They’d taken shelter in an old transit repeater station, gutted clean years ago. Most of it was useless, its power stripped, its data wiped, but the walls were thick and the ceiling didn’t leak. Much. That made it one of the nicer stops on The Ghost Lines.
It was late. The kind of late that made silence feel heavier than sound.
At some point, Kairo had passed out with his face half-buried in a coil of wires. Soahn sat cross-legged against a nearby wall, eyes closed, not sleeping exactly, but doing something quieter than being awake. Onyx was soldering a circuit board in the corner like it owed him money. Minjae had slipped out an hour ago, muttering something about ramyeon.
Rayne was bored.
He moved slowly through the back corridor, head tilted, eyes scanning the shadows with that synthetic stillness that made people forget he was there until he wasn’t. The station’s air vents were old and jagged, little more than rusting slats and forgotten dust. But something caught his eye.
A gap.
Not large, just… off. Like something had been nudged loose, then carefully—too carefully—put back.
He pulled the vent cover away without a sound.
Inside, nestled between dust-caked pipework and flaking thermal tape, was a small, battered notebook. It was worn, bent at the corners, tied shut with an old string. The black cover was blank—no name, no label, but across the font someone had scrawled "USELESS."
Rayne turned it over in his hands. Then, almost absently, he walked back into the main room and held up the book. “Found this in the wall.”
Soahn’s neural filaments shifted from dark blue to azure as he stood up and crossed the room to get a better look.
Onyx hitched an eyebrow. “Yours?”
Rayne shook his head. “Not mine.”
Kairo, stirring at the sound of voices, sat up slowly and squinted. “Is that a diary?”
When Rayne held it out, Soahn accepted it with careful hands, as though it might come apart at a touch. Gingerly he opened the cover.
The first page was blank. But the second had writing, slanted and scratchy, running not just left to right but curling down the page and across it at odd angles.
"They're lyrics, I think," Soahn said.
Ink bled into the paper like it had been written fast, or maybe under stress. Some verses were crossed out and lines rewritten, and some pages blurred with water damage, while others were marked with faint fingerprints, smudged like they’d been read over and over.
The lyrics were unpolished, raw and angry in places, tender and wistful in others.
Kairo leaned in, blinking sleep away. “Whose is it?”
No one answered, but they all knew. Somewhere in the quiet between the lines, it was obvious.
Minjae.
The jokes weren’t there, though. Neither was the swagger or the snark. What filled these pages was something else entirely; guilt, confusion, grief that unfurled at the edges of every stanza like smoke. Some verses read like memories, others like secrets he couldn’t say out loud.
Soahn reverently turned another page.
One line was written over and over again, layered like a mantra:
I wasn’t made for silence, but I keep finding it anyway.
They stopped reading.
Kairo let out a low breath. “I thought he just… y’know, free-styled everything. Didn’t know he wrote like this.”
Onyx didn’t look up from where he sat, but his voice was quieter than usual. “He doesn’t show it. But it doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
Rayne leaned back, head tilted. “This is grief dressed as rhythm. It’s not a song. It’s an unraveling.”
Kairo blinked hard, like the air had changed. “It’s really good.”
They sat with it for a while. Just... sat. No commentary. No more page turning. Just the weight of it pressing in gently around them.
Then—footsteps.
Minjae’s voice, from the hall: “Hey, did someone move my—” He stopped dead in the doorway when he spotted the notebook in Soahn’s hands.
The room stilled again, but it was a different kind of stillness. This was bated.
“You weren’t supposed to read those,” Minjae said quietly. Usually he’d crack a joke when something made him uncomfortable, but he just stood there, his shoulders hunching slightly, a lost soul in the quiet.
Soahn went to where Minjae stood in the doorway, holding the notebook out with both hands like he was returning something sacred.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Minjae took it without meeting his eyes.
Onyx didn’t move from his corner, but his voice carried: “They’re good, Minjae. Seriously good.”
Minjae swallowed thickly and looked down at the cover like it might disappear if he didn’t hold it in his gaze.
“Next track.” Kairo stood, stretching widely like a cat.
Minjae blinked. “What?”
Kairo smiled. No teasing in it. Just warm, tired certainty. “Yours.”
For a long time, Minjae merely stared at him. Then, finally, he nodded. A small nod. A tight nod. He slumped down where he stood, back against the doorframe, dragging a battered pen out of his pocket. Nobody said anything as he opened the book and began rewriting one of the pages.
Rayne moved away, just enough to give Minjae space.
Soahn, however, went to him and sat beside him, quiet and present in the moment.
And the silence that fell changed again: a hush that felt alive with promise.
The new safehouse wasn’t much more than a hollowed-out access port beneath a collapsed rail station, its walls lined in broken monitor frames and mostly-dead cables like the carcass of something that once mattered.
Kairo had claimed a corner for his gear, already looping signal through three ancient decks that groaned when touched. Rayne sat cross-legged on the raised platform, silent, watching the light patterns play across the broken glass embedded in the wall. Soahn dozed—or maybe just disconnected—a half-finished cup of tea cooling beside him. Onyx was tinkering with a cracked processor that wisely played dead.
Minjae sat in the middle, notebook open, pencil stub scratching over the page.
No one said anything. They knew it would be ready when it was ready.
The page was messy again, ink lines slashing across older verses, graphite ghosts of thoughts he couldn’t pin down. He didn’t know why he was trying. The words looked wrong in this light. Sounded too fragile in his head.
Still, he tapped out the rhythm, just against his leg.
da-da. da — da — da.
Kairo noticed first. Of course he did. His ears were wired for rhythm like some people breathed. He didn’t say anything, but he shifted his interface, layered in a low tone beneath the beat.
A base line. Barely there, but what was there sounded like a question.
Minjae looked up.
Kairo smiled. “You tap, I build.”
“Wasn’t meant to be a song.”
“Too late.”
The loop played again, this time with a gentle synth echo. Something delicate and slow, like fingers trailing across fabric. It filled the space like gauze.
Rayne unfolded himself from his spot and drifted over without a word. He crouched beside Minjae and passed him one of the battered headphones they used when they didn’t want to disturb the whole team.
Minjae slipped them on.
The loop played again.
This time, he let himself hum.
The melody bloomed haltingly, raw and low and full of hesitation.
Soahn cracked one eye open. “Is that the note?”
Minjae paused, chewing the inside of his cheek. “No. I mean… maybe. It’s not a full track.”
“That’s how all of them start,” said Onyx.
Minjae didn’t reply, merely went back to humming.
Across the room, Kairo caught the rhythm and began layering sounds, a pulse here, a shimmer there. The loop held. It didn’t push.
Beside him, Rayne adjusted a dial on the old interface; faint distortion growled beneath Minjae’s voice, giving it a cracked-glass edge.
Minjae reached for his notebook, flipping back to the water-damaged pages—the ones he’d never intended to share. He scanned them in silence, scratched out a few words, rewrote them, said one line under his breath. Tried again.
This time, it came out music.
“You said don’t disappear But I already had…”
He stopped.
Soahn watched now, fully awake, a curious little tilt to the corners of his lips.
Kairo froze the loop and played it back, just that one line. The rawness of it. The half-muttered truth tucked into static.
Rayne swayed ever so slightly along to the line.
Minjae exhaled hard. “That sounded bad, yeah?”
“No,” Kairo said. “It sounded real.”
“Keep going,” Onyx told him.
Minjae looked dubious. “You sure?”
Onyx didn’t hesitate. “We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t.”
Minjae sat back, eyes on the notebook, voice low. “This song… it’s not finished.”
Kairo reached over, tapped the recording panel once.
“Neither are we.”