𓆏 Sebastian𓆏
I sat at the far end of the pier, as far away from the warm lanterns and the suffocating "community" chatter as I could get without falling in.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
I kicked lightly at the mossy-covered pillars. It was a way to drown out the town, the noise of a world that was about to delete its only interesting feature.
"You're going to miss the glow."
Her voice hit me like a frequency I'd been tuned to since I was ten, when I first moved to this shithole town. I didn't turn around—I couldn't. If I looked at her, I'd have to acknowledge the boxes I'd seen in her hallway earlier this week. I just let my shoulders drop an inch, the tension leaking out of me in a way only she could cause.
"Let him cry," I mumbled. "He probably just realized he's been wearing the same suspenders since the seventies. It's a lot to process."
Aurora sat down next to me, her knees just inches from mine. She told me about Abigail trying to eat a jelly and Pierre's impending heart attack.
"Standard Saturday night, then," I said. I finally looked at her. The blue glow from the water reflected in her eyes. "The city won't have this, you know. They don't have glowing fish. They just have... smog. And people who walk too fast."
"I'll probably just become a person who walks fast," she said, looking at her lap. "It's my destiny."
Doubt it, I thought, but my throat was too tight to say it. I reached into my hoodie pocket, my fingers fumbling with the small, braided cord I'd bought at a stall while pretending to be interested in artisanal honey.
It was cheap. It was tarnished. It was the most important thing I owned.
"I, uh... I found this earlier. Before the crowd got weird." I held it out. The crescent moon charm caught the blue light, looking like a tiny, fallen piece of the sky.
"Seb," she breathed. "It's beautiful."
"It's just... so you don't forget the sky here. Since you'll be surrounded by skyscrapers and whatever." My ears were burning, a hot, frantic red that I hoped the shadows would hide. "Want me to put it on?"
Her wrist was pale and trembling as I took it. My fingers were cold, but I tried to be as careful as if I were handling a piece of unshielded hardware. I furrowed my brow, concentrating on the tiny, stubborn clasp, biting my lip in that way I only did when Aurora made me feel like I was physically glitching. The silence between us grew heavy.
When the clasp finally clicked, I didn't pull away. I couldn't. I stayed there, my thumb resting just above her pulse point. I could feel her heart racing to match mine. I looked up, and the world outside the pier—the jellies, the lanterns, the town—just... vanished.
There was no thought process. It was just gravity. She leaned in and pressed her lips against mine.
She tasted like salt and the peppermint gum I always chewed. It was shy, but it sent a shock through my entire system. For a moment, I was paralyzed. Then, instinct took over. I moved my hand to the side of her neck, my fingers tangling in her hair, pulling her closer as I kissed her back with a desperation that tasted like the end of the world.
For a few seconds, the signal was perfect. No father, no Demetrius, no Zuzu City. Just her.
But then she pulled away, the cold air hitting my lips.. Her eyes were wet, her expression a wreckage of things she couldn't say.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, her voice breaking. "I'm so sorry, Seb."
"Aurora, wait—"
"Goodbye."
She scrambled up and ran. I didn't follow. I couldn't move. I just sat there in the fading glow of the jellies, my fingers rising to trace the place on my lips where she'd been.
I was already a ghost, and she hadn't even left the valley yet.
☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆
The morning felt like a fever dream I couldn't wake up from. I was standing at the edge of the General Store's gravel lot, my hands shoved so deep into my hoodie pockets I thought the seams might snap.
The moving truck had already left, a giant white ghost haunting the highway, but the family car was still there, idling in the driveway. I saw her through the passenger window. She was tucked into the seat, her head leaning against the glass, looking like she was already a thousand miles away.
The world actually went quiet. She looked up, her eyes finding mine across the gravel. We didn't wave. We didn't do some dramatic goodbye. We just stared. It was the kind of look that felt like a scar—raw and heavy with everything we hadn't said on the pier. I wanted to move. I wanted to run over there, rip the door open, and tell her that I didn't know how to exist in a town where she wasn't just a house away.
