, the light was dull and silver-gray, the kind downpours tend to leave behind. An old blanket lay over her—coarse, familiar. She hadn’t put it there. Joel must’ve come by. He probably noticed the shoes by the door, her jacket on the floor. Said nothing, as usual. Just saw her, made sure she was back, and left.

Now, a day later, it’s all behind her. Passed with the last traces of the haze.

Though the ground still carries the memory of it. Soft beneath Ellie’s boots, damp and dark like tilled soil. The field stretches wide and open in front of her, the grass flattened in places by wind, but already lifting its head again. There are wild flowers whose names Ellie doesn’t know. Just the colours among the meadow—spilling puddles of blue and white, dots of yellow and purple.

Sunlight bathes everything—soft and cool, not burning, but drying her sleeves as she works, and leaving warmth on Ellie’s collarbones. There’s a breeze, light and steady, fresh enough to keep her awake, brushing strands of bangs across her face, but not unpleasantly so—just a reminder that summer isn’t over yet.

Ellie stands at the edge of the pasture; her sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, plaid fabric bunched at the crooks of her arms, hands on her hips. The sky above Jackson is so clear it almost hurts to look at. Pale blue, scrubbed clean of cloud, like someone rinsed it out and hung it to dry.

A section of the old fence is down—the storm took its time here. Not surprising, really. It had always been half-crooked, thrown together from uneven cuts of timber and rusted nails, more suggestion than structure. Now the boards lie in the grass like fallen ribs. Ellie spent the better part of the morning prying out bent nails and measuring new planks. She rests a boot on one of the fallen boards, brow furrowed, fingers tight around a hammer.

At her back, horses shuffle lazily through the field. Yesterday all of them stood idle at the stables—horses can’t eat wet grass—so now they’re just soaking up the sunshine and wandering around.

Shimmer’s the closest—her tawny coat is glossy in places, ears flicking toward every noise. She lets out a low snort when Ellie shifts, as if checking she’s still there. Ellie doesn’t answer—she knows this sound like her own breath. She knows the calm rhythm of hooves against the ground as Shimmer paces the fence line, patient and unbothered.

Ellie reaches down and sets a new plank in place. She grips one nail between her fingers, steady, while the rest are clamped between her teeth—three silver slivers catching the light when she turns her head to flick one into her palm. She lifts the hammer. The veins shift beneath her skin as she drives it down, wrists flexing with the clean precision of someone who’s done it a hundred times before.

The tattoo on her forearm ripples with movements—black fern leaves breathing with the stretch of tendons, the moth’s wings fluttering each time her grip tightens around the handle. It’s almost hypnotic, the way ink and muscle and skin become one living thing.

She doesn’t pause between strikes. Just inhales slowly, lips parted, eyes narrowed in focus, strands of hair falling forward to brush her cheek before she tosses them back with a sharp shake of her head. Sunlight glints off her jaw line, off the small sheen of sweat gathering in the collarbone hollow—right where a knife’s tip might rest if someone got close enough. She wipes it away with the back of her hand, smearing dirt and sunshine together.

The gloves on her hands are too big—someone else’s, borrowed from the shed this morning. They bunch at the wrists, stiff with grime. The hammer fits better: heavy and solid. It makes a satisfying crack as Ellie drives a nail into the wood. The sound echoes, and then disappears into the field.

The final blow lands with a dull, certain thud. She exhales, long and quiet, thumb brushing over the finished nail before she shifts to the next plank, arm flexing again, and for a moment it’s unbearable—how effortless she looks, how holy and unholy all at once.

Ellie glances over her shoulder, adjusting the hair out of her eyes, and keeps going; pearls of sweat on her temples.

Earlier today, she stirred up some kind of commotion. Nobody knew where she had gone, and that she was back, nobody would let her forget it. Not in a rude way—only concerned.

Dina looked up from brushing one of the colts and froze, a hand still tangled in its mane. Then her shoulders dropped, and her mouth moved before the words came.

“You’re back,” she whispered as if it wasn’t obvious.

She crossed the room in three quick steps and pulled Ellie into a quick hug, barely a second long, just enough to feel she was real before letting go.

“You okay?” she asked, eyes scanning Ellie’s face for any cracks in her armour.

Ellie snorted, shaking her head a little. “Takes more than that to kill me.”

Dina huffed, rolling her eyes before giving Ellie a light smack on the shoulder. “Don’t be an asshole.”

Ellie’s mouth twitched, almost a smile. Almost an apology, except for Ellie never apologizing. “Yeah,” she said finally, quieter. “I’m okay.”

That was it. No details. No revealing secrets.

Maria had tried to talk her into taking the day off, but Ellie had already grabbed the toolbox. She needs this. Something to fix with her hands. The rhythm of it; the effort. The way it shuts everything else up—even if for a little while.

Ellie scratches her scarred brow with her wrist, gaze drifting over the field. Horses stolidly flick their ears at flies. Wind sighs through the grass. Ellie blinks at the dragonfly near her face. And then it comes.

A flash behind her eyes, quick and uninvited.

The headset that left dusty patches on her head; the numbers she doesn’t even know why she remembers. Three. Nine. Four. Seven. Her own kind of Morse code. And a name burning her tongue. Or burned on it.

They flood her mind like a traumatic memory, although there was no trauma, no big deal at all. She talked to a girl, yeah, whatever?

In some way, it matters. It won’t leave her mess of a head for two days.

The image flickers, bright and gone in the same breath as she opens her eyes. It’s gone like a glare of sunlight on a blade; flies away like the startled dragonfly. Ellie exhales, blinking two more times, and puts the hammer back in the box. As if by moving fast enough she can keep her mind empty.

She slips down to sit with her back against the newly fixed fence. The wood is rough and smells of resin and old rain. Ellie tips her head back against it, legs stretched out and crossed before her, boots streaked with sawdust.

The sky above her head is wide open. The same sky you probably look at. It’s wide enough for you to see the same clouds.

Shit.

Ellie pulls a long stalk of grass from the earth beside her and twirls it between her fingers before slipping it into her mouth. The taste is sweet and clean, melting.

Beside her sits her backpack, half-zipped. She drags it closer and pulls out her journal, its cover scuffed and peeling at the corners. The pencil is worn down to a stub. Ellie has to pour it all out on paper; ease the tension of this itch that keeps twirling at the edge of her mind. She doesn’t think and doesn’t plan.

Just presses the lead to the paper and lets her hand move, sketching jagged lines that rise and fall like radio static. Waves and frequencies, the shapes of invisible sound. The spoken words linger between those lines. She shades them darker, pressing harder until the page almost tears. The pencil lead breaks with a crack.

The blade of grass in her mouth tastes bitter now. Ellie spits it out.

A warm shadow falls over her. She looks up to see Shimmer standing close, Ellie’s convex reflection in her big doe eyes. The horse’s breath curls out in small waves of warmth. She lowers her head and nudges Ellie’s shoulder with her soft muzzle, insistent and curious.

Ellie laughs quietly, knowing her struggles mean nothing to a horse. Shimmer smells of sweet hay and dust and late summer evening. Her coat shimmers—huh—with campfire flames.

Ellie presses her palm to the horse’s cheek, feeling strength beneath the velvet skin, the calm heartbeat that doesn’t care about storms or voices or broken fences.

For a while, they stay like this. The girl and the horse, resting under the inverted dome of the sky. The broken pencil is lost in the tangled grass, and the page on Ellie’s lap is filled with silent signals, stretched across the paper like heartbeat monitors. She wonders if you could catch them. Like you did the first time.

Ellie doesn’t hear the footsteps behind her at first. She only notices when a shadow falls across her again, broader this time, blocking out the sun. She shuts her journal out of old instinct, and glances up.

Jesse’s there, leaning his arms over the top rail of the fence, wood creaking softly under his weight. He squints down at her with that lazy grin of his.

“Damn,” he says, eyes sweeping over the nailed planks. “You’re really making the rest of us look bad.”

Ellie grins, grabbing her pencil stub and flicking it at him like a spear.

“Then maybe the rest of y’all should do your fucking jobs.”

Jesse catches the pencil before it hits his chest, rolling it between his fingers as a trophy.

“Harsh words for someone sittin’ on their ass chewing grass.”

Ellie looks away with a smirk, slipping another stalk into her mouth just to spite him. Jesse props his chin on his folded arms.

“Came to check on you,” he says, quieter this time. “Dina said you were out here since dawn.”

Ellie shrugs.

“Needed to finish it.”

“Yeah.”

For a moment he watches her with that unreadable look he gets sometimes, like he’s seeing something she doesn’t know she’s showing. Then he sighs and swings himself over the fence in one easy motion, boots thumping softly on the other side.

He lowers himself into the grass beside her with a grunt, long legs crossing awkwardly. For a while he just sits there, elbows resting on his knees, looking out across the pasture. A hawk circles far above them.

“Well,” Jesse says, leaning back on his palms. “If you’re gonna waste time out here, I might join you.”

Ellie snorts again but doesn’t argue.

Jesse shifts to pick up a small stone near his boot and tosses it aside with a muted clink.

“Too bad,” he mutters, almost to himself. “Wish we could radio Dina. Tell her to quit whatever she’s doin’ and come be useless with us.”

Ellie sighs out a quiet laugh through her nose, though she gives Jesse a quick side eye, with a weird instinctive reaction to the word ‘radio’. She’s crazy.

Ellie chews on the inside of her cheek and clears her throat awkwardly. When she speaks, her voice is careful, too casual. He started it first. He did. Ellie just keeps the conversation alive. Sure.

“You think…anyone can just…I dunno. Get on the radio like that? Talk to whoever they want.”

She scrapes her cheekbone, her eyebrows lifting, gaze fixed on anything but him. Jesse watches her, unimpressed. When Ellie tries to play it cool, she’s about as subtle as a brick through glass. Still, he plays along.

“Depends what you’re using. Patrol radios are locked channels. Shortwaves are different, though. You get the frequency, you can talk to whoever’s listening. Why?”

Ellie scratches at the worn edge of her journal cover with her thumbnail, suddenly super-aware of the smudge of dirt on it.

“No reason. I dunno. Just…wondering.”

Jesse watches her for a second longer, narrows his eyes a little, then lets out a nonchalant laugh.

“Yeah, sure. Next thing I know, you’ll be running some late-night talk show. Ellie’s Hour of Depressing Shit.”

“Fuck off.”

She points a finger at him. Not the pointing finger, though. But her lips curl almost into a smile.

“Hey, I’d tune in,” Jesse says, grinning and leaning back on his hands again. “Long as there’s music breaks.”

A groan in response.

But a faint idea—more just a premonition of the coming idea—is vibrating somewhere beneath her ribs. Undefined and restless. Like a signal she can’t quite tune into yet.

She doesn’t think properly when she speaks to Jesse again. It’s bigger than her. It’s crawling.

“Uhm—in theory,” she begins, so Jesse squints at her with one eye open. His head lies on his arms, the sky above is blinding. “In a city like Jackson—not in Jackson, but. Like, you know...”

Jesse’s gaze says that he doesn’t.

The corner of his mouth twitches upwards like he’s trying not to smile.

Maybe it isn’t too late to just shut the fuck up and say something about the weather. Yeah, like how hot it was the first time she heard you. Or how fresh the morning felt when she came back, wrapped in mist. Or how furious the predicted storm was, the one that broke this very fence pressing into her back. So many topics, yet somehow all about you. White threads of your timbre are stitched through Ellie’s days. They’re tying her wrists, pulling tighter with every thought.

You’re the one tying them.

She rubs her nose with the side of her finger, smudging her freckles with the sun at its zenith, and releases a small sigh, like she’s bracing herself before diving underwater.

“If someone in that city would like to get—let’s say, a walkie-talkie…?” Ellie purses her lips, tongue pressing against her canine in thought. Her eyes scan the horizon, deliberately anywhere but him. “For personal purposes, hypothetically, how and where could they get it?”

Jesse rolls onto his side, propping himself up on an elbow to get a better look at her face. He’s silent for a good couple of beats. He looks at Ellie, Ellie doesn’t look at him. Dumb show.

“Do I wanna know the details?” he finally asks, voice low and cautious, but the smirk is already tugging at his lips.

“No way. You don’t.”

“Nah, I think I do…” He draws out the words with fake seriousness, eyes narrowing with mischief. “We really have to call out for Dina.”

“No way, we don’t.”

“Bro, is your record broken? Though, yeah—let’s not mention records. Bad topic.”

Jesse says it slowly, with all his fake concern, dragging out each word with deliberate emphasis. He wants to savour the way it’ll piss her off.

Ellie groans, rubbing the heel of her hand over her eyebrow—it was a low blow.

“You’re not fucking helpin’. Mockin’ me here…” she mutters, flicking a stray ant off her knee with unnecessary force.

“I know,” Jesse says, grin widening as he flops back down into the grass. “That’s the funniest part.”

Ellie stares at him, jaw shifting, and exhales through her nose in half a laugh, half defeat.

 “What did I expect?”

The sun crawls, pressing heat into their backs as minutes slip by. Ellie picks at a loose thread on her knee, while Jesse listens in silence, only nodding sometimes, looking thoughtful. She doesn’t tell him everything—just enough. Enough for his mouth to thin out into a line and his fingers to tap restless rhythms on his thigh.

At some point, the conversation dies off. The wind rustles through the tall grass, carrying faint scents of cooking fires from town. Maybe Ellie needs to simply speak it out loud more than to get a reaction. But spoken words have a tendency to grow deeper the second they fall from the lips.

Jesse lies back down with a sigh. “You gonna tell Dina any of that?”

Ellie scoffs, flicking a pebble at his boot. “Maybe. Over lunch.”

“Good,” he mutters. “She worries.”

Almost as if her name conjures her, Dina appears at the edge of the field, waving one arm to catch their attention. A folded cloth bundle is tucked under her other arm. Her silhouette cuts bright against the pastel background, hair pulled back messily, stray strands catching the wild wind.

“Speak of the devil,” Jesse murmurs, sitting up with a grin.

Dina stops a few steps away, mock glaring down at them both. “I knew I’d find you there too,” she says, pointing her chin at Jesse. “Thought you might want food before you die of starvation.”

She tosses the bundle down between them. Bread, jerky, two bruised apples.

Ellie huffs a quiet laugh and reaches for a piece of bread.

“Thanks,” she mumbles, and for a moment, with Jesse’s lazy smile beside her and Dina rolling her eyes at both of them, everything feels almost normal.

“Also,” Dina adds as she sits beside them, brushing crumbs from her fingers. “I brought Ellie a sandwich.”

Jesse makes a wounded noise from where he’s sprawled in the grass. “And for me?”

“What did you bring to her?”

She crosses her arms and tilts her head, unbothered.

“My company.”

“That’s why we broke up.” Dina shoots back without missing a beat. It’s done for Jesse.

Ellie whistles with her mouth full of food. “‘Cause of me?”

“Yeah, keep dreaming.” Dina smirks, brushing a stray hair from her cheek.

“Harsh.” Both Jesse and Ellie mutter, defeated.

Dina suddenly frowns at them, hands on her hips, eyebrows raised. “You two look… weird. And suspicious. Like you’ve been trading weed behind the barn.” She pauses, shaking her head with mock offence. “Without inviting me? Assholes.”

Ellie snorts, tearing the package of her sandwich. Jesse points at her with the calmest expression on his face.

“Ellie’s just got herself another situationship over the radio with some girl from Montana quarantine zone, and now she’s awkward after her first old-fashioned sexting.”

It takes him less than thirty seconds to spill the whole thing on Dina with the most casual and careless manner, without even stopping to chew his apple. Ellie immediately starts choking on bread, fighting for her life with crumbs and flaxseeds. She’s losing. Ellie-ate-but-left-crumbs-Williams. Dina slaps her on the back with confusion.

