The others were sleeping. Even in The Ghost Lines, downtime meant something: rest, cool darkness, the slow reset of systems and nerves alike.
But Rayne didn’t sleep.
The makeshift studio hummed with a low, fractured loop. Three broken audio decks connected by a tangled pulse of rewired cables. It was messy. Glitchy. Beautiful.
Rayne lingered in the doorway, standing watch the way Onyx would have if he was awake, though his vigilance was quieter—more listening than guarding.
Kairo had fallen asleep mid-mix, half-sprawled across the floor, one hand still resting on a cracked touchscreen. His breathing was shallow and rapid, the cortical link at his temple shimmering faintly blue. Active.
The audio loop he’d been working on repeated—then, unexpectedly, morphed.
Rayne tilted his head.
New sound spooled through the speakers—not music exactly, but fragments: strings of syllables, data-glitches that sounded like speech yet weren’t meant to be decoded.
Except Rayne could. Of course he could.
He stepped closer, silently coaxing the new sounds.
Kairo murmured something—half-gasped—and his hand twitched. The loop changed again. Layered. Warped.
Rayne’s internal translator parsed the audio feed.
These weren’t code strings. They were lyrics. Dream-lyrics, spoken mid-sync.
“The noise is quiet now...
We made it through the storm...
…Somehow...”
Even unconscious, Kairo was still composing.
Rayne knelt beside him, careful not to distub his sleep.
The floor was scattered with loose nodes and copper coil. A single neon line blinked across the interface. Blue-orange, timed to Kairo’s breathing.
Rayne reached out slowly and tapped the playback deck. The recording began.
Light spreads, blooming at my fingertips, We were the dark, now we’re the fire. Every scar, a seed, a wire — burning quiet, reaching higher...
Rayne silently adjusted the gain, fed it through a soft layer of delay. Let it run again. And again.
A song began to form. Not fully. Not yet.
But the bones were there.
Eventually Kairo stirred, blinking awake, confused and groggy. He sat up sharply, almost headbutting Rayne's shoulder.
The startle wasn't lost on Rayne. He hadn’t meant to unsettle him. Observation came naturally; it was how he learned things. Still, he filed the reaction away. Next time, more distance.
“Did I…” Kairo paused, squinting. “Was I talking?”
Rayne turned back to the mix. “Yes.”
Brushing dust off his cheek, Kairo said, “I was dreaming in waveform again, wasn’t I?” He rubbed the back of his neck, fingers brushing over the neural threads there—absent, automatic. “It’s been happening more. Like the music’s running without me.”
“You said something about light blooming.” Rayne didn’t know why the phrase made his chest tighten, like it belonged to something he'd never known but still missed.
Kairo yawned hugely, and then grinned lopsided. “That sounds like me.”
Rayne replayed the loop. “Do you remember it?”
“Nope.”
He added a quiet filter to the vocal track. A low shimmer beneath the words.
“You’re building it,” Kairo said, watching him. Not a question.
Rayne finally looked up. “Yes. It’s beautiful.”
Kairo let the silence settle, then reached for the nearest interface. “Let’s finish it, then. Before it fades.”