But I stayed frozen.
The car pulled out, the tires crunching over the gravel. I watched the tail lights until they blurred into the trees at the edge of town, and suddenly, the air felt too thin to breathe.
I couldn't just stand there. I couldn't be near that store while it was still echoing with her absence.
I took off. I didn't have a plan; I just needed to outrun the pressure building behind my ribs. My boots thundered against the pavement, my lungs burning with every sharp breath, but I didn't stop until I hit the town park. I collapsed onto the weathered seat of a swing.
My hands were shaking—not just a little bit, but a violent tremor that made my vision go blurry at the edges. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes I'd swiped from my dad's old desk before he'd cleared it out.
Flick. Flick.
The lighter sparked, but my fingers were too twitchy to catch the flame. "Come on," I hissed, my voice cracking in the quiet. "Just... come on."
I stared at my hands, the reality finally hitting me.
She was gone.
She was on a highway bound for a city full of strangers, and I never told her. I never actually said the fucking words, and now they were just going to sit in my gut and rot.
And then there was the other blackout.
I looked at my phone, hoping for a text—anything—from my dad. But the screen stayed dark. He hadn't called once since he'd packed his bags and vanished a few months ago. I'd overheard my mom talking to Jodi earlier; apparently, he wasn't just "taking space". He was three hundred miles down the coast, living in a house with some woman I'd never even heard of. He'd already moved on. He'd started a whole new life that didn't include a son who spent too much time in the basement.
The realization stung. First my dad, now Aurora. It was the same loop, over and over. They find a better narrative, a bigger city, a new person—and I'm just the guy who stays. The guy who watches the tail lights.
I finally caught the flame, the harsh smoke hitting my lungs and grounding me for a split second. I leaned my head back, looking up at a sky that felt way too big and much too empty.
"I'm still here," I whispered to the empty park.
The signal was dead. I was alone and I was officially a ghost in my own life.
☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆
It didn't take long for the house to stop feeling like a home and start feeling like a lab experiment. Within weeks, the smell of my mom's sawdust and wood-glue—that earthy, honest scent of things being built—was systematically buried under the sterile smell of Demetrius's equipment and his expensive, organic coffee beans. My dad's old office, the one room that used to smell like clove cigarettes and the kind of heavy, unspoken tension you could cut with a knife, was now a "workspace." Demetrius moved in with a collection of microscopes and a set of "household guidelines" that he presented with a smile that never quite reached his eyes.
Then there was Maru. She was younger, smarter, and had this "perfect daughter" energy that made my entire existence feel like a glitch in a carefully curated system. My mom, Robin, was trying so hard to play the part of the happy architect, building this new family from the ground up, that she didn't seem to notice the foundation was already cracked. I did the only thing that made sense: I retreated. I moved everything I owned into the basement, carving out a bunker in the dark. If they wanted to play "Happy Family" in the light, they could do it without me.
☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆
Walking through the halls of Pelican Town High at the start of freshman year without Aurora was a nightmare.
Why haven't you called?
The question sat in my chest. I spent my nights staring at our last message thread, scrolling up until the "goodnights" and the inside jokes felt like they'd been written by a different species. I was fourteen, and my pride was a cage I'd built myself. I told myself that since she was the one who left, she was the one who had to blink first. I stayed behind. I was the one still in the valley, still in the basement, still here. That had to count for something, right? I waited for an apology, or a "miss you", or even just a random link—anything to prove the "Source Code" wasn't corrupted. But as the months turned into a winter that felt ten years long, the silence became a definitive answer.
Stalking her Instagram became a masochistic ritual. I'd stay up until 2:00 AM, the light of my phone the only thing illuminating my corner of the basement, scrolling through the "Zuzu City" version of her life. She wasn't the girl in the oversized thrift-store sweaters anymore. In her posts, she was surrounded by neon lights and high-rise glass. She was smiling in photos with people I didn't recognize—guys with expensive haircuts and girls who looked like they'd never seen a mud puddle in their lives. She looked vibrant. She looked like she'd finally found the volume knob on her life and turned it all the way up.