“What the—?” she hisses at Jesse over Ellie’s hunched back. He doesn’t hear the words but can perfectly read the message with her whispering lips and questioning look. And then, as if remembering something, she speaks to him again, in full voice now. “Sexting is when there’s texting, Jesse.”

“There was no sex anyway!!!” Ellie blurts, rising from the dead, still coughing with her voice cracking halfway through. Both of them stare at her.

“So the other part is correct?” Dina inquires, leaning forward, her eyebrows raised. “How the hell did that happen?”

Ellie groans, scrubbing a hand down her face. “Long story.”

She rips a bite from her sandwich, chewing hard, refusing to meet either of their eyes. Then she explodes, a bit late.

“Can’t believe out of the whole fucking town, I chose to tell you,” she grunts, glaring at Jesse. She waves her hand at him, and a piece of tomato flies out of the sandwich she’s clutching. “Go tell Joel now, won’t you?”

“C’mon, it’s Dina,” Jesse protests, waving a dismissive hand. He kicks the tomato out of his jeans. “She’s smart. She can keep secrets. Hell, I’d bet my lunch she’s the only person who can actually help you.”

Dina lifts her chin, smirking. “Can’t believe I say that, but he’s right. I am the smart one in this trio.”

“At least I’m the handsome one.” Jesse shoots back instantly, flashing her a grin. It doesn’t work.

Dina and Ellie exchange a look. There’s a pause. Then:

“Actually…” Dina starts, tilting her head thoughtfully.

Ellie swallows her mouthful and nods solemnly. “No, you’re not.”

“Far from it, to be honest,” Dina adds.

“Fuck you two,” Jesse mutters, flopping backwards again with a dramatic groan. “Then I’m the funniest.”

Ellie chuckles. “Unlikely.”

Jesse brushes Ellie off, lips curling in a smug smile. “Can’t hear what a girl with a radio girlfriend says. Bad signal.”

Ellie shoves the last bite of sandwich into her mouth and glares down at him one more time. “I hate you, Jesse. Watch your back. I’ll poison your next apple.”

A girlfriend, yeah? Such nonsense.

The ride out is quiet, sun slanting low and gentle through thin veils of woods. Ellie leans forward in the saddle, one hand wrapped around the reins, the other resting lightly on Shimmer’s warm neck. The horse’s ears flick back at her touch, listening.

“Don’t give me that look,” Ellie mutters under her breath, voice swallowed by the breeze. “It’s not like I’m doing anything stupid. Well… not that stupid.”

Shimmer snorts, as if in argument, hooves drumming a steady rhythm against the path. Birds scatter from the grass in small brown flutters. The world smells like warm earth and old pine sap, dust kicked up behind them like pale ghosts following.

Measured rocking in the saddle clears the mind.

At first, it was an accident. The second time will be a huge mistake.

Ellie knows it isn't worth so much effort. The risk, the uncomprehending looks Ellie met as she said she needed to get back there. They were right. But she’s got a bad habit of walking down the wrong path. Today, it’s leading her to the long-abandoned school.

As an excuse, Ellie said that she had forgotten something important there. Maybe her common sense.

Earlier this day, Dina pulled her aside behind the canteen, glancing over her shoulder before slipping something small and black into Ellie’s palm. Cold metal and rough plastic. A two-way radio. Dina Woodward, the woman she is.

Ellie blinked at her. “How the hell did you—”

Dina just shrugged, a sly smile playing on her lips. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want honest answers to.”

“You stole it?!” Ellie stared at her, unbelieving.

“No! Not a crime.”

Now, as the old school looms into view, rooflines jagged against the pale evening sky, Ellie breathes out slowly. Careless birds far above know her worries. And they don’t care.

The same hallway waits for her beyond broken doors, the same peeling posters of letters and cartoon animals. The same you? And something new, settling heavy in Ellie’s chest, somewhere below the heart.

If nothing happens, if there’s nothing to hear tonight… she’ll drop it. Drop the whole idea, let it rot here like everything else. She’s not desperate enough to keep trying when there’s no one on the other end. Right?

She slides off Shimmer’s back, soles crunching over gravel. Pavement is hot. The horse whinnies softly, pawing the ground.

“Stay here,” Ellie tells her, giving her flank a gentle pat. “Don’t go wanderin’ off, alright? Not planning to drag your stubborn ass back to Jackson in the dark.”

She steps into the silent, echoing halls. The air tastes faintly of mildew and forgotten childhoods. Her fingers tighten around the backpack strap as she makes her way back to the broadcast room, the floor littered with soggy worksheets and broken crayons. The same window she sat beneath last time gapes open to the field, letting in the dying gold light. This room itself is like a jar of honey.

Ellie sinks down in the chair, remembering its creaks under her weight. The radio console is in front of her, all scratched panels and blinking dead lights, as if winking at her. Her gaze lingers above the knobs for a second before she exhales and slides the headphones over her ears. The cups swallow the world, leaving only the faint hiss in her pulsating head. She draws in a breath that tastes of rust and summer dust, thumb over the button.

She twists one dial, then another, eyes narrowing in focus. Numbers flicker past—frequencies she doesn’t understand, scattered noises—lives and stories just like hers, maybe—dissolving in crackle. Finally, she finds it. The familiar empty buzz, vibrating against her eardrums like a pulse.

She wants to drop it right now.

Rip the headset off, recoil from the table, set this damned room on fire and gallop back, urging the horse on. Hide in the quiet of her house, become deaf for a while, until she stops  hearing codes and faint laugh, ‘Jackson’ instead of her real name. But she sits there, frozen. Her soft breath near the mic.

Ellie’s mouth feels dry as she leans in, her heart hammering; her hand lightly beating over the button. She has no idea what she’s supposed to say. There’s a protocol for this shit, right? But she’s never been good with rules, and it’s not like she’d care to follow them anyway.

She clears her throat, voice low and cautious.

“Uh—Montana, you there? It’s… it’s me.” She cringes at herself immediately. ‘Me’? Really? Comprehensive.

A part of her starts hoping for no answer. Ellie releases the button. Silence hums back at her, stretching long and thin. Another part of her starts to curl away, embarrassed at herself for even trying, already preparing to cut the connection and leave this place and this stupid idea behind.

She imagines all the people who could be listening on the other end. Scavengers. Raiders. Strangers with guns. She repeats herself one more time that it’s not worth so much effort and risk. But despite that, there’s a strange lightness, tingling in her fingertips—expectation. The delicious, awful tension of waiting. It sits warm and electric in her belly. That’s probably how you felt, waiting for a response.

Then there is a familiar click, becoming a reflex sound for Ellie. She identifies the hiss, but not from the static.

“What the fuck are you doing here—?” you finally burst out, more shocked than harsh. That’s it—instead of any greetings. Ellie’s lips curve quickly into a smirk. Montana.

“Hi to you too,” she drawls, leaning back in the chair, her shoes scuffing softly against the linoleum floor.

“That’s not funny.”

Your tone tightens, serious, but there’s an undertone of something else—relief, maybe, or disbelief.

“No, it is.” Ellie insists, grin widening as she taps her fingers restlessly against her thigh. The headset feels hot around her ears.

You need a couple of heartbeats to live through the depth of her teasing voice.

“Can you talk?” There’s a change in Ellie’s tone. It’s serious and almost hesitant.

“Yes,” you reply after a beat. There’s a rustle on your end, like you’re shifting the mic closer. “Just didn’t expect you here.”

“Good.”

What's good? Ellie doesn’t know herself.

“Are you lost again?” you ask, dropping a little lower, amused despite your obvious confusion. “This time you definitely need help, hm?”

“I’m not lost,” Ellie shoots back, her smile fading just enough to leave her mouth slack with honesty. She exhales, rubbing the heel of her palm against her forehead. “I—fuck. It’s just… seems like I can't stop thinking ‘bout you.”

A brick through glass, remember? Subtle as a rifle shot. You’re shot. Another two or ten heartbeats to proceed what she said. You have a feeling that this is too much for your ordinary late shift. Not complaining or anything, but you haven’t got used to random girls with—let’s admit—hot as hell voices, telling you they think about you day and night. Did she say day and night?

There’s a brief silence, broken only by the steady hiss of the frequency. Then your sigh crackles through the line.

“Can’t stop thinking about the girl you’ve never met in person and had, what, a twenty minute long conversation with?”

“Yeah.”

Ellie breathes out. It’s quiet, her voice catching a little at the end, almost like a laugh but not quite. Her restless fingers roll the pen without ink across the table.

“Desperate,” you whisper. But there’s no bite in it, only weary amusement, like you’re shaking your head at yourself as much as at her.

Ellie admits:

“Maybe.”

She holds her breath, eyes fixed on the darkened window, as if she could see you there. Her fingers release the pen, tighten around the edge of the table, nail brushing over a flaking chip of green paint. The sound of you is curling warm and ragged in her ears.

“Listen,” Ellie starts, rougher than she intends. She clears her throat and tries again, softer this time. “I got…hell, sounds stupid.”

“Wow, now I’m curious.”

“A walkie talkie,” she finally exhales.

There’s a pause on your end. She imagines you frowning slightly, head tilted like you do when thinking. Or you don’t. She has no idea how you look when you think. Or when you chuckle faintly at her comments. But does it matter? Ellie’s here because of a whole different reason. You yourself.

“A walkie talkie,” you echo finally, scepticism covering your tone. And a smile, but you won’t let her know about it. “And for what?”

Ellie looks down at her palms. Even through the headset she can hear Shimmer wandering under the broadcast room’s window. Really, why all this? She bites her lips.

“I dunno just—figured… maybe you’d wanna talk. Over the radio. When you’re bored or… whatever. Sometimes.”

Ellie just knows if Jesse was here, he’d explode.

She hates how small her voice sounds, how unsure. But there’s no taking it back now. The words are out there, floating in the stale air and across broken miles to wherever you are.

Another pause, shorter this time. She hears you breathe in, slow and considering. Something’s shifting on your side, then a dull crash. Ellie starts thinking you’re about to quit your post and leave her dying from embarrassment alone.

“It’d be nice. Sometimes,” you say. The best things are simple, just like your reply. You’re quiet, unreadable. “But not too often. And my shifts are at nights. So, no day calls. No ‘it’s me’ before six. I’m serious. And—”

“Another ‘and’, and I might give up.” Ellie interrupts.

“The biggest ‘and’: it might not work at all,” you cut in, and this phrase is screaming that you’re rolling your eyes hard.

“Why?” Ellie asks, frowning, thumb absently scraping a fleck of dirt off her jeans.

“How to explain…” You trail off, and she can almost hear you chewing on your lip, thinking.

“I’m not dumb, okay?”

“Right,” you rush to add, voice a little softer. “Well… my radio’s kinda powerful. It reaches pretty far out. That’s how I picked you up last time. It was late, or close to it. At night, radio signals go further ‘cause they bounce off the ionosphere better.”

Ellie blinks, staring at the scuffed floor, her mouth curling down. “Forget it. Now I feel dumb.”

A small laugh crackles through the line. “Don’t. Basically—regular radios reach further at night. Walkie-talkies, though… they only work short-range no matter what.”

A smile creeping across Ellie’s face. She picks at a splinter on the table edge.

“So. You’re a nerd.”

“That’s what you got from all that?” you hiss at her with this fake indignation that falls apart as soon as an uninvited laugh comes.

Ellie grins, leaning back in her chair until it tips onto two legs. “Brain and brawn,” her eyes half-lidded as she gazes at the peeling ceiling tiles above her.

“You’re the brawn part, right?”

“Who knows, Montana, who knows…” she drawls, openly teasing. Then Ellie returns the chair to its normal position, remembering. “But what’s with that damn walkie talkie? Useless?”

“We can try. You know how to set it up?” your tone becomes slightly guiding, the banter smoldering somewhere behind the line.

“That’s kinda why I’m asking. Figured you’d know. Thought… maybe you could walk me through it.”

Ellie scratches the back of her neck, glancing at the battered device in her bag. She is the brawn. Silence hums between you for a moment, long enough that Ellie wonders if you’re thinking about hanging up.

“Maybe,” you say, and she hears the faint smile in your words. “Depends how desperate you really are.”

Ellie’s mouth quirks up at one corner.

“Desperate enough.”

Seems like you both savour the moment, and then your voice shifts, gaining that crisp edge of focus Ellie’s heard only once before—when you called your lost patrol. Clear. Confident. Professional. Hot.

“Okay. Check the channel knob—yeah, that one on the left. Turn it until you hit a blank frequency. We’ll set up a direct call line.”

Ellie obeys without thinking, her fingers moving quickly over the battered plastic controls. Your instructions come steady and calm, breaking only when you pause to breathe or correct her.

“Now adjust the squelch. Just enough to kill the static but not lose signal.”

“Done,” she says in response, adjusting the dial slowly.

“You did better than I expected,” you say, half-kidding, and despite the fuzz of the line, Ellie can hear the quiet approval warming your tone. It makes her snort.

For the next few minutes, neither of you speaks beyond clipped instructions and short confirmations. Ellie’s world narrows to the feeling of the weight in her hands and the sound of your voice guiding her through shadows and signal noise.

Finally, you exhale, and the line crackles softly.

“There. That should do it. Try calling me later tonight, around two or three. If it works… well, I guess we’ll find out.”

Ellie leans back, staring at the dusty ceiling. Relief floods through her bones, heavy and warm.

“Yeah,” she breathes out. “Yeah, okay.”

Outside, the sun is already sinking, laying long shadows across the floor. Ellie can almost feel home calling her back—the quiet roads, Shimmer’s steady steps, the smell of old wood and the faint echo of Joel’s guitar drifting through the house.

But for now, she lingers a moment longer, headset still cupping her ears, as if hoping to catch the fading warmth of your frequency before she goes.

[ log saved; time ??? ]

J: I told my friends about you.

M: Bold.

J: Did you report me?

M: ...No.

J: That’s really bold.

You had told her to call you later that night, and she did.

That night and the one after it.

It was something like a miracle in the world of science. The outbreak was slightly bending the rules of nature, messing with tides, moon phases, and magnetic poles. And the radio waves as well. Links of the same chain—or the butterfly effect.

Your stranger girl somewhere in Wyoming isn’t a butterfly, you already know that. She’s a moth. The kind that exists for you only after sunset. The one instinctively drawn to light.

She said something stupid in your headset—she had torn through miles of distance, the poor quality of the equipment, forced these waves of signal to listen to her. Only to drop her typical “you here?” and make you interrupt your business and sigh with laughter.

You were here. Probably just for her. There were no groups to coordinate—not after what had happened. Loss teaches patience: no more night patrols, or you’ll run out of people. No tasks. You sat there, surrounded by copper wires pulled from a broken lamp, trying to rebuild the whole circuit of the dead transceiver. Just in case. In case of her.

By the end of the night—by the end of your shift and your renewed conversation—the transceiver was fixed. You’d learnt that she can also work with her hands and has a horse named Shimmer.

She asked what you were doing, and you told her—stripping wires, re-soldering contacts, trying not to burn your fingers off. She said that sounded badass. You shrugged, even though she couldn’t see it, and told her it was mostly just tedious. She laughed (oh, that laughter; more like a sharp, voiceless  exhale) and said tedious things keep you alive these days.

She asked if your hands were steady. You said they had to be. She said hers were too, when it came to her rifle, and for a moment there was a quietness between you, like she was thinking of something else entirely. You were thinking about hands holding a rifle. Yours became less steady. You burned your fingers at the end.

She said she wasn’t good with words. You thought she was perfect with them, just didn’t know how to place them right yet.

Then she told you Shimmer hates rain. You told her everyone hates rain. She said, “Not you, I bet,” and you didn’t answer.

