The bunker vibrated. Not from any working system—those had died decades ago—but from what Kairo had managed to wire together: two cracked interface panels, an ancient data conduit, and a cursed bit of copper he swore was haunted.
The relay room glowed with low light, pulsing red like a heartbeat. Or a warning. Sound coiled through the space, fractured and reforming, bouncing off crumbling concrete and old tech scars.
“I swear to god, if that thing fries my synapse again…” Onyx crouched by a power hub, eyeing a twisted line of cable like it had personally offended him.
“It won’t,” Kairo said, which wasn’t quite a lie. “It’ll probably just hum a bit—a comforting hum. Vibe hum.” He twisted a dial. The lights trembled. “See?”
Onyx did not look convinced. “Last time you said that, my hand stopped working for an hour.”
Minjae, legs slung over the back of a broken office chair, grinned. “Can we get it to stop our maknae’s mouth from moving? Imagine the peace.”
Kairo didn’t even look up. “Min-min-hyung, I coded this mixer with parts I found in a bin. Respect the magic.”
Rayne leaned against the wall like art, half in shadow, his face haloed by the glow of a cracked monitor. “It’s not magic,” he said softly. “It’s desperation set to rhythm.”
Soahn, seated cross-legged in a far corner, blinked slowly. “That sounds like a genre.”
“It is,” Kairo said. “We just invented it.”
A hiss of static broke through the hum, sharp enough to make them all freeze for half a beat. Onyx’s head snapped toward the source. Kairo gave the cable a little slap.
“Ambient feedback. Totally planned.”
“Totally dangerous,” Onyx muttered.
Minjae rolled his eyes. “If we die here, I’m blaming the haunted copper.”
Kairo crouched by the twisted mess of wires like a gremlin composer mid-summon, face lit by the gentle quiver of the relay’s stolen life, one thumb hovered over a patched-together input deck. With the other, he turned a cracked dial so delicately you’d think he was tuning a symphony rather than an ex-surveillance node.
“OK,” he murmured. “Everyone shut up. This one might slap.”
He hit play.
What came out was a glitched harmony: ghosted chords warped through two decades of dust and a busted reverb unit. A heartbeat under the melody stuttered. It was messy, gritty. Beautiful.
Onyx raised an eyebrow. “It’s off-tempo.”
“It’s intentionally off-tempo,” Kairo said, eyes wide. “It’s anti-rhythm. You’re not supposed to trust it. Like us.”
“That’s not how rhythm works.”
“Not with that attitude.”
Minjae gave a low whistle. “Somewhere out there, a classical composer just burst into flames.”
Kairo turned a dial. The deck hissed and bloomed into a wave of bass. “Look, listen. If I bounce this layer over the midline, and you… Onyx, wait, give me something.”
Onyx blinked. “What kind of something?”
Kairo shrugged. “Freaky synth. Your broody brand.”
“Broody is not a brand.”
Still, he reached for the touchpad without hesitation—hands precise, movements practised. He always fixed things like they might break again if he didn’t do it fast enough.
One slow, serrated note rippled through the room. It was rich and cold and sharp, like metal in moonlight.
Kairo’s mouth dropped open. “Oh my god. You do have feelings.”
Onyx shot him a dry look, but didn’t stop playing.
In the corner, Soahn tilted his head toward the waveform display, his pupils expanding as he watched the frequencies, like he could see the birth of starlight. He whispered, not for the others, just to the pattern:
“It’s speaking in pulses.”
Rayne, still draped against the back wall, straightened and stepped forward without a word. The others barely noticed him move. He crossed the room, rested his hand on the mic pad, and let his voice slip through the processor.
One long, gliding note.
The frequency arced through the bunker like a ripple in still water. Everything stilled. Kairo froze mid-dial. Onyx’s fingers hovered. Soahn closed his eyes. Even Minjae didn’t speak.
It was raw and echoing, full of something that didn’t belong to language. A sound that felt like a memory you never made but still missed.
Then, silence.
Rayne stepped back.
“Right,” Minjae said, clearing his throat. “So that happened.”
Kairo broke first, laughing too hard. “Rayne, what the hell was that? That wasn’t just harmony, that was—like—cosmic grief. With good vibrato.”