By the time dawn crawled into the room, bruising the windowpanes with lilac light, you’d finished the repairs. Your fingers were smelling of copper and burned plastic. And for a fleeting moment, in the grey hour between night and morning, you wished you could fix yourself as easily as you fixed old circuits.

She was still there on the other end, breathing softly into your headset, like she wasn’t planning on going anywhere soon. You realised she’d fallen asleep only ten minutes later—her quiet breaths filling your ears, each one making the static pulse in a strangely comforting rhythm.

You didn’t say anything after that. Couldn’t. And you couldn’t bring yourself to end the connection either. Just sat there, listening to her steady breathing, your words caught in your throat and locked away by the pressed-down button she’d forgotten to release. You told yourself you’d hang up in a minute, just one more minute, until the room turned from lilac to silver.

What was she dreaming about?

She never told you that. But she told you many other things.

There are many of these Jackson-convos in your collection. She comes again, and you answer. She’s gone—you don’t report. A ritual. The first fake record in your logbook is left a couple of pages behind, forgotten. Time drags on, the summer’s living its last days, temperatures dropping, crying with starfalls.

“Yo.”

You raise your head from the book you’ve read four times this year. The choice isn’t great, and you’re not picky. The ink is smudged at the edges from old rainwater or tears—you don’t remember which.

The same old clock shows 2:32. Its hands sometimes twitch convulsively, and the next minute they slow down—its days are almost over. After that, you’ll probably have to tell time by the sun. Pretty convenient for someone working nights, right?

“You should call me with a ‘Do you copy?’ message,” you say into your mic, low and quiet enough to not wake up the room around you. If there was anyone to wake up.

You’re speaking honestly, or at least as honestly as you ever speak these days—to her, to yourself, to the fresh jar of wildflowers perched by your elbow. Tiny purple heads bowing under their own weight, like they’re asleep too. Your protest is nothing but the act of protesting itself, and you smile faintly into the dimness, amused. There’s no way you’d actually want to hear those dull words from her, words burned into your memory by hundreds of other voices that came and went through your headset. People come and go. She comes and stays.

You don’t want her to go.

She snorts so loud that the signal creaks with a burst of noise.

“That’s bullshit,” she says, mockingly laughing. “I won’t say that.”

“But—”

“No way. It sounds so stupid.”

“You know what’s even more stupid?” you cross your arms, defensive. The chill bites through your jacket, grounding you for a second. You scrape the stripe on your shoulder with your nail. The threads stick out because of its age. You sigh. “You.”

“Did I personally offend you?” her voice is warm, scratching at the edge of a chuckle.

“Now every time I say that, I’ll remember your valuable remark.”

“Then just fuck them. Greet people with normal greetings.”

“Normal ones like, let me remember—” you pause, dramatically bending your fingers to name the list. “‘ugm—Montana, it’s me’, or ‘Hi, nightshifter’, or (my personal favourite) ‘sup’. No more, no less, right?”

She whistles and shifts in her seat. You hear something similar to the rustling of pages. Could she be reading too? Unlikely. Once you were describing to each other how your work place looked, so now you could imagine her blending into the permanent clutter of her desk.

“Woah, sounds way cooler. Who said that? Kinda wanna meet her.”

Jackson wants to play, you think, catching the teasing drawl in her tone.

Tonight you’re more than ready to play back.

“Yeah, go find another. She’s already taken.”

You bite down on your lip, feeling heat pool in your stomach. She clicks her tongue, a low sound that sends a flicker of something dark and sweet down your spine.

“Montana, you’re on fire today.”

This is what you like most about the two of you. The way distance strips away everything else, leaving only words between you.

Talking to someone so far away feels like standing in the dark with your eyes closed, safe in knowing they can’t see you—only hear what you choose to give them.

You can let yourself burn a little brighter, say things you’d never risk to say if you were face to face. Let your words spill out without thinking twice. You don’t have to measure them, wrap them in polite tones, weigh them against the flicker of someone’s gaze to check if you’ve said too much.

Here, you don’t worry about the quiet gaps or the wrong expressions on your face. You don’t have to look anyone in the eyes or smile when your mouth feels too tired to move. But, ironically, you smile so much with her.

Here, in this crackling darkness, your voice is enough. You can be sharp, teasing, cruel, soft. You can flirt. You can curse. You can admit you haven’t slept in two days or that you’re terrified of your own dreams. You can say things that would rot on your tongue otherwise, hidden and heavy.

Because she’s just a voice, and you’re just a voice. And that’s what makes it so easy.

So safe.

So damn dangerous.

You’re not breaking any laws—if there are even laws left to break. This isn’t wrong. This is yours. Quiet, secret, harmless. Just a distant friend, and really, what harm is there in that?

You turn a page, words blur and settle under the thin light.

“What’re you doing?” she asks, breaking the hum, as if she could see the way your shoulders slump in the chair, the way your mind wanders.

“Reading.”

“At this hour?” There’s a grin hidden in her tone. “First line of your page, c’mon. Impress me.”

You sigh, running your thumb along the paper’s worn edge. Your eyes flick down the page, searching, until the sentence finds you.

Of course. You shake your head.

Fucking perfect.

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

There’s a pause. You can almost hear her squint in confusion before she snorts too loud for 3 am.

“What the hell, girl… you got chairs for all your imaginary friends?”

A small smile tugs at your lips. “Well, one I definitely have.”

“Hey!” Her indignant laugh crackles through the headset. “That’s awful. Don’t you have anything else in your library?”

“What’s not awful then?”

“Comics?”

You let out a short breath of laughter, pressing your palm to your forehead. “And how exactly are we gonna share pictures? Telepathically?”

“Well-well.” she hums,  the sound curling low and warm in your ears. “Any encyclopedias?”

“And who’s the nerd here now?” you tease back, still remembering, but your voice is softer than before.

“Can’t hide my nerdy ass anymore…” she mumbles, suddenly declassified.

Your chest rises and falls peacefully in time with her invisible presence. You imagine her lying on her back somewhere far away, her hair probably a mess—you can’t help but think of it as nothing but a mess—and her eyes half-lidded with sleep.

“Why encyclopedias?” you ask, your tone gentler now, testing the dark for her secrets.

She exhales, almost like she’s forgotten you’re listening.

“Dunno. Guess I just… always wanted to know how shit works. The world. Stars. All that. At the end—I mean, where we’re now—nothing else really matters except space. And even that… doesn’t give a fuck about us. We’ll all be gone long before the sun burns out. Kinda comforting, in a fucked up way.”

And she is not good with words?

You tuck your knees up to your chest in your chair, hugging them close, and rest your chin on top. For you, space feels like loneliness in its purest form.

“You like stars?”

“Used to…”

Her voice is quieter, vulnerable. You know she’d hate this ‘v’ word. Her shell is just like yours, stronger maybe. She’s made of stone—you’re made of glass. North and South; plus and minus—an impossible duo.

“I mean, I went to a museum once. With… someone.”

You wait. You’ve learned not to force words out, the way people force water from a dry well. Eventually, they come.

“He—uh, he made it like I was really there. Like I could… touch all that stuff. Spacesuits, rockets, moon buggies. I got this flyer. Still keep it.”

A faint smile flickers at the corners of your mouth, though your chest feels unbearably tight. “Sounds like he was a good person.”

“Yeah,” she says softly. There is a pause. “He’s a good liar.”

The static hisses. Your smile fades away. You hear her swallow. “We… don’t really talk about that shit anymore.”

Her armor is all those ellipses, the half-sentences she never finishes. The wounds aren’t treated—they fester behind the ‘whatever’s, ‘shit’s and ‘fuck it’s. Not a girl—just an unspoken revelation, bits of honesty sharp enough to cut if touched.

Your throat stings with words you won’t say. I’m sorry. That must hurt. Tell me more. I’m here. But you only nod, swallow your sorries and whisper:

“Stars are still there, you know.”

There for her. Shining. Falling.

Who cares if the sun burns out, when there are so many stars lighting up in the dark?

“Yeah. Guess they are.”

The sun isn’t even fully risen when you leave your little comms room—your kingdom of wires and static. The morning air is pale, thin, quiet in a way only morning can be, but people are already awake. Always are. Shifting shapes between makeshift tents and half-ruined buildings, voices low and restrained. No one wastes words this early. Everyone’s busy carrying crates, checking traps, mending fences, preparing for a day that will strip a little more life off their tired bodies.

You pause on the doorstep and inhale. The chill fills your lungs, sharp with the scent of pine needles and wet earth. There’s dew clinging to the grass. The sky is grey-blue and streaked with soft gold near the horizon. Instead of the heavy ache you expect after a night with no sleep, there’s only a peaceful, startling freshness against your face, as if the world is gently pressing its cool palms to your skin.

Funny, you think, how easy it is to forget all this exists when you’re trapped indoors, surrounded by rust and blinking lights. Yet all around you, this pretentious sacrifice—you don’t even know for what, humanity?—is ignored.

Out here, everything feels simpler. Trees don’t lie. Dawn doesn’t pretend. The birds aren’t screaming warnings down broken headsets; they’re just… alive. Singing because that’s what they do. Meanwhile, you spend your nights tangled up in old technology, chasing something distant and unreachable—trying to keep something human alive in a world that keeps forgetting how.

Her unsteady voice is in your head—too light without the burden of the headset. We’ll all be gone long before the sun burns out.

Your gaze drifts across the clearing to a lone pine, dark against the paling haze, its needles trembling. She’s right. Humans will vanish long before that tree meets its end—before rot hollows it from within or lightning splits it down to smoking ruin. The earth will go on spinning. The sun will keep rising, scattering light across empty roads and collapsed rooftops. The birds will keep singing without caring who listens. Seasons will come and go, wind will scatter seeds across cracked concrete, ivy will bury the broken buildings, wrapping steel and glass in silent green shrouds.

One day the world will forget there were ever people here at all.

And standing there in the soft hush, you find something devastatingly beautiful in that. A quiet mercy. An absolution. The idea that nature will keep writing its story without them—without you.

The world won’t remember you. But maybe she will. The one fascinated by comics and stars.

You walk slowly, blinking against the light. Your knees ache from sitting all night, your eyes feel gritty, throat dry from hours of quiet talking and breathing in recycled dust. The gravel crunches under your boots. You keep your head down, mind heavy and humming with afterthoughts.

The morning shift change happened an hour ago. Someone else is in the comm room now, sitting in your chair, flicking through channels and logging transmissions with half the precision you would. But it’s enough. Daytime is easy—most of the chatter is routine, people reporting locations, asking for gate clearance, reading out supply lists. Anyone can keep the frequency open, anyone can follow protocol. They don’t need to know signal theory or how to splice broken wires back to life. They don’t need to calculate skip distances or translate old encryption codes left behind by the Fireflies.

That’s why you asked for nights. Nights are quieter, lonelier, but if something happens—something outside the script—they need you. They need someone who knows what to do when the system fails. Who can stretch a dying signal across impossible miles. Who can hear a girl’s voice through the static when everyone else hears nothing.

Sometimes you cover daytime too, when there’s no choice. Sometimes you teach others, quick lessons scrawled on scraps of paper, diagrams in smudged pencil. But mostly, you stay in the dark.

The breakfast line forms along the old cafeteria wall, half collapsed on one side and reinforced with salvaged tin sheets on the other. You stand in the short queue for rations. The tables here are repurposed crates; metal mugs clang against them with muted finality. Someone’s child tugs at their mother’s sleeve, eyes dark with hunger and sleep. Two soldiers stand off to the side, rifles slung over their shoulders, speaking low as they check maps and routes for the day’s patrol. Their boots scuff against gravel; their movements are unhurried but restless, as if waiting to be given a purpose.

You shove your hands in your pockets, kicking at pebbles with the toe of your boot. Summer’s supposed to be easy. Green, blooming, alive. But these woods have been silent for years, emptied of deer and elk long ago. Even birds seem fewer these days.

Two weeks ago, fish still came from the northern dam. Last week, radio towers kept humming with trade requests. Now the towers are quiet. The dam’s gone silent.

Hunger has a sound too—not an empty stomach, but the way people start avoiding each other’s eyes in the breakfast line. Conversations grow sparse. No one wants to say it out loud: that cables and frequency waves can’t be eaten, that even the brightest circuits can’t keep bones from showing through skin.

There’s a soft clatter as the worker behind the counter slides your portion forward—two strips of dried meat, tough as old leather, smelling of old salt and smoke; and half a fist of coarse brown bread. Enough to keep you upright. Not enough to feel full. You murmur your thanks, fingers curling around the small tray.

Somewhere out there, the patrol sent for trade supplies should’ve been on their way home. They were meant to bring back flour, powdered milk, tins of oil—whatever the agricultural base further south could spare in return for tools and spare parts. But no one’s heard from them in five days. Silence is never a good sign.

You keep your gaze low as you move through the line, catching glimpses of the soldiers adjusting their straps, of women portioning out food with practiced resignation, of children staring at crumbs in their palms. The patrol was out there on your watch. But it’s not your fault, you tell yourself. You keep telling yourself.

It doesn’t matter. You’re not hungry enough to feel desperate yet. You wonder when that day will come—when these portions will stop being annoying and start being terrifying. When you’ll have to leave this place. When all your fragile wires and carefully tuned dials will be left behind in the dust, unnecessary.

A voice cuts into your thoughts.

“Hey.”

Soft, hesitant. You glance up. One of the girls from the perimeter watch. You struggle to remember her name. Marcie? Mara? Something short, clipped, with an ‘m’ in it. You give up before you find it.

Her hair’s short above her shoulders, sleeves rolled up, knuckles scraped raw. She shifts her weight from foot to foot, looking awkward just standing in front of you with her tray.

“Morning,” you say, voice hoarse. It comes out more like a croak.

She clears her throat, eyes flicking away for a second.

“Were you the one who fixed the uplink last week? I think I asked half the camp trying to find you.”

She lets out a quiet, awkward chuckle, like she’s laughing at herself for even asking. There’s a scattering of small moles across her cheekbone, and her smile’s a little crooked on one side—not in a bad way. Just… human. Real.

The memory comes back—a corroded connector in the transceiver, signal bleeding out into nothing. You soldered it back together with half-dead tools and trembling hands at four in the morning. The Jackson girl was rumbling about a comic book plot she half-remembered, or maybe a story about a stray cat she named after a movie villain. She talked until her words slurred with sleep. Ended up snoring through her patrol shift. You’d laughed so quietly no one heard.

Your shoulders loosen as the thought drifts through you. Without meaning to, you smile—just a flicker at the corners of your mouth—before you look back at… Marcy? Mary? Molly?

“Yeah, guess it was me.”

The nervous tension around her mouth eases, replaced by a genuine smile. Her teeth catch on her lower lip as if she’s trying to keep her relief in check.

“We would’ve been screwed without the comms working,” she says, voice warmer now. “You probably saved our asses.”

You shrug, looking down at the thin plastic tray in her hands. Compliments feel foreign.

As she shifts, you catch sight of the butterfly patch on her sleeve—same as the one on yours, crookedly stitched above the MCB insignia. Everyone here wears it, though no one talks about who started it, or why.

Maybe it’s just a reminder that there’s still beauty left in this world, even if it’s been torn apart and sewn back together with shaking hands. Or maybe it’s a joke, a soft rebellion against the Fireflies who promised salvation and left ashes behind. Just the same old story—fragile things trying to outlive the dark.

Either way, the thread it’s made of is fraying, curling at the edges. Just like yours.

“You’re welcome?” you mutter, scratching the back of your neck. Then, quieter, “I mean… that’s my job.”

When you look up again, she’s still smiling, brighter this time, like she sees something in you worth holding onto for a moment longer.

“Yeah, well. Still. Listen, we… a few of us usually sit by the western fence after shift change. Drink something hot, talk shit about the world, trade cigarettes and whatever’s edible these days,” she laughs at that, soft and self-deprecating. “You should come by sometime. If you want.”

You blink at her, caught off guard. The humming noise of the crowded yard fills the pause between you—metal clinking, boots on gravel, distant shouting from the watchtower.

She looks away, just for a second, and when her eyes come back to yours, the look in them is gentler. Less sure of itself. “Or… it’s okay if not. I just thought… y’know, you’re always working nights. I’ve heard you so many times, but. We never really see you.”

Your chest tightens at the offer. For a moment, the thought of it claws at your ribs—being out there, words catching in your throat, eyes darting anywhere but at people’s faces. But there’s also a part of you that wonders what it would be like. To sit with them. To hear laughter not filtered through mics.

Existing together in the same fragile moment—so vulnerable, your personal challenge. You imagine yourself there, silent, staring at your boots, feeling the alien rhythm of them—of living.

You swallow, shifting your packaged breakfast. “Maybe? Thank you,” you say, quiet enough she has to lean in to hear it.

She doesn’t push it. Just beams at that. A flicker of relief crosses her face before she turns away to find a place in line, leaving you standing there with your stale bread and jerky. You watch her go, the morning light catching in her hair like the ears of wheat, and you wonder—briefly—what her name really is. It’s too late to ask.

You wonder if it’s always been like this—if your tongue only works properly when there’s a headset pressed to your ear, when the other person is nothing more than a voice carried through distance. With them, words come easy, sharp and honest and a little cruel sometimes, just for fun. Out here, though, with real eyes watching you, expecting something you don’t quite know how to give, your thoughts scatter like birds in the brush.

Maybe that’s why you like your Jackson girl so much. Because on the radio, you can be anyone. Yourself, even. Or someone bolder.

The path back to your quarters is empty, silent but for the crunch of gravel and the faint metallic scent of rust hanging in the air. The ground is littered with fallen screws, splintered wood, fragments of cables gnawed through by time and damp. Somewhere nearby, water drips in a steady rhythm from a cracked pipe, echoing through the stillness. You pass a wall covered in flaking posters for bands that don’t exist anymore, their bright inks bleached to ghosts by sun and rain.

You almost miss her at first—just a flash of movement near the corner. Then, two gleaming eyes catch yours from beneath a twisted beam. She steps out slowly, cautious, tail flicking with annoyance or pain. It’s hard to tell. Her fur is matted and sticking out in sharp tufts, ribs etched beneath the thin skin. One ear is torn at the tip. She looks like she just clawed her way out of hell.

“Hey there, scrappy thing.”

You murmur, voice barely carrying over the quiet dawn.

You crouch down, then sit on the cold step, unwrapping your breakfast. The cat creeps closer. There’s enough to take the edge off your own emptiness. Not enough to share.

But you tear the jerky in half anyway and hold it out. She looks at you with narrowed green eyes, suspicious, but hunger’s stronger than fear. The cat snatches it so quickly her whiskers brush your fingers, and you flinch, though she’s too thin to do real damage.

If anyone saw you now, they’d shake their heads. Waste of rations on a half-wild animal. But her hollow eyes look at you like she understands something no human ever will.

You watch her eat, tearing and gulping, crumbs scattering across the porch. Your own bite tastes like nothing, but you chew anyway, gaze drifting out to the horizon. The sky is softening into pale gold above the distant tree line. For a moment, you imagine just walking past the buildings, tables and fences, and heading straight into those woods. Away from this half-starved human world.

There’s nothing out there for you. And you’re too tired to keep searching.

A crow caws somewhere beyond the abandoned fence, the sound settling heavy in your chest. Nothing moves except the cat, bored already, busy cleaning her paw with long, deliberate strokes. The world is quiet. It feels like the two of you are the only ones left to witness this slow beginning of the new day.

Behind your back, inside those walls, there are bunks crammed side by side like crooked teeth. At night, the air is thick with other people’s breathing, the restless shuffle of limbs in sleep. There’s no space there, no quiet to sink into.

Maybe that’s why you cling so tightly to your comms room—hours alone, just you and the faint glow of dust-fogged bulbs. Here, in the dark, you have room to exist.

You don’t dream of home. Because home isn’t a bunk or a cracked ceiling above your head.

Home is… something else. You just don’t know what yet.

You finish your food without hurry. She finishes hers faster. For a moment you just sit there together, sharing the silence, until the cat flicks her tail and slips away between the twisted weeds.

You watch the place she disappears into for a long while, and then you stand up, brushing crumbs from your lap, and go inside.

Just for a second, you wish you could follow her.

“Hey. You awake?”

Her voice slips through the static like it’s always been there. Like it never left.

You glance at the clock out of habit. It’s dead. Its hands froze at 2:32. You think it’s stupid how your mind instantly drags you back to her—to that night. Just a broken clock, dead batteries, nothing more. But still… you keep looking.

With a quiet sigh, you reach for the radio and flick through the frequencies. Static crackles, voices bleed in and out—

“Post Three, checking in. Nothing to report.”

You murmur a short acknowledgment, your fingers moving automatically, logging their words in a notebook already filled with cramped scrawl. Another channel. A low conversation between two watchmen about the moon looking bigger tonight. Another. A short burst of chatter from a watchpost further south. Another.

Finally, you settle on hers.

The silence there feels different—thicker, waiting, almost warm. Like leaning your forehead against a locked door, knowing someone is standing just on the other side.

Tonight feels more crowded. Usually, it’s just you and her, tucked away alone in the dark, as if the world outside ceased to exist once her voice came through. But tonight… the air is full of people, fragments of other lives weaving through the static like threads of bright color. It’s like you’re both hiding at the edge of a crowded party, pressed together in a dim hallway—or sitting in the kitchen, away from music and dancing, away from everyone who’s too busy laughing to notice the way night softens voices and opens up hearts.

The quiet corner where people end up talking about life and death and the way the world spins, with the morning just an hour away.

Just two strangers, breathing the same secret air.

The corner no one ever comes down—but any second now, someone might. A random passerby. Or a whole crowd pushing through, flooding your quiet space with light and noise. The thought makes something tighten low in your stomach—part fear, part thrill. Like standing too close to the edge of something deep and dark, and wanting, despite everything, to lean just a little closer.

“Yeah,” you breathe out, pressing your thumb into the curve of the dial. “I’m here.”

You’re sitting cross-legged, a blanket sliding down your shoulders. Outside the small window, the sun hasn’t even started thinking about coming. The cat curls on your legs, her thin body trembling with each exhale. You stroke her bony spine. She purrs like a faulty motor.

“What’re you up to?” Her voice is lazy, scratchy with tiredness.

You wonder—how much labour did she finish before calling you? Was it heavy work, hard on her shoulders, did it hurt her hands, or her back? Was it her heart that hurt, or her body?

You want to ask. Want to know everything.

But you keep your mouth shut.

Because asking would weigh the moment down, drag it under, when all either of you wants is to float above the heaviness for a while. To keep this place light. Safe. A little unreal, like it’s supposed to be.

“Thinking,” you say, staring at the unmoving clock, the quiet room, the little creature keeping you company tonight. “About the fact my clock’s dead. Stopped at half past two. Maybe that’s a sign.”

“Sign of what?” she snorts softly. “That your maintenance skills suck?”

“Hey, rude,” you say, tucking your hair back beneath the headband. “Maybe time just… gave up here first. Before the rest of the world.”

She hums, neither agreeing nor teasing this time. You hear shifting fabric on her end, the creak of what might be a mattress or a floorboard.

“What’re you thinking about apart from clocks dying tragic deaths?”

You hesitate. Then sigh, shifting your legs under you. The cat stretches out, her tail flicking against your ankle.

“There’s a cat here,” you say quietly. “Been hanging around the station. Looks like shit, to be honest. All bones and knots.”

She hums. “Stray?”

“Yeah. We’re sharing breakfasts now. Can hear her purring all the way up to my skull.”

“Sharing is caring,” she teases softly. “You got a name for her yet?”

“I just call her… Cat.”

“Well, that’s no fun. Lemme think…”

You hear rustling on her end, as if she’s rolling onto her back, staring up at whatever ceiling she’s under tonight. There’s a long, thoughtful pause. Then a solemn conclusion:

“Name her… Megatron.”

You scoff, loud enough that it echoes in your little booth. The sharp sound startles the cat from her sleep; she jerks upright, fur bristling, and slips down to the floor with a quiet thump before slinking into the shadows. A pang of regret twists in your chest.

“What the hell, Jackson… you’re terrible with names. Never have children.”

She seems incredibly proud of herself and chuckles.

“We had a horse once. Named him Callus.”

“Jesus Christ,” despite your words, you can’t help but smile until your cheeks hurt. “Stay away from my Cat.”

She whispers low, almost fond.

“No promises.”

There is another burst of rustling, she sounds muffled. “But look. She’s badass. And ugly as sin, you said. Fits perfectly.”

“She’s not ugly!” you mutter.

You roll your eyes and glance around, searching for the cat’s silhouette. She’s curled up on the old torn couch, looking like she’s found the closest thing to heaven she’s ever known. And maybe… maybe it is.

Megatron. God.

“Hey, guess what,” she begins suddenly, with the purest of grins. You already feel that something isn’t right there. You’re cautious, suspicious and, of course, curious.

“What?”

“Jesse and Dina made a bet on you.”

Her friends. It’s funny how you learned their names before you even learned hers. She mentions them so easily. Their names slip off her tongue with an absent fondness, like constellations she’s used to seeing every night. You wonder what it feels like—to call someone by name without choking on it.

You shake your head with a sly smile.

“On me?”

“Yep.” She's clearly enjoying this. “Jesse thinks you’re my imaginary friend. Like, he’s convinced I’m making you up to avoid helping him with patrol paperwork.”

You grin, imagining it. “And Dina?”

She exhales, like she’s rolling her eyes. “She’s worse. She thinks you’re some spy trying to get Jackson’s strategic secrets outta me.”

You clap a hand over your mouth to keep from making the same mistake twice and waking up the whole town with your embarrassingly stupid laugh.

“Guess I’m doing a shit job so far.”

“And the bet is—” she continues, amusement lacing her words. “If you’re real, Jesse has to do Dina’s patrols for a week. If you’re not… well, I think he gets her breakfast rations for two days.”

You smirk with the corner of your mouth.

“Aw, poor Jesse. Guess I should side with Dina… but I kinda love them thinking you’ve gone nuts.”

“Yeah?” The question carries that crooked smile of hers, teasing and pretending to be dangerous. “Makes two of us.”

“Well, obviously. I am your imaginary friend, after all.”

For a heartbeat, silence falls between you. Then her voice returns, stripped of humour. Raw with its honesty. Almost tender.

“Lucky me.”

The words land hard in your chest, a heaviness blooming under your ribs, pressing into your lungs. You swallow around it, blinking at the table’s scratched surface as if answers might appear there. But nothing comes. Only the warmth that spreads, slow and aching, through every part of you.

This damn Jackson, with her damn Jackson ways—turning the world light with her teasing, only to let it crash with two quiet words. Her simplest phrases settle so heavily. She doesn’t even need to see you to leave marks like that, doesn’t need to reach out to pull something loose inside you. And God, you’d give up every brittle morning ration just to catch the shape of her mouth as she let those words fall into the dark.

Your fingers find a stray pen and roll it from one side of the radio to the other. You press at the ragged edge of your thumbnail, feeling the sting where the cuticle tears.

You don’t know what to say to that—there’s no smart comeback, no sarcastic retort to deflect the way your chest tightens. So you clear your throat, searching for any anchor to pull yourself back to safety.

“I almost forgot,” you say, the words rushing out too quick, too eager to cover the silence her honesty left behind. You lean forward in your chair, reaching for something on the shelf beside the radio.

“I’ve got something for you tonight.”

There’s a pause on her end. You think you hear the faint rustle of blankets as she shifts.

“For me?” she perks up; you can hear it in her inhale. Surprise and curiosity dancing together in her tone.

You run your thumb along the frayed edge of the book before opening it, letting the musty scent of yellowed pages seep into your lungs. It’s heavy in your hands—not by size, but by memory. On the inside cover, scrawled at an angle in the top corner, there’s a short line in faded ink. A date. A few words. Their handwriting. You don’t read it. You never do.

You never let yourself read the book fully, not anymore. Just enough to know it’s there. Enough to feel the echo of them sitting beside you, telling you to look up at the stars instead of down at equations.

You haven’t taken it out since—well. Since they were gone.

You flip through until you find the first page of a chapter.

“Yeah.” you rub your eyes, pushing away the memory. “Thought you might like… a bedtime story. Black holes, wormholes and time travelling… Romance of physics.”

She laughs again, properly this time, and you think about how that sound feels like warmth against your chest.

“Hit me with it, Montana. I’m all ears.”

And for a moment, the room feels warmer. As if time moves forward only because the two of you choose to fill it with your voices. The coming morning simply doesn’t exist for you now. In the night, anything can seem possible, though daylight will always prove it was only a small, beautiful foolishness. And you’re drowning in it.

You start reading about the end of stars—how even giants collapse under their own gravity. How their deaths make space brighter. How their endings become beginnings for something else.

Something that outlasts stopped clocks and frozen nights.

“Listen to this.” you flip to chapter 6, your whisper is soft in the dim room. Your thumb traces the faded line of text. “‘A black hole is the result of a large star using up all of its hydrogen fuel… pulled back by the star’s gravitational field. …we cannot see them…but you know they exist.’”

Silence blooms between you, soft and infinite, broken only by the quiet static of the radio—like distant stars crackling light-years away.

“That’s…” her voice comes, hushed, contemplative. “Beautiful in a weird way.”

Your lips curve, small and tired. You shift on your chair, gaze falling to the shadowy corners of your room, the sleeping cat curled like a faint galaxy on the battered couch, tail wrapped around herself as if holding in her last warmth.

“You’re quiet,” you murmur, smoothing out the pages with your fingers, feeling the coolness seep into your skin. “Does it make sense to you?”

“Yeah,” she breathes out. There’s a noise on her side—maybe the sound of her exhale. “It’s like… that feeling I get talking to you, even at night. I don’t see you, but I know you’re there.”

Your heart tightens, painfully gentle in your chest. You close your eyes, tipping your head back against the chair. Above you, beyond the cracked ceiling, beyond the rotting beams and sky thick with dark clouds, there are stars, scattered like handfuls of silver dust thrown across the black. Silent, unreachable, burning with light older than this broken world.

You think of her words. How even if the distance devours you whole, even if your voices are pulled back into nothing like hydrogen into collapsed suns, there is still this truth between you:

You don’t see each other. But you exist.

For a moment, it feels like the universe still makes sense.

And then—

Just quiet.

The quiet of stars breathing in the dark.

You go.

It’s easier than you thought it would be—just putting one foot in front of the other, walking through the dim-lit paths towards the glow of lanterns. The sky above deepening to velvet blue as the first stars begin to pierce the dusk. The firelight flickers ahead, warm and alive, drawing you closer.

They’re gathered outside, voices low and laughter soft around the crackling flames that send golden sparks swirling upward, fading into the night. Someone’s telling a story about a patrol gone wrong; someone else interrupts, half-choking on dry bread with silent laughter. A quiet chorus of life.

You stand at the edge for a moment, hidden in the shadows. And maybe it’s because of her, or maybe it’s about her, maybe it’s because of the way her words still burn in your chest like falling stars, but you step forward. You find a spot a little apart, settle down on the cool earth, pulling your knees close.

Her voice echoes softly in your mind—“Lucky me.”—and you wonder if she’s watching the same stars from somewhere far away.

Someone shifts closer to you—the girl with the moles. You finally know her name now. It’s spoken so casually by one of her friends that it just… settles into your mind without effort, like it had always been there.

She smiles at you across the flickering light, her mouth curling up in a way that’s almost shy, almost brave. You don’t smile back, not really—but there’s a flicker of something in your eyes that makes her look away, cheeks warm in front of the camp fire.