Rayne didn’t respond, but the sound seemed to linger inside him, caught somewhere between memory and code. He silently walked back to the wall and leaned.
Onyx shook his head, but his expression had softened slightly. “We should layer that in.”
Kairo nodded, already spinning back to the dial. “Oh, we are. That was ghostcore excellence. Glitchwave sadness. I’m adding snare.”
“Can we play it once more?” Soahn asked.
Kairo met his gaze. “Yeah. We’ll loop it.”
And once again, when the track played, none of them spoke.
The track wound down in layers, like steam curling off wet concrete. The last of Rayne’s note shimmered against the walls, then dissolved into silence, warm, clinging, unwilling to leave.
No one moved.
Soahn’s breath hitched, barely audible, and he lowered his gaze. The waveforms still danced across the cracked display, each spike echoing with the residue of their voices, their tension, their tether. He pressed two fingers to his temple. Too much.
“Back in a moment,” he murmured.
No one stopped him.
He slipped out into the corridor beyond, the door hissing shut behind him.
Minjae watched it close and then stood, stretching with an exaggerated groan. “Whew. Nothing like a raw emotional soundscape to really clog the old sinuses.”
“You okay?” Kairo didn’t look up from his dials.
“Me? Thriving. Flourishing. Emotionally constipated as ever.”
He followed after Soahn.
The corridor outside was cold, the walls marked with old system glyphs, worn away by time and fingers. Soahn stood with his back to the wall, eyes shut, hands clasped behind his neck like he was trying to keep himself from coming apart.
Minjae didn’t speak at first. He just leaned against the opposite wall and slowly slid down to sit, legs stretched out in front of him.
After a moment, he said, “You ever feel like you’re made of exposed wires?”
Soahn opened his eyes.
Minjae shrugged. “I do. Especially when Kairo starts playing music like he’s calling down ghosts.”
A silence passed between them. Not awkward. Just... full.
Soahn said quietly, “Sometimes I feel like I’m made of the static between words.”
Minjae tilted his head, studying him. “That’s poetic as hell.”
“It’s exhausting.”
“Yeah. That too.”
They sat there for a while, neither trying to fix the other. The chill of the corridor settled between them, not quite comfortable but real. Present.
Minjae reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a half-crushed protein bar, and held it out.
“Is that cherry-flavoured?” Soahn said.
“Supposedly.” He wiggled it. “It’s terrible. You’ll hate it.”
Soahn took it. “Thank you.”
Minjae leaned back against the wall again, a faint grin twitching at the corner of his mouth. “Anytime, Ghost Boy.”
Back in the relay room, Kairo was still tweaking the mix, muttering under his breath like a preacher possessed.
Onyx crouched beside him, soldering one of the frayed cables with a pocket arctool. Not because he had to—the whole thing would be torn down soon—but because it was what he did: make things hold a little longer, even when they shouldn’t.
“You’re letting the bass clip,” he said.
“I want it to clip,” Kairo replied. “It’s the emotional climax.”
Onyx gave him a look. “Clipping is not an emotion.”
Kairo grinned, wild and golden. “It is if you’re doing it right.”
Across the room, Rayne leaned back against the wall again, eyelids half-lowered. He didn’t speak, but when Onyx’s synth line played once more on loop, he smiled.
Soahn felt it first.
He was halfway back to the bunker, protein bar wrapper crinkled in his sleeve pocket, when the chill threaded through his chest. A lurching sensation, like walking through someone else’s hatred.
He paused at the doorway.
Inside, the track had softened to a low loop. Kairo was still lost in it. Onyx was making small adjustments with the meticulous care of someone who never stopped scanning for failure points. Rayne glanced over as Soahn entered, and something in his gaze sharpened—concern.
Soahn went to the wall panel and tapped it twice. The screen juddered. An interface lit up, but it wasn’t one they’d activated. A system log, buried deep beneath the relay’s shell.
One word blinked at them.
ACTIVITY
Rayne was beside him instantly, his voice barely above a whisper. “How long ago?”
“Four minutes,” Soahn said. “Low-frequency scan. Bounce-back interference.”
“That’s… bad, right?” Kairo finally looked up.
Rayne didn’t answer. He tracked the readout, the timestamp, then the exit routes he’d already memorised the moment they arrived.