Above, a sudden streak of light cuts across the sky—a shooting star, brilliant and fleeting.

You breathe it in.

Maybe this is a sign. More meaningful than the clock and half past two. Maybe she’d laugh at you.

It’s a small moment in the vast universe—a reminder that even in the darkness, light falls. And sometimes—it’s enough to wish upon. Maybe they were not so wrong, and when you’re lost, looking for that light is the only thing that’s truly worth it.

[ log saved: 3:58 ]

Late august comes with heat. It clings to Ellie’s strained shoulders, sticky and heavy. It traces, tries to count her freckles—however they are countless—along toned arms smeared with dirt and dried, rust-brown blood.

August loves her wild auburn hair in a way winter never did; autumn will love it soon as well.

Ellie’s shrouded in sunset; she’s walking, worn-out converse stirring the red dust of the road. Somewhere nearby, crickets cry—this sound is louder now than the groaning of the horde that follows.

Well, yeah, she’s fucked. She’s cooked.

The sun is dying in copper ribbons that bleed across the hills. Tonight she probably won’t be sleeping on Joel’s beat-up backyard couch. She’ll make him worry, all over again. Shitty daughter; shitty fighter. Ellie exhales through clenched teeth, a curse slipping past her lips.

What started as a short detour outside patrol range turns into a very Jackson-style mistake—impulsive, selfish, and stupidly brave. She left that morning with a rifle, a half-full canteen, and a lie. “Just getting some air.” she said.

Truth is, she’d grown tired of the noise.

She loved them all, this whole damn town but she still needed air. Space. Silence. Her boots and the grass, the weight of the rifle over her shoulder, the tension she feels as she draws a bowstring. Cicadas’ little noises, ivy climbing the bones of old buildings, birds startled into flight. This was life.

That’s all this world still gives them. And Ellie takes it all. She’s not lonely, she’s at peace (Ellie tells herself that’s true).

She drew a doe in her journal before it bolted. Scribbled a few lyrics, hummed a half-finished melody on her way back.

Then the infected came as they always do. Too many. Too fast.

She fired. Ran. Got lucky. Then unlucky: her ankle still aches, new scratches will heal in a week; she stopped notice things like these long time ago. But then, as if by some cruel mercy, Ellie got lucky again.

Now here she is.

A building, mostly intact. No time to identify its past usage. Some old-world thing—windows shattered. The kind of place no one in Jackson would step into alone. Ellie kicks the door in anyway. What’s the alternative? Be torn apart outside—or inside. Her shoulder throbs. Her chest heaves. She looks like she always does, post-fight: like a ghost. Like an evil spirit clawed from Hell.

But in fact she’s just a girl looking for a little quiet.

The door slams shut behind her with a dull clang. For a moment, there’s only her breath—heavy, uneven—and the echo of silence. That kind of silence she feels in  her teeth.

Ellie stays still. One hand still clenched around the rifle, metal warm against her palm. It’s been heating up with her—from the run, from the fight, from the fucking August sun. Now it hums quietly against her skin, like it’s alive too. Tired. Overworked. Just like her.

Ellie shifts the weight of it, closes her eyes and listens. There’s a knife in her pocket, just in case. But no footsteps echo inside. No snarls. Just her breath, the soft ringing in her ears, and the rifle’s warmth seeping into her bones.

The infected are out there though—pacing, maybe sniffing for her. She can almost feel their weeps hanging in the air. That’s why Ellie drags a metal shelf against the door, clicks on her flashlight, and scans the dark lobby.

“Don’t tell me I’m stuck in a fucking high school…” Ellie mumbles with a crooked grin as she sees the scenery.

Thick dust and old footprints mar the faded linoleum. A tattered banner hangs crookedly on the far wall, the mascot barely visible under layers of grime. “Welcome Back, Seniors 2013!” Someone drew a smiley face on it once. It’s half-erased now. Like everything. Beside Ellie, a faded broadcast schedule peels off the wall. “Friday at 7 PM — Indie Night with DJ Alex".

“Did you manage your Indie Night stream, Alex?”

Talking to herself helps. At least she’s still funny as shit. There is no one in the whole world more distant from that meaningless school crap than Ellie. She has empathy, sure—but not understanding. The outbreak took that from her.

She moves on instinct, flashlight jittering as she climbs creaking stairs. Second floor smells like paper rot and something sweet—candy left to die in someone’s locker. Powder floats in the thickness of air, caught in the shafts of light leaking through boarded windows. It’s golden hour outside, and in here, the hallway glows mild, like cider: amber and rich as honey. Ellie takes a breath, and this is what past tastes like—curdled forever time, sweet and gone. It lingers on the tip of her tongue.

At the end of the hall, she finds it: a narrow door with a peeling sign barely clinging to the wood.

Room B33. Broadcast Club.

The sight gives Ellie a strange chill—a flicker of instinct telling her to stay far from that door. Never open it. Run away right into the embrace of the infected instead of stepping inside.

Dina calls it intuition. That gut-wrenching anticipation. Or probably Ellie is just starving and hasn’t eaten since morning. More likely.

She doesn’t believe in intuition. If bad things happen, they happen with no warning. Life is too cruel to send omens.

Ellie opens the door B33 with the full force of that unique Ellie Williams blend of bravery and recklessness. Inside, it feels like time machine. It’s still and weirdly intact. Like someone used to live here—someone who cared a little too much about the room, and the equipment. There are two chairs. A desk scarred with pen marks and age. A dusty mic arcs from the soundboard like a neck craning for attention. Coiled cables. A plastic bin full of old cassette tapes. Handwritten labels:

“Indie Hour (April)”

“Sarah’s breakup advice”

“Prom mix”

“The Friday joke war” (“Oh, this one I could’ve won”, Ellie mutters, her fingers covered in dust sliding through the bin.)

One tape is buried with a warning sticker “KEEP OUT!!! — cringe singing.”

Ellie scoffs, low and dry. The world burns, but cringe survives.

All these messages from the past suddenly hit hard. These little pieces of lives long gone, turned into ashes. Maybe being trapped in a haunted house feels like this. Not scary but endlessly sorrowful. Ellie was never part of it, yet the ache of nostalgia still catches in her chest. Life is unfair. She’s eighteen. Maybe she wants her own prom mix. A girl to ask. Then her deserved breakup advice. And a damn joke war trophy.

The truth is, she never had a choice.

She circles the room. There is a shelf of manuals, a chipped coffee mug with “DJ Charlie” flaking off the side. Not a room—just a box of broken memories. Ellie kicks an empty candy wrapper and sighs. She could’ve been home by now. Eat dinner. Watch a silly movie with Joel. She groans angrily.

“Fuck this school. Fuck the clickers. Fuck the outbreak.”

A beat.

“Just fuck this world.”

In the middle of her mental breakdown, Ellie glances at blotches left by humidity on the paneled walls—and then notices a compact generator tucked beneath the desk, like the most precious treasure in this room, if not in the building itself. Had she gotten lucky again? Its wires still ran into the back of the control panel. Ellie starts it with a gentle turn of a key. For three seconds, she wonders whether it’s alive or dead.

“Please work,” she whispers almost kindly. And it leans into her kindness like a stray cat remembering how it once was tamed. It sputters. Chokes. Then hums. A warm, low vibration—oddly similar to purring—settles in the floorboards.

Then the broadcast room gets its pounding heart back. Lights flicker overhead. Bathed in yellow light, Ellie is wrapped in comfort. The soundboard buzzes awake, all knobs and dials glowing faint amber. Ellie steps forward—she’s barely seen anything like this in her lifetime. It might be useful for Jackson. One of the radio monitors springs to life, blinking with static lines and a shaky signal. Ellie has no idea how to use it.

She slides into the chair, exhales. How had nobody found it before? How is it still working after all this time? Is it dangerous to touch? She’d become so wild. Suspicious. Distant. “Man is a wolf to man,” she has read it in a book. She grew up being a wolf to everybody.

Ellie bites before being bitten.

She never liked wolves.

There is a sign painted in red above the front wall:

“On The Air”

On the table, she finds a long-forgotten dried-out marker, and a sticker on the cork board “Hi! My name is Charlie :) ps. Alison, stay away from my cookies, I save them in case of an apocalypse.”

“And where are your cookies now when I need them so bad, man? Probably rotten, yeah? Like, ‘bout ten years ago.”

Ellie rubs her face, forgetting she’s caked in dirt and blood. She doesn’t look at photographs and other belongings pinned on the board.

Ghosts shouldn’t talk to each other.

She tries to wipe her hands clean with a piece of red cloth, it seems like it was a flag once. “Go Eagles!” Does Ellie like eagles? She considers it as she gets her journal from the backpack. She sketches a quick image of what she thinks an eagle looks like. She concludes that she likes cranes more than eagles.

Radio keeps talking to her in its quiet, delicate manner. Smooth hiss of interference sings gently like a lullaby. Like a lover. Ellie’s fingers brush over the tuning dial. The second she slowly turns it, the desk lamp starts flicking. The diesel might run out any moment. That would be a pity, but Ellie could deal with it. She had nights way more terrible than this one is going to be. She clicks further without special thoughts, without intention and hope. She’s bored and tired. Dina would know how to treat this thing right. Ellie’s just pressing buttons to kill time. There is another note—Charlie, or whoever left that, is getting annoying—“if you can’t hear the signal—reload the broadcast at 95.2 FM.” Ellie narrows her eyes to read scribbles and grins. She rests her head in her palm.

“Fucking radio. Buddies really had hope.” Pure irony in her harsh voice, then a yawn. Last useless click before turning it off and getting some sleep.

Buzz. High-pitched whine.

Then:

A voice. And it's yours.

Ellie jumps up in her chair, half-sleepy. Her fingers release the dials and buttons, heart strangely pounding.

The voice is faint. Female. Crisp, but wrapped in static. Like it’s traveled too far through too many silent lines.

“…I repeat, AA40B, answer my call. Report the situation. Have you got any troubles? This is channel ninety-four point seven, if you’re suddenly unaware. Lisa, if you don’t respond your mother will fucking murder me. Slowly.”

Ellie freezes. Every hair on her arm stands up, sweat on her palms. She leans closer. Her heartbeat is thumping, but not from running, nor from the horde—now something else, something heavier—sinks into her chest.

A living voice.

Not Jackson.

Not recorded.

Alive.

She blinks, slowly, and mutters under her breath.

“…what the fuck?”

The night split open.

Not with thunder. Not with rain. Not with anything you could trace or predict. It was the most dangerous of all disasters.

Human.

Who brought screaming. Who brought fire. And after, they left the kind of silence that follows when you’re too afraid to breathe.

You sit hunched on the edge of your cot, elbows biting into your knees. Your palms lie open, raw, like you don’t know what to do with them. Your thumb won’t stop dragging over the pale creases—back and forth, back and forth—as if skin could erase blood, or the sound of people screaming your name. It only burns. Nothing fades.

The barracks breathe around you, restless and too alive. Boots scuff the floor, bunks groan under sudden movements, voices break in places where they shouldn’t. The air stings—burned rubber, damp earth, the sour press of sweat sunk into mattresses long before tonight. All of it clings to your tongue like you’ve been chewing on smoke.

Fear isn’t what you feel now.

It’s what keeps crawling back, hours later, when the noise is gone and the night pretends to be quiet again.

Right after, the world presses closer, every sound sharper, every movement too near. At first, it’s heat in the veins, a storm that shakes the cage of your chest. Then it freezes.

You feel it sooner than the others—where they burn on the fuel of adrenaline, you’re already fading pale, a shiver tracing the slope of your shoulders like frost finding its way in.

You close your eyes, but the dark doesn’t stay dark. It cracks with white flashes, the rattle of gunfire shredding the sky—and then the sky isn’t the only thing tearing. Your chest clamps tight. Your fingers twitch against each other like they want to creep away from you.

You never saw their faces. In this world, there are too many packs like them, crawling out of the dirt with empty hands and sharper teeth. They didn’t come for survival; they came for the noise, for the way fear swells in a room and makes it theirs. They left with batteries, with wire, with anything that hummed when you touched it.

They left with lives.

Voices are what you’ve always remembered best—their weight, their grain, the slips between syllables. But theirs you can’t recall. What stays are the boots; uniform in their way, mismatched in another. Boots taken from the dead, the thud and drag of them. You see them everywhere, pressed into mud, smearing across torn linoleum, stamped into the walls beside the blood.

Somewhere beneath the buzz, beneath the tremor in your fingers, a thread of memory catches. Your mind leans toward it. You are back there, before the storm broke.

Mia’s laughter still clung to you when you shut the door behind your back. She had slipped something into your palm before the shift—half a broken pencil, with a joke about ‘official station equipment.’ It was dumb, and you’d both laughed anyway.

You hung your jacket on the crooked nail hammered into the wall. Bent down, brushed your fingers along the cat that wove between your legs. Her fur had thickened, sleek with new health, scars almost swallowed under fresh hair. You touched the spot where her whiskers had started to grow again.

“Hey, mouse,” your voice came out in a quiet murmur. “How’s command without me?”

She pressed against you, purring like a tiny motor.

Light on. Switches flicked. Routine, steady. The ritual kept your hands busy, gave your mind the illusion of control. Check the dials. Test the band. Make notes. Same every time.

But that night, you rushed it.

Because there was weight low in your stomach, a knot pulled tight, threaded through with anticipation. You’d promised yourself: if the workload was light, if you cleared the calls quickly, you’d allow the indulgence. That small breach of protocol. A stolen turn of the dial. Her frequency.

That small, stubborn string of numbers.

You slipped your hand into your pocket without thinking and felt it. The pendant that always lay there.

For the longest time, it was nothing but weight in your pocket. Smooth from years of someone else’s life. No name, no numbers, no claim of yours upon it. Just a thin disc of tin, with the mark of a firefly stamped on its face, the black paint worn down to a faint blur; a ghost of someone else’s allegiance. An inheritance you never asked for. You kept it only because habits are hard to break—because your hands liked to find it there, rolling the edge between your fingers, tracing the circle like it might answer back.

It was after one of those nights—her voice low, tripping over itself as she told you scraps of childhood, military school, a friend she once had. Not details, not names, just the shape of a story, awkward and uneven.

She wasn’t used to speaking when silence on the other end meant listening, not absence. You weren’t used to holding a silence that mattered.

When the frequency became hers, when something inside you became hers irrevocably, when her words pressed too close, you looked at the pendant differently. Saw it as more than an orphaned trinket. You pulled a knife across the metal, scored the numbers in, your hand steady even as your chest was not.

Not because you needed to remember—you knew you couldn’t forget—but because you needed it to be real. To ground the weightless, to give the unspeakable a shape.

To trap it inside something small, something you could hold and carry beyond the walls of the radio room—the quiet illusion of her presence always within your reach.

You told her, then, that you’d never seen fireflies. Not the emblem, not the cause, just the insects themselves. The irony of it was almost funny, that you had spent so long under their shadow and never once beneath their glow.

She said they crowded her backyard in the summers. She didn’t suggest catching them in a jar for you.

You both already knew what it was to burn behind glass.

“Do they really shine?” you asked, voice careful, as if the wrong answer could scatter it all.

“Yellow,” she said. “Like bulbs. But not enough to light the dark.”

“Liars.”

And then there was silence.

Since then, the pendant has been different. Not a relic, but a vessel. A secret pressed into tin, cool against your palm whenever you reach for it. Were her hands as cool as tin?

You blinked and bit your lower lip hard, driving the thought away. Somehow, you just knew her hands were warm like late summer air. You released the little disk warmed by your fingers, shifted in your seat and glanced at your palms.

You’d marked your wrist, a tiny cross, so you wouldn’t forget the thing you wanted to ask her. The ink had worn off by the time you sat down. You tried to summon it back, frowning at your hand, distracted, chasing the ghost of the word.

The room was quiet, only the hum of the equipment. Out here, on the rise, the radiocabin always felt separate, half-removed from the rest of the base. Alone but secure.

You thought the main work was done.

Hours slipped between checks and logs, the clicks of switches, the scribble of your pen across the journal. Your handwriting had loosened, a little cursive, wide at the tips, lazy in a way you never allowed yourself. Notes spilled across the page in long, careless arcs, each word a small rebellion against your usual precision. You paused, reread, smirked at your own looseness, and felt—just for a heartbeat—that you’d earned it.

A reward for a few quiet days, a few stolen moments without disaster. You reached for the dial. The line you’d been waiting for. Jackson.

And then—

A sudden intervention of fate, a warning sign, a heightened animal sense that you ignored.

The cat, usually a perfect shadow, jumped. She hadn’t done this before, not in the cabin, not on the desks, not anywhere near the fragile things you left for her. She leapt straight onto the shelf and toppled the empty glass jar, dry autumn flowers scattering across the table, stems snapping like brittle bones.

You startled so hard you yanked the headphones from your head, the sudden silence pressing in.

“Shit.”

A sharp breath escaped you—not for the cat, but for the jolt that rattled straight through your chest.

The cat brushed past you, wide-eyed, alert. Something in the air, you realized, though you didn’t name it.

“Now you owe me a new jar, troublemaker,” you muttered under your breath with a smirk, and the cat meowed something in high tones.

By the time you crouched to gather the glass, the shards were everywhere—large, jagged, catching the faint light. You carried them carefully to the bin, brushed the dust from the table, set back the little things that had fallen with it. And in those minutes, the moment slipped. The voice, if there had been one, was gone.

At first, the sounds on the horizon were only noise, faint and unshaped. Then fire flared in the black sky. Bursts of guns. Screams. Your breath caught as you stumbled back to the desk, fingers shaking on the dial, switching to the regular channel—dead air. Nothing. They must have called you. From the east gate, or the far one, when they realized.

And you hadn’t answered.

You had been here, daydreaming about the girl you’d never seen, arguing with a cat, picking up spilled flowers, while the one thing they trusted you with fell apart in your hands. Mia had the shift at those gates. The others you’d just begun to know—people who smiled at you in the morning, who brought you old, half-broken devices, because they knew it was your little passion; who saved you a place in line or slipped you an extra piece of bread for your night watch.

They were all out there.

And you? You weren’t there for them.

The weight of it settled on your chest like a noose, dragging tighter with every breath. Cold spread through your ribs, crawling up to the base of your neck.

You were standing in the middle of the room, frozen, staring at the window as if the black sky might split open and show you something you weren’t ready to see. You couldn’t move closer, couldn’t step away. Couldn’t cross the door and disappear into hiding, but couldn’t run out either. Your body betrayed you, caught in the chokehold of its own hesitation.

You clenched your fists until your nails dug into skin, as if pain could anchor you, could make you act. But your hands still shook.

Anger flared, hot and useless, curling up your throat. You almost cursed yourself out loud. You hated this paralysis, this cowardice; most of all you hated yourself.

For a moment, you wanted nothing more than to collapse, to crawl under the table, press your forehead to your knees and cry until there was nothing left—cry so bitterly you could forget there was ever a choice to make, forget the weight of having to answer for it. Running headfirst into danger wouldn’t have been the hardest thing. What terrified you was the moment before—the decision itself, the breaking free of paralysis, the reclaiming of your own body.

To tilt the scale, to choose a side—that was always heavier than throwing yourself into the current and letting it carry you. But the seconds kept bleeding away, each one dragging a life onto that same trembling scale. Life didn’t wait for hesitation. Life didn’t forgive mistakes.

That night, you were unforgiven.

The radio coughed—first a wet crackle, then a torn syllable that was almost nothing and somehow everything. It raked through the fog behind your eyes like a hand, and you felt the numbness unthread, seam by trembling seam. Instinct came faster than thought: radio, always radio. Your body remembered before your head could argue.

A voice fought itself through the static—garbled, ragged, a name or an order caught on the edge of comprehension. “—east—” or “—gate—”. Whatever it said, it landed like a stone and made something else shout back up through you: do something.

You quickly wiped the damp of your cheeks, erasing any traces of shameful indecision.

You grabbed the knife without deciding. Your fingers closed on the handle as if they had done it a hundred times, though they hadn’t. The metal was colder than you had expected. It was blunt and useless for grand gestures; it was enough to hold, enough to put between you and the thing you might have feared. You tucked it into your fist like a promise.

There was no dramatic pause.

The room dissolved into motion: you shoved past the couch, feet finding rhythm before your mind finished bargaining. The door swung open and the night hit you—thin and sharp; the air smelled of smoke and something hotter, the ground was a hard, unfamiliar plane under your boots. Far off, fire threw a pocked light against the clouds. Closer, a shout snapped, and someone answered with a string of gunfire. Sound arranged itself into a map: toward, away, danger.

For a breath, you thought of staying—and letting the world sort itself without your small, imperfect hands. The thought was a treachery. Dropping into action was not courage. You ran because not running would have been to let the scale tip while you stood and watched.

You couldn’t watch life from the farthest window anymore. You were never a heroine, but for once, you decided to be a part of this life. To do something you wouldn’t regret after, rotting in delay and realizing that the moment was gone.

The shadow was turning into a figure. The night swallowed you whole.

You bury your face in your hands. Darkness blooms there, warm and close, the pulse a little too close to your temples.

This is the story. Half of its weightness lies on you.

When you rise, it feels like pulling yourself through water—slow, resistant, your body reluctant to follow the command. Your knees drag at the movement as if they would rather stay folded under you.

In the far corner, a mirror hangs crooked on the wall. The glass is dull, its surface mottled with shadows instead of reflections. It doesn’t give back a face so much as a shape.

You stop in front of it.

The jacket that once fit you now sags from your shoulders as if it belongs to someone else. Fabric pools where it shouldn’t. Angles replace softness: your collarbones push sharp beneath the skin, your shoulders drawn narrow, your chest hollowed by hunger that has grown too ordinary to even name. You look at it without alarm, without shame—like watching a cracked wall or a leaking roof. A fact. Something you live beside, not against.

You turn away, pulling the jacket closer, hunching yourself into its thin embrace. Cold chews at your fingertips. One boot threatens to give out, the sole peeling loose; you know another pair in your size would be a luxury, one more thing the base can’t afford.

And then—movement in the doorway. Mia’s head slips into the frame, her eyes finding you quick. She jerks her chin once, still softly for you, toward the corridor. No words. She doesn’t need them.

So you go. The cot behind you sags back into emptiness. Whatever you have been waiting for all this time on—whatever you have feared, postponed, tried to drown in stillness—it comes for you at last.

The street is too wide, too empty. You walk side by side at first, though your steps fall just half a beat behind. Your hands are buried deep in your pockets, your teeth pressing hard into your lower lip until it stings. Your eyes keep darting over the broken facades. You don’t hold on to anything for long; the gaze wanders, never resting where it might hurt too much.

The silence stretches thin between the empty shells of buildings as you keep walking. Through the gaps you catch glimpses of the fence that hems the settlement in, the broad wall of concrete meant to keep the infected away. And there, just behind it, where the ground dips, you know what waits.

A handful of crosses lean at strange angles, cobbled together from scraps of wood and metal, lashed tight with wire. Some are old, weathered by seasons of wind and snow, while others stand too straight to have been there long. You don’t need to see them clearly; knowing is enough. There are new graves among the rows—or what should have been graves. The earth, frozen stiff, refused to open. The ground was clawed at, scarred by shovels, then abandoned. Soon there will be fires. That, too, you know before you see it—the way ash always drifts heavier in the mornings after.

Mia’s left arm hangs in its sling, wrapped in gauze that has already gone grey at the edges. The further you let yourself stare, the further your thoughts drift, until the base feels like a place you’ve already left behind. The guilt burns sharper than the cold. Mia hasn’t said a word. No one really has. Not aloud. But you know. No one needs to accuse you when you already carry the weight yourself.

She finally turns, slowing her steps until you almost collide into her shoulder. Her brows are lifted just slightly, her mouth parting like she wants to speak but isn’t sure she should. The silence hangs, taut, until she lets out a breath and says quietly, “You weren’t at the post.”

The words hit like a blunt edge. Your answer rises too fast, too defensive, and it almost stumbles on your tongue. “Look, the cat—”

But you hear yourself, hear how thin it sounds, and interrupt yourself.

Mia doesn’t blink. Her eyes search yours, steady, patient. She doesn’t push. She never has.

You remember it in all the quiet ways: the end of long shifts, when she’d nudge you to come sit outside with her and Jade, sharing stale crackers and whatever scraps of warmth the night had left. How Jade laughed too easily, how Mia rolled her eyes but never stopped smiling when she looked at her. You never felt like an outsider. With them, you never felt the need to say something when you had nothing to say. They had folded you into that space as if you belonged there. And with time, you did.

But sometimes, watching them—Mia leaning into Jade’s shoulder, Jade brushing her thumb across the back of Mia’s hand—you felt something hitch inside your chest. Not envy. Just the faint, restless ache of recognizing something you could never quite claim for yourself. A reminder. Of what was missing.

They had each other’s warmth here, where hands could touch and voices didn’t have to cross static. You had only the cold of your bunk, the brittle hush of nights when the radio was your only company. Only a voice you could never reach, pressed against your ear like a secret.

Still, you never resented them for it. Quite the opposite. Their love was proof that warmth could exist here, despite everything. And their friendship, the way they drew you in without hesitation, had kept you standing more times than you cared to admit. That’s what lingers now, in the pause between you. Mia just waits, as if to remind you—whatever else you’ve done or failed to do, she’s still here. On your side.

“You weren’t even on the frequency.”

She fills the pause with the last try, as if asking you to come back to your senses. But all in vain.

“I was!”

The words snap out before you can temper them. Too sharp, too eager. You know she hears the crack in them.

Who taught you to lie, little firefly?

She exhales, slow and tired. Not angry. “Listen. We both know this wasn’t the first time. I won’t ask you about it. But they will.”

She knows, and you know that she knows, and so on. Well, maybe you did miss a couple of calls before, hanging on another frequency. Maybe more than just a couple. And it isn’t carelessness—it’s more dangerous than that.

You feel it the way a scar remembers the blade: not freshly cut, but never gone. The fault is etched into you, and you know you’ll carry it forward, however quietly.

But there’s another blade and another scar—

There’s Jackson.

She’s carved into you like something permanent, something you can’t wash off.

You’ve let her seep under your skin until the rules that held you in place began to loosen. Until you stopped watching the clock, stopped repeating the ritual phrases that once felt like lifelines. Every half-hour call, every scribbled note in the logbook—suddenly they were paper walls, hollow routines dressed up as order. A pantomime of the old world, as if counting the minutes could hold anything together.

And you began to ask yourself: who is this for? Who are you keeping safe, if no one goes beyond the gates anymore? What is the point of a voice that exists only to tick boxes and fill silence with protocol?

But her—Jackson—she cuts through all that. She is the breach in the script, the break in the pattern. On her frequency, you are not a function, not a placeholder to keep the illusion breathing. With her, you are yourself—raw, unguarded, seen. A voice, yes, but never faceless. Never empty.

That’s why you missed the calls. Not because you forgot, but because you remembered too much. Because for the first time, something mattered more than the job. More than the logbook. More than the farce.

For a moment you want to look away, to find another ruined wall, another distraction. But you don’t.

“Then I’ll answer.”

You say, your voice low but steady this time.

“Because answering is my job, isn’t it?”

They do ask questions. Of course they do. That’s what this place is for.

The room swallows you the moment you step inside. Narrow, windowless, bound in steel and concrete. The air tastes of iron and old dust. Everything here gleams in the wrong way—too sharp, too sterile, polished to strip away any human trace. There are no papers, no mugs, no half-forgotten belongings. Nothing here carries a trace of personality, no sign of the person who spends their hours inside these walls. Even the face across from you might as well be carved from the same faceless stone, revealing nothing.

His expression is a mask, his voice a metronome.

The man wears the same standard-issue jacket as you, only cleaner, sharper, like it was cut to fit his rank. On the shoulder, the patch catches your eye: a butterfly stitched in dull thread. Mourning cloak butterfly—the name unspools in your head, fragile, incongruous. The kind that outlives winter, that was the idea of insignia. The winter is coming, and now you’re not sure at all if you’ll survive it. For a second, you imagine it pinned beneath glass, wings spread. A man of his posture, his bulk, that implacable face, and here he is branded with a butterfly.

You don’t laugh. It’s just the kind of stray observation a tired mind makes, absurd enough to notice, too thin to linger on.

Then your gaze slips lower, to the small black letters stitched beneath: MCB. The other meaning. Military Communication Base. The patch no longer looks whimsical; it looks like a seal, a warning stamped in fabric. And the man himself shifts with it—no longer an awkward figure dressed in irony, but a wall, an emblem of order and discipline.

Mia wanted to wait outside, to be near when it was over. You’d seen the shadows beneath her eyes, the fragile pallor that blood loss had left behind. She needed rest more than you needed comfort, so you told her to go. You told her you’d handle it. Maybe it was just another lie you’ve grown used to telling.

The man doesn’t offer you a seat. Perhaps he wants you to stand exposed in the centre of the room, as if unease itself were part of the ritual. The gravity of his intent almost makes you laugh. For men like him, you’ve spent your life inside four walls, learning how to speak to static instead of real people.

He begins without preamble. A grey person in a grey room. You start missing your radio corner, your M and your J.

“State your station and your shift.”

“How long have you held your post?”

“Confirm the date and the hour of the last missed call.”

His words arrive with precision, the clipped rhythm of protocol. No space for hesitation, no room for stories: he’ll never know about the cat breaking the glass jar.

Your answers are clean, contained, stripped of inflection. Yes. No. Forty-seven minutes. Monitoring gate sector west. Each one falls into place like a weight, like the neat entries you’ve made a hundred times in the ledger back in your room.

There was never really a choice: four walls, one task, one voice among wires. If you spend your life breathing the same air, your lungs adjust; if you hold the same machine long enough, it begins to feel like an extension of your hands. You know it better than your own reflection.

But mastery is not faith. You can love the quiet thrill when a voice cuts through the noise—and still see the emptiness of the order behind it. They put you here to chase ghosts, to sift through static for echoes of the past. The signal lives, but the purpose is hollow. And now, standing under the expressionless gaze of the man’s deep-set eyes, you understand: it was never the system that mattered. It was the chance that, by mistake, by accident, someone real might answer back.

The light burns your eyes. A lamp dangles low from the ceiling, thick-bellied glass humming faintly as it sways. Its yellow glow pools across the metal table, carving your face into harsh shadow. Suspended on its cord, it hangs like a spider on its thread, patient and unblinking.

Yellow. Like bulbs.

You shift your shoulders back, spine strung tight, as if posture alone could make your version of the truth more convincing. In your pocket, your fingers close around the pendant, pressing its familiar edge into your skin until it leaves a mark.

Somewhere out there, a stranger’s voice had cut through the static and made everything else sound like noise. This man is just an interference on the air.

The questions keep coming. They pass by you almost without shape, blurred and weightless, too far removed from what really matters. You know the answers before they’re even asked, and they fall from your lips with automatic precision, clean and unshaken. As if your mouth remembers the script your mind no longer cares to follow.

“Why did you change frequency?”

“Who authorized the switch?”

“What reason can you give for failing to log the deviation?”

He sits like marble, unmoving. His back never bends, his shoulders locked, his hands folded neatly as if he were carved that way. For a while you think he might never move at all—a figure molded out of military wax.