Onyx stood, tension sliding into his shoulders like armour. “It’s not exact. They don’t have us yet.”
“But they’re looking,” Soahn said. “And getting closer.”
“We have five minutes,” Rayne said.
Kairo stared sadly at the cobbled-together workstation, the mess of beauty and chaos, the dancing waveform that had just started to sound right. “I haven’t bounced the file yet.”
“You can save the raw track.” Onyx started unplugging the central core. “If you move now.”
Minjae stepped back into the room, brushing dust from his sleeves like it was nothing. “And here I was thinking we might get one peaceful night without dramatic exits. Silly me.”
This wasn’t a new thing. No one panicked. There was no shouting. No orders.
They just moved as a single unit, calm and practised.
Minjae grabbed the packs. Onyx detached the core. Soahn swept the terminals with a looped frequency break, scrambling whatever data trail they'd left. Rayne disappeared into the corridor for twelve seconds and returned with confirmation: no drones yet, but that would change.
And Kairo, his brow furrowed, clutched the copper-wrapped chip between his fingers as if holding a precious gem. “It’s not finished,” he said, mostly to himself.
Rayne passed him on the way to the door. “Then we’ll finish it somewhere else.”
The relay bunker had never been much—concrete bones, cracked terminals, and walls that whispered when you moved.
But it had given them a sound.
Kairo moved like his fingers were already twitching through the next mix. He yanked cables from ports and wrapped them in spirals, mumbling to himself. “If I splice the drive to the corner node, I can rebuild this with... OK, OK, maybe not that bit. She’s fried. But she was pretty.”
He slid the chip—their fragment of a song—into the lining of his jacket. It was still warm.
Onyx packed methodically, with no wasted motion. Drive first. Then cables. Then tools. Then kill the power. He scanned the dark corners even as his hands moved, as if danger might unspool from the shadows at any second.
“You’re tense,” Kairo said.
“You’re surprised?”
“No. Just checking.”
Soahn crouched by the main terminal, brushing dust off the screen. He whispered something to it. Maybe goodbye. Maybe just a grounding thought to keep himself from absorbing the unspoken sharp-edged urgency choking the room.
Rayne passed behind him, barely audible, sliding a blank disruptor tile into place above the door frame. When it activated, it would flood the space with electromagnetic noise, just enough to confuse sensors, just enough to buy time.
Minjae was everywhere at once. Bag slung over one shoulder, backup battery under his arm, half a cracked ration bar in his mouth. He muttered as he moved—curses, jokes, lyrics maybe; no one could tell.
“Y’know,” he said, voice muffled. “One day we’re gonna land somewhere and not have to run. Like, set up shop. Get real mattresses. Actual mugs instead of cracked thermals.”
Kairo snorted. “Min-Min, you don’t even sleep in a bed when there is one. You curl up on coiled cables like some cyber raccoon.”
“This is true.” Minjae grinned. “But let me have my fantasy.”
The room was almost stripped. One mic left. A single light strobing above the sound deck, the last heartbeat of the track they started to make here.
Kairo stood in front of it, hands in his pockets. He didn’t say anything, but the others felt it.
Onyx paused at the door. Soahn stopped mid-reach. Rayne turned his head.
Minjae walked back toward him, quieter now. “You gonna miss it?”
Kairo smiled without showing his teeth. “Only all of it.”
A beat.
Then Onyx said, “We’ve got the file.”
Rayne added, “It’s enough.”
“It’s not gone,” Soahn said. “Just... echoing elsewhere.”
Minjae bumped Kairo’s shoulder. “Besides, this place is a dump.”
Kairo laughed once, a breathy, small thing. He stepped back and flicked the last switch.
The light died.
They vanished down the tunnel like smoke through a grate—soundless, fast, efficient.
The relay room sat empty.
Then the disruptor tile blinked once, washed the space in white noise, and went still.
What remained wasn’t silence. Not really.
It was the ghost of a memory. The promise of something unfinished.
Minutes later, a drone swept the ruins.
Its sensors picked up nothing but static: the kind that’s too messy to trace, too human to decode.
It hovered, scanned, blinked red, and moved on.
Beneath the cracked tiles, a single strand of copper wire glowed faintly — still warm.