And then he does. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he shifts his weight. One elbow rests on the table, his palm lifting to cradle his jaw. The posture cracks, the statue fractures—and there he is. Human. Unarmored. And that makes the silence heavier.

His eyes fix on you. Not the dull stare of protocol. It’s different. Patient, searching. Long enough that you feel the air thinning around you.

“You’ve found someone, haven’t you?”

The words don’t fall like a question. For this one you are not ready.

Something inside you gives way. It’s like the snap of a rope you’ve been hanging from; the drop is instant, sickening. Your stomach lurches, hollow, as if the floor has been kicked out from under you. Blood drains from your face so fast you feel light-headed.

It’s a missed step. A blank shot that wasn’t blank at all, detonating in the center of your skull. Your chest tightens, ribs aching as if ice water has been poured straight into your lungs.

The echo of the phrase remains, circling, relentless.

You force your mouth to open.

“What? You mean Mia? Or—someone from the base?”

A flick of his hand cuts you off, sharp as a knife through paper.

“Not them. Don’t play games with me.”

The look he gives you is almost weary, almost indulgent. A teacher watching a child fumble through a lie.

“You’re young,” he goes on, his voice unhurried, almost conversational. You’re starting to feel nauseous; maybe it’s from malnutrition—maybe from his indulgency. “Before all this,” he waves his pathetic hand, pointing at something beyond the base. “The outbreak. People liked to toy with that kind of thing. Long-distance romances. Midnight calls. Secret little games for the lonely.”

The words feel wrong in his mouth, clumsy, too large for him. They make you wince—dated, awkward, almost embarrassing. And still, the truth of them coils inside you, undeniable.

“It could even make them forget about those who were near them.”

You feel like you’re losing your foothold.

His gaze doesn’t waver. His hand stays pressed to his jaw. When he speaks again, the softness has drained from his tone.

“But this isn’t then. It isn’t harmless. You’re distracted. And distraction kills.”

His words pin you to the spot like needles fixing a butterfly to cork.

He doesn’t raise his voice. The calmness is worse than shouting.

“Eight died. Four because your report came late. Do you understand?”

You do.

And you know he’s right, that he’s not here to humiliate or ridicule you. And you hate it. He’s here because he wants his people to live; they are not comic villains—the world isn’t black and white. In their eyes, your mistakes might as well be crimes.

And you want to slam your palms to your ears. To scream at him, to tear the sound from the air. To tear him from it. You want to curse, to shriek into the empty room, to dare him to stop it, to shut his fucking mouth.

You want to knock over this steel table nailed to the floor and throw it at his all-knowing face.

You want to go back to your radio, call her and hear her voice. You want to cry your miseries on her shoulder, wrap around her body and never let go.

But how can you never let go of something you’ve never held?

Your hands tremble, fingers gripping nothing.

You feel it—the collapse of the illusion you’ve been clinging to. That you could fool them. That you were clever enough, careful enough. That your voice on the radio was yours alone.

Your mouth goes dry. You want to say something, anything—but nothing comes.

He leans closer, his eyes still pinned to yours.

“Tell me,” he says, his voice low. “It wasn’t you who slipped her what she needed, was it? Who else could’ve? Or maybe you don’t even know who you’ve been talking to. Maybe she’s not who you think. Maybe she’s been using you all along.”

You simply snort at it. Cheap trick, nonsense. You can’t tell if he’s serious, or if he’s only trying to shame you into breaking, to make you doubt yourself. You know her—maybe better than you know anyone from the base.

“You think you’re invisible, girl. Smarter than the rest. Nothing lasts forever, though.”

Oh, fuck him.

In that moment, you see him as you should have all along. Not a faceless officer, not a dull interrogator wound tight by protocol—but a danger, sharp and waiting. A hand on the wire you thought was secret, a shadow behind every word you thought was yours.

Your stomach knots. The breath in your chest turns thin.

You’re not laughing anymore.

It’s been a week.

A week of work you’d never really done before. They kept you everywhere else—hauling crates in the warehouse, sliding rations into waiting hands, sorting papers until numbers blurred on the page. Some days they pushed you toward the children, as if their restless energy could drown out your own.

It was just enough work to wear you down to the bone. Each night you crawled back to your cot, muscles screaming, and collapsed into a shallow sleep that never gave you rest. Just enough to keep your body standing. Never enough to quiet your mind. You can’t even remember the last time you woke and felt whole—maybe you never have.

And yet—it isn’t your body they’re punishing. It’s your heart.

They’ve carved you away from what matters most, cut off the pulse you used to live by. Your old routine throbs like a phantom limb—you still reach for it in empty moments, still feel its absence burning. You used to measure your days by the radio, by the breath between your words and the static that carried hers back to you. Now there’s only blankness.

The days leave nothing behind; you can’t tell one from another, just the grey smear of repetition. But the hunger—that stays sharp. A week without her hasn’t dulled it; it’s only honed it, a blade beneath your ribs. You replay every conversation until the words grow brittle with overuse, then spin fantasies of new ones you’ll never get to speak.

It feels like they’ve ripped out an artery and demanded you keep living. For the benefit of society.

And every night, as exhaustion drags you under, you dream of sneaking back through the corridors, slipping into that room that still feels like yours, sliding on the headset and pressing it close. Just to hear her. Her voice, sleep-rough, blurred with static, drifting toward you like oxygen.

They wanted to strip you of attachment, to beat discipline back into your bones.

All they’ve done is teach you how much you can’t bear to lose.

This morning, the message came.

Not directly—never directly. A stranger brushed past you, dropped the words like a stone in your hand, and vanished into the crowded hall before you could even catch his face.

You were to take the night shift. With the radio. Back to your old post.

You stood there long after, the echo of it burning against your ribs. It should have been relief, maybe even joy, but there was no room left for either. Every step since has carried the weight of eyes on your back.

Nothing has been said about your “distractions,” your wandering loyalties. As if they’d forgotten.

But they don’t forget.

And so you’re split open, caught between two fears: that you’ll fail whatever test this is, or that you’ll never hear her voice again. You don’t know which is worse.

You need to break this week of silence, to let her know you’re still here, still breathing. In a world where every day can be the last, the words “I’m alive” mean more than anything else. But what if pressing that button becomes the mistake that marks you unfit? What if one wrong word, one stolen second, costs someone else their life?

And another sort of thoughts concern you as well. God, you have so many concerns for a simple radio operator. Ex-radio operator.

Did this week hollow her out the way it gutted you? Or did she simply drift on, less lonely than you ever were?

The questions tear at you, sharp and endless.

Your duty pulls you one way. Your heart pulls you another.

And both roads look like ruin.

Now you’re back at the desk, staring down the headset like it’s both salvation and execution.

Your hands tremble against the wood, nails digging faint crescents into the surface. The hum of the radio surrounds you, strangely intimate, a reminder of everything you’ve been denied. The silence is heavy, daring you to break it.

Somewhere at your feet, the cat winds between your ankles, tail curling, patient in her small orbit. She doesn’t know you’re standing on the edge of a choice that feels larger than life.

You can’t move yet. You can’t even reach for the dial.

Because if you do, you risk everything.

And if you don’t, you lose her.

You are suspended in this fragile balance, where silence feels like betrayal and words like surrender.

The hours drag on in contradictions like these. You squeeze your head, then you rest it on the cold table surface, every pause in the radio hum like an opening you cannot step through.

Once—twice—you reach for the switch, only to freeze with your hand hovering mid-air, as if the whole world were watching.

Secret little games for the lonely

The phrase suddenly pops up in your mind, burned deep into it, like a brand.

This is all that you are in others’ eyes. But who made you lonely?

So you take your hand off the panel.

By dawn your throat aches with all the things you haven’t said. Your fingers are stiff.

You flip the logbook open for another routine check-in, and suddenly the very sight of it makes your stomach turn. Neat columns of names, dates, signatures—it all feels suffocating. The radio, once almost tender, almost alive when you were waiting for her voice, now grates against your ears until you want to tear the wires out. Every little procedure, every shift you will be forced to sit through, is just another reminder that you are no longer free to reach for what matters.

In a sudden, sharp motion you shove the logbook off the table, pages scattering across the floor. You press your head into your hands, elbows digging into the wood, trying to hold yourself together.

You start to hate it all. The radio itself. Because if it isn’t her, then what is it good for?

And yet—somewhere in the hollow of your chest, a treacherous thought begins to form: perhaps if you earn back their precious trust, if you prove yourself obedient, they will loosen the leash.

They cannot listen in, not with the outdated equipment rattling in the command post. They don’t know her frequency. What they have are the check-ins, the logbooks, the neat little lines that betray a missed call. All you have to do is stop stumbling. Play along—until it’s safe again.

They will give you nights like this again. You tell yourself you only need to wait, as if patience could make you cleverer than them.

But you know what patience costs.

When you finally rise from the chair, it’s with the hollow certainty that you’ve failed twice over: failed your duty, failed her.

You walk away with empty hands, empty lips, and an empty heart. And the echo of your own cowardice.

Not tonight.

Two days ago you didn’t reach out to call her. The calls kept coming one after another, as if to test you.

Yesterday you didn’t reach out either, as if to punish yourself—though for what, you couldn’t say.

Today?

You wish you had done it yesterday.

Because yesterday you were summoned again.

This time, fear gripped you in a way it never had before. You started being there quite too often.

The face of command had changed. No longer the old familiar man with tired eyes. A woman spoke to you. She smiled. Her eyes did not.

You don’t remember much of the conversation, not clearly. What you do remember is the way the world cracked—not into two halves, but into a before and an after. Small, careless freedom on one side, and on the other, the abyss.

At first, you didn’t understand what she meant. You didn’t react right away—you didn’t know who she was talking about or where she was trying to lead you.

The moment she asked it of you, still smiling, you felt your heart drop. It fell into your stomach, rolled down into your legs, heavy as lead, and all the way into the toes of your cursed new boots. Boots that had belonged to someone else. Someone you hadn’t heard that night. How memory works: you remember the boots, but not your own words.

Did you interrupt her mid-sentence? Did you refuse before she finished explaining? You think so. You think you couldn’t bear to let her finish.

Because she kept asking, gently, insistently.

“Have you ever told her how hard it is for us?”

The words landed like a stone in water, sinking fast. What would she—Jackson—even hear in that? Static, a stranger’s complaint. To make her carry your burden would have been the cruelest thing.

“What if it’s easier for them?”

You almost choked on it. How could anyone’s life be easy here? And even if it was, what right would you have to demand it of her? To let those words cross the frequency would have meant to admit you saw her not as a person—not as Jackson, but as a resource, a vein to be mined. You felt sick at the thought.

“What if they have more than they need?”

That one almost made you laugh. As if abundance existed outside of fairy tales and fading memories. The question itself felt obscene, grotesque, like a cruel joke whispered with a smile.

“Wouldn’t you want to know?”

And then, only then you realized what it was for.

They weren’t asking you to share. They were asking you to strip her down to nothing—to her rations, her shelter, her secrets. To turn her into a ledger entry.

What they were asking was not curiosity, but hunger. Not discovery, but theft. Knowledge not as connection but as leverage. You didn’t want to know. The only thing you wanted was to keep her untouched by this—unsullied, free of their reach.

One person? An anonymous voice on the radio, your accidental correspondent? That was their plan? Their great hope? To gamble everything on coincidence, on the fickle chance of two voices colliding across static?

Each question left a bruise, but none of them pierced you deep enough to sway you. The absurdity of it steeled your refusal. The bile rose, sharper, and you understood:

they will never comprehend how sacred her voice has become to you.

Your sense of reality tilted. You wanted to laugh, but the sound would have been a scream. The world had become a place where the simplest idea—to ask a few harmless questions—felt like a knife carving through everything you had held dear.

Never.

Not even once.

Not even in jest.

Not even to ask the smallest, safest question.

You didn’t even let yourself consider the halfway option. It wasn’t the questions themselves that sickened you—it was the very act of them. The idea that someone could pry, even gently, even under the guise of saving lives, felt like betrayal from the first second. She never asked you about the base, never questioned your work, never pressed you for a name, or for anything beyond your state. She never tried to map your life like a territory to be measured.

For the base, it was a small matter, a trivial step toward some distant, indirect goal: maybe a few more rations saved, maybe a few lives spared. But for you, it was everything unraveling at once.

You shook your head again, mouthing “no”, and got out of there.

And the smile stayed on the woman’s face. She knew you’ll be back—sooner or later.

But the world around you had already caved in.

Now everything circles back to this room. Always.

Every road seems to lead here, like you’re caught inside a loop, some unfinished gesture, a door that refuses to close.

You sit on the sagging couch with an empty stare, and the radio room feels foreign again, stripped of the fragile order you once built. The flowers are gone. The books you once read aloud are missing—someone must have taken them during another shift. The broken clock has been pried off the wall, leaving only a pale round mark where time used to hang.

Even the cat has slipped out into the night, hunting or wandering, gone without a sound.

Someone untangled your headset cable and twisted it the wrong way; the wire frays where you used to curl it around your finger while waiting. The soft lamp that made this place bearable has burned out, and the ceiling light feels merciless now.

You don’t know what hour it is, or even what day of the week. You blink into the dimness, thinking of how odd the whole habit of keeping track always seemed to you. A number, a mark on a page, a bell struck at the same time every day—it was never about truth. It was about the illusion of order, of pretending the world still ran on rules. But time isn’t neat like that. Time frays. It slips. It devours. And here, in this room, it folds back on itself until you can’t tell if you are living a day or remembering one.

They wanted you to reach out to her?

Who are you to hold back when tomorrow they might demand worse?

You have already lost so many chances, let so many words vanish between you. You feel that something has been left unsaid—something vital. Maybe your name. Maybe the single, smallest truth that she deserved but never received.

Now she feels too close, too personal, for anonymity to make sense anymore. You can’t even remember why you clung to it so fiercely in the first place. Foolish.

You jump up from the couch.

Despite you being the one who disappeared, you’re praying for her to stay alive and answer.

Your hands move with a feverish urgency, spinning the dials, adjusting the machine. Your brow lifts, lips raw and chewed, breath uneven. You forget the headset at first, then remember, tugging it over your head in a clumsy rush. The microphone tilts crooked, almost falling against your cheek.

You lean forward, close enough to feel your own breath warm the metal, and whisper the only words that will come:

“Are you there?”

Not a name. Not a question of substance. Just a thread tossed into the static, a plea stripped down to its barest form.

You freeze in place, waiting, your whole body has become an antenna tuned only to the possibility of her voice.

Time passes, though you have no idea how much. It doesn’t matter. You only know that you’re still here, standing with both hands pressed flat against the table, leaning into its edge like it’s the only thing keeping you upright.

And then it happens, like it always does.

The crackle bursts alive, sudden and sharp, and a voice cuts through the miles. Her voice.

“—the hell? What the—what the fuck—”

Your breath stops. It feels like your stomach turns over on itself, a violent, impossible somersault. You slap a hand over your mouth because you don’t know if you’re about to laugh or cry. Your throat burns like you’ve been holding it all in for years.

Then her tone shifts, raw, urgent:

“You okay?”

You let out a breath you didn’t realize you’d been choking on. Somehow, the word comes out:

“Yeah.”

She curses again, rough and wild—not at you, but at the sheer fact of it, at the shock and the weight of what just happened. Static swallows the edges of her voice, but you can still feel it.

A beat. Then, softer, stripped down to the core:

“Something happened?”

You flinch, because yes, something happened—so many things—but where would you even begin? The words push at your lips, hot, desperate, and for a moment you think you might spill everything: the attack, the lives, the questions, the silence.

But you force the simplest truth, small and fragile.

“Yes.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

The question lands like a strike to your chest. No sound escapes—not because you can’t, but because you won’t. You won’t let her carry this weight. She’s too far, too vulnerable in this distance to shoulder what’s pressing against your heart.

The urge to cry rises, but even that feels selfish—too raw to spill where she might glimpse it. You breathe, trembling, letting the tremors flow through your hands, through the small press against your lips, holding everything close.

You shake your head before realizing she can’t see.

“No.”

The truth is not for her to carry. It’s yours.

There’s a pause on her end, long enough that your heart stumbles. And then her reply comes like an anchor thrown straight into your chest:

“Alright. You don’t have to. Just… stay with me, yeah? That’s all I need.”

You almost forget how she can turn easy words into bullets. Every syllable somehow magnified, tender, almost cruel in its simplicity. It’s meant to calm you, but all it does is the opposite of calming.

You sink onto the chair, hands lifting to press against your cheeks. It’s a grounding, a way to steady yourself when the warmth of the voice is so immediate you almost forget to breathe.

Stay

You can’t promise her that. You can’t promise her any real tomorrow waiting on the other side of this night. You can’t tell her that nothing is stable, that the ground beneath you might shift before sunrise. It hurts—to know you can’t give her certainty—and you don’t want that hurt to reach her.

You let out a breath, slow, almost guilty. “I don’t know how long I can.”

The noise is carrying her inhale. You know that she feels the shift in the air too. “Then how long do we have tonight?”

You close your eyes.

“Maybe until dawn,” you whisper.

“Then let’s not waste it,” she says, gentle, firm, as though it’s already decided. As though that’s more than enough.

It makes you smile, with the faint twitch of the left corner of your mouth.

“And how?”

“You know how. I’ll distract you. You’ll call me a loser. Nothing new, nothing changed,” she says it like she might shrug at it, with a sly smile.

You can’t help but laugh, the sound is sincere but hollow.

“Deal, loser.”

She lets out a soft huff of a laugh, almost triumphant. “You kinda like calling me that.”

It makes you exhale through your nose. “And you kinda like being one.”

The words hang between you, lighter than the air was a moment ago. For a heartbeat, it almost feels normal.

Then she shifts, voice dropping just enough to sound like she’s half-teasing, half-serious.

“I almost forgot. I’ve got something for you.”

Your breath catches.

“For me?”

“Who else?” she says, like it’s obvious, but there’s no smugness this time—only that same unspoken insistence that you don’t have to stay under the weight alone.

Your curiosity slips out before you can stop it. “What is it?”

She exhales through her teeth, like she’s trying to swat the question away with a wave of her hand. “Forget it. I thought you were dead, so—nothing here for you.”

You huff, half-offended, half-amused. “Wow. That’s cold.”

“It’s true,” she deadpans, but the edge is playful, masking something else.

For a beat, the static fills the space between you. Then her voice comes back softer.

“Gimme a couple minutes, okay?”

You hesitate, caught between a dozen questions and the sudden, sharp thrum of anticipation in your chest. Then you just nod and whisper.

“Okay.”

There’s a shuffle on her end—fabric, movement, something set down and picked up again. The line hums with her absence, and you find yourself holding your breath.

When she speaks again, her voice is farther, muffled, like she’s turned away. You lean in instinctively, as though closing the distance could help.

“Don’t get too excited,” she says, almost casual, though you know she is not. “Heard this the other day. Didn’t think I’d get enough time to practice.”

The words land with a weight you don’t miss—time without you. A gap she filled alone.

Then it comes.

A sound you’ve never heard in your headset before.

Strings.

Gentle, tentative, the tempo soft as a touch, slowed as though she’s coaxing the notes out. For a moment it feels unreal, as though you’re listening to something stolen, too intimate to belong to anyone but you.

A stumble. A discordant twang that snaps against the quiet.

“Shit—sorry,” she mutters, low, a half-laugh tangled in the apology. The rustle of her shifting, starting over.

You’re smiling before you even realize it, wide and helpless, the burn at the corners of your eyes spilling without warning. You press the headset tighter against your ears with both hands, greedy for every sound, greedy to be closer.

This time there are no breaks. The music flows steady, carrying you with it.

But then—more.

Words, low and uneven, her voice carrying the melody not with skill but with everything she has, every ounce of her laid bare in the tremor of it.

The room feels too small for it. The night outside presses its face to the glass—a dark, endless backdrop—but you barely register it. Everything recedes: the scattered papers on your desk, even your own reflection in the black window.

All that remains is her.

There is nothing more sacred than this.

It begins almost like a confession, the strum soft and steady, a fragile pulse you’re terrified might stop if you move too quickly, if you even breathe too loud.

“And I’d give up forever to touch you”

Barely a whisper, she’s afraid of saying it out loud, the words themselves could break.

You feel them land inside you anyway, raw and unflinching. You close your eyes, press the headset harder against your ears, and for a fleeting second it feels like her mouth is against yours, like the song is spilling directly into you. The closeness impossible but so vivid it burns.

“’Cause I know that you feel me somehow”

It doesn’t sound like singing so much as believing, the kind of belief that hurts, that claws its way out of her chest.

The guitar slows, tender and aching, and you’re aware of nothing else—not the room around you, not your own body—only her, somewhere out there, tethered to you by wire and air and courage.

“You’re the closest to Heaven that I’ll ever be”

It makes your throat close, makes your lungs rebel. Heaven isn’t a place; it’s this: her voice breaking against your ears, her choosing to give it to you anyway.

“And I don’t wanna go home right now”

There’s a faint catch when she says it, a fracture, like the plea is too heavy for the line to carry. The night outside deepens. The window reflects only your tears now, silver streaks down your cheeks.

“And all I can taste is this moment”

Her voice wavers, but the words strike clean, burn bright.

“And all I can breathe is your life”

You inhale sharply, choking on the thought that she might mean it—that somehow, impossibly, she is breathing through you.

The chords linger, round, imperfect, and yet you think you’ve never heard anything so absolute.

“And sooner or later, it’s over”

The whisper curves downward, but she doesn’t stop—

“I just don’t wanna miss you tonight”

The silence between lines feels enormous, unbearable. You ache to fill it, but you can’t. You can only hold on tighter.

Then, softer still, a secret pressed into your ear:

“And I don’t want the world to see me, ’cause I don’t think that they’d understand”

It’s a confession she shouldn’t be able to make, not like this, not to anyone. Yet here it is.

“When everything’s made to be broken,” her voice climbs, falters, breaks in just the right place.

“I just want you to know who I am.”

It breaks on am, crumbling but true.

The line dies slowly, carried away by the last vibrations of string.

You can’t breathe.

You can’t think.

The world has narrowed to the impossible fact that she sang for you—sang you the shape of her heart, raw and unpolished, and put it trembling into your hands.

In that hollow left by her final chord, you understand: there is no distance great enough to swallow this.

Nothing remains. Not the night shift outside, not the weight of questions, not the faint, gnawing presence of death. All of it vanishes, folded into the silence that follows.

You are nothing but the music. The notes she memorized, trembling on her fingertips. The chord she stumbled over and cradled back to life. You are gone, dissolved into the space between breaths and strings, and nothing else exists.

And yet—the radio remembers.

It holds the echo of her voice, a ghost that lingers longer than you, longer than the night, longer than time.

“Ellie.”

The word slips out like a breath held too long, barely louder than a sigh. With that sound a butterfly could move its wings, a gentle rustle of leaves in the night.

“What?” you whisper, your voice trembling with disbelief and wonder.

“…My name. My name is Ellie,” she says again, softer this time, tasting the sound. “I’ve wanted to tell you for so long.”

Seconds fall away like drops from a waterfall, each one slipping silently into the dark. Ellie moves forward, deliberate, fearless. She chooses you—not as a hesitation, not as a test, but as an act of raw honesty she can no longer hold back. She has laid down her coin: truth. She has given up on holding herself apart, on keeping the distance, on pretending she can wait forever. And now she waits—only for your next move. Back, forward, anything but the quiet that gnaws between you.

But the truth has already been decided. You chose her the moment you answered her call, the moment your voice met hers across the airwaves. You have kept choosing her, through every heartbeat, every stolen instant, every thread of longing and fear. You are running toward her, with or without miles between you, with or without reason, driven by the gravity of what has always been there.

So you respond to her confession with your own name.

Ellie hears it and treasures it—the sound of your trust, of your closeness—but she can’t help herself.

“I liked you better when you were Montana,” she murmurs, carving this moment into memory forever.

You blink.

She spoiled the moment, but you couldn’t imagine it going any other way than that.

“Oh, shut up!” You burst.

“I’m kiddin’. Humor is my language of affection,” Ellie says, soft, almost coy.

“So you’re mute,” you shoot back, trying to mask the flutter in your chest.

“Hey… I said affection. Are you deaf?” Her voice is playful, but it reaches inside you, brushing against the places you thought only fear and longing touched.

“Fuck you, Jackson.”

“Call me by my name,” Ellie asks gently.

You rub at your eyes with the sleeve of your jacket, trying to wipe away the shimmer that’s already betrayed you. The laughter slips away, leaving only the rawness underneath. A small, shaky breath, a quick sniff, and then the truth stumbles out of you—desperate, almost broken:

“I need you so much closer, Ellie.”

Something in the way you say it can make Ellie’s heart freeze. Fall. Break. It seems like she can cut herself with the shards of her name slipped from your lips.

Ellie doesn’t answer right away. Something collapses inside her defenses.

When she finally speaks, her voice carries no smirk, no armor. It’s simple, unadorned.

“I love you too.”

Ellie.

ellie. Ellie. ellie. Ellie. ELLIE. ellie. e. l l i e. ellieellieellieEllieelLieeLlieielIeellEillie

You write her name in your logbook.

You don’t hide it, you don’t disguise it—just leave it there, black ink bleeding into the page. Let them see, if they want. They won’t understand. They will never know her the way you do. They will never love her the way you do. Ellie is no longer your secret; she’s a vow you keep breathing when they ask you to betray.

You write her name in steam on the window glass.

Your breath fogs the pane, each letter blooming and vanishing, leaving behind a mark. The same mark that sits in your chest.

You write her name in fallen leaves.

You spell it with pine needles, threading her into the sky, into the dark seam of the horizon. You whisper it to the stream, you bury it in the soil, you scream it raw into your pillow.

You mouth it to your cat, as though telling her bedtime stories, but every story turns into the same one—Ellie. Always Ellie.

And it tears you apart.

You can’t see her chrysolite eyes, hidden beneath the mischief of her fiery lashes, or the way she wrinkles her nose when the sun dares to spill its brightness across her face.

She rejects the sun.

She is the sun.

She belongs to no one—nobody’s daughter, only the child of wilderness. She smells of gunpowder and restless winds, of feathers tied to arrows shot straight through your heart. She never misses. You knew that from the very start.

You can’t feel her uneven breath ghosting your neck when your joke is too much for her.

You can’t hold her battered hand when she entrusts you with the secrets she doesn’t share with anyone else.

You can’t wrap yourself in the nylon of her guitar strings, can’t become the fragile melody she keeps alive under her fingertips. A tune she carries on patrols, a hum that clings to her lips. God, you don’t ever want to leave her lips—that much is true. You want to hear her speak your name, your real name one more time.

But all you are is a voice. A secret. One word is enough for you. Yet for Ellie there could never be enough words, not in a hundred languages.

You can’t count her scars, every scratch she didn’t even know she has. But you would. You’d count each one, make the number your password, the key to your own wounds, the number of nails in your coffin. The beats left in your chest before death finds you. And when she comes, you’ll tell her your story, and her name—and she will spare you. Death will have Ellie’s eyes. You’ve never seen her eyes, but her voice… it’s enough to know that when the end arrives, it will sound like Ellie.

You would handle her with care and treasure her like she is going to break.

It’s never been about meeting her just to kiss, to fuck, to test the curve of her body against yours. It’s so far beyond that.

You’re already drowned. Already gone. Her voice burrows under your skin; this longing keeps you awake on nights when the silence doesn’t carry the crackle of static and her low, steady tone.

You can’t bear silence anymore if it isn’t shaped like Ellie.

You can’t bear the weight of her absence.

She lingers in the core of your bones. She’s your infection. A fever. Your own cordyceps.

And, obviously, you are not immune.

And if some clicker tore your ribcage open and pulled out your heart, they would find her there—Ellie, in the deep brown of her fingertips, the shade of rust and august and dried blood.

In the auburn of her hair. If she ever tried to find you, she would only need to look in the mirror—trace the constellation of freckles scattered over her cheekbone.

You’ll be there.

Dwelling in a shape of her forever. Until the sun explodes, and the moon turns into ashes, and the stars collide. You will be there. No matter what.

That’s how you feel for her.

Love?

How can something like this be trapped in four letters?

You would braid it into the feathers of cranes so they could carry it to her across the sky. You would whisper it to fireflies, let them glow with your secret, mistaken for stars as they rise into the dark, delivering the message to her.

Because Ellie doesn’t see it. She thinks she has no light of her own, only a reflection of someone else’s shine. Once a sun, now a moon. But the way she glows to you—it should be a crime.

Four letters will never be enough.

But Ellie’s name has five of them.

For you, that is perfectly enough.

Time after that stretches differently. The days pile up, heavy and indistinguishable, while the weeks crawl toward winter. What grows is not ease, not comfort, not even safety—only your feelings.

They swell, deepen, and root themselves into your bones. And yet the space for them shrinks: conversations taper down to once a week, to those stolen minutes before dawn, when the world is hushed and no one is listening. They are never enough. A voice like Ellie’s deserves whole nights, deserves laughter that spills over, deserves quiet mornings where the air is safe to breathe. Instead, you get scraps in the dark, whispers that vanish as quickly as they begin. What should be endless is rationed down to survival.

“You’re awake?” “Always.” “I wish I could see you.” “Don’t say it too loud.”

“Shimmer’s got sick.” “Is it serious?” “I don’t think so.” “We don’t have horses here. I wish I could learn how to ride them and get away.” “I’d teach you.”

“Don’t call too often. They’re starting to notice.” “But I miss you.” “I know. I miss you too.”

“I once saw a giraffe.” “You’re such a storyteller.” “But it’s true!” “Maybe you saw a dinosaur too?” “You won’t believe it, but—” “I’m hanging!” “Trust me.” “...I do.”

It is unbearable, loving like this. Loving when it is mutual, when words could run for hours, and having to measure that love by the clock, by fear, by walls that keep closing in.

The others no longer hide their disapproval; they’ve turned their backs on you. The punishments begin: they call it youthful defiance, but they make sure you see the hungry children, the dwindling supplies. You are fed little, reminded daily of what is at stake. To them, Ellie is nothing but a dangerous dream. To you, she is the only tether left.

You know for certain now: the single wire connecting her to them runs through you. If you break, the connection breaks with you. You’ve known for a long time what must be done. So you don’t mark your maps. You don’t draw red circles around the places Ellie might be—where Jackson is. You don’t carve little trails that point toward her. If anyone found them, it would ruin everything. Instead, you save food bit by bit, and you wait.

Until one night, you take the backpack and the knife from beneath your pillow.

It isn’t because you have nothing to lose. It is because you have too much. You leave behind Mia and Jade, who help you slip through the gates. You leave behind the cat, who pressed against your legs for the last time without knowing it was the last.

And you leave the radio. Perhaps you shouldn’t have done it—yanked out the wires, smashed the bulbs, hurled the headset against the wall until only a plastic skeleton remained. But only after the destruction, only after the bridges burned, do you feel the loop around your neck loosen, the door that was always opened finally shut.

And you leave Ellie.

Not a farewell, not a warning that you’ll be gone, not a single word, no hope. She will be waiting for you tomorrow, and you won’t show up. Bad kind of a deja vu. You don’t say to her neither over, nor out.

But you have lied too much already, promised too many times what you couldn’t keep—that you would come, that you would survive.

She deserves to live without being tied to a piece of metal.

She deserves something real—not a ghost.