The real breaking point was my birthday.
It was mid-winter. I spent the entire day with my phone in my pocket, feeling for a vibration that never came. I told myself she was just busy. Maybe she was waiting until the end of the day to make it special. I stayed awake that night, staring at the clock on my nightstand.
11:57 PM. 11:58 PM. 11:59 PM.
I waited for the notification. I waited for her name to pop up on the screen, even if it was just a two-word text. But at 12:00 AM, the date changed with a silent, digital click, and the screen stayed black. She didn't remember. Or worse, she did, and she just didn't care enough to hit "send". The realization hit: I wasn't an aspect of her life anymore. I was just a childhood crush she'd forgotten with ease.
By spring, the dynamic of the group started to shift. It was the first day back after winter break when Emily showed up. She was like a prismatic explosion in a town that was mostly shades of brown and grey. She was Haley's sister, but she had this weird, ethereal energy that made her stick out like a sore thumb.
I watched the first day of the drama unfold from my usual spot at the back of the cafeteria, my hoodie pulled low to hide the dark circles under my eyes. Sam was already a goner. He spent the whole lunch period trying to impress Haley, who was too busy checking her reflection in her phone to notice he was breathing.
"She's way out of your league, man," Alex said, leaning back in his chair with that smirk that always made my head flare up. He looked at Sam with a kind of pity that was more insulting than an actual fight. "You're wasting your breath."
"You don't know that," Sam muttered, adjusting his grip on his skateboard.
"Sure, Sam. Well, let me know how that works out for you," Alex laughed. He looked at me for a split second, his gaze dismissive, before turning back to his inner circle.
They were all starting their own sub-plots, building these messy, loud lives while I was just trying to keep my signal from flatlining.
I didn't know then that Haley and Alex were already the early drafts of a betrayal, or that Emily would eventually become the distraction I used to stop myself from thinking about the girl in Zuzu City.
☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆
Eventually, I started smoking to keep my hands busy. Above me, the floorboards were a constant map of a life I no longer belonged to. I could track them by the sound: Demetrius's heavy, logical stride toward the kitchen; my mom's frantic, creative pacing; Maru's light, perfect footsteps.
I was the glitch in their "Happy Family" update. I stayed in the dark, my face illuminated only by the cold blue light of my monitors. I stopped going to band sessions. Every time I looked at my keyboard, I felt an ache in my chest—the memory of the way she used to rest her head on my shoulder while I played, her breathing perfectly synced with the rhythm. It was easier to just stay offline.
The "static" was the worst part. It was a sensation that usually started around 3:00 AM. It was the sound of being forgotten, the feeling of a signal that had been cut without warning. When it got too loud, when the weight of the silence from Zuzu City felt like it was literally crushing my ribs, I needed a way to ground the current.
I didn't do it because I wanted to be dramatic. I did it because I was drowning in a feeling I couldn't name. I'd sit on the edge of my bed, the blade from my nightstand drawer feeling cold and honest against my palm. My mind felt like a constant, exhausting war—half of me screamed that this was pathetic, that I was better than this, while the other half just wanted the noise to stop.
The first time the steel met skin, it wasn't a relief; it was a shock. It was a sensation in a world that had become a blurred mess. For a few minutes, my mind was silenced by a stinging reality. I'd watch the slow crawl of the heat, focusing on the physical sting until the buzzing in my head finally dimmed. I'd pull my hoodie sleeves down, hiding the evidence from a world that wouldn't understand the physics of it anyway, and finally, I'd be able to breathe.
Under my bed, buried beneath a pile of old cables and discarded hardware, was the Archive.
It was a motherboard box filled with letters I'd never have the nerve to send. They were my only honest translations of the wreckage. Some were filled with defensive anger—hateful pages where I screamed at her for leaving, for the way she looked so happy in those Zuzu City photos, for the fact that she'd essentially deleted me from her life without a second thought.
"I hope the city is as cold as you are. I hope you find someone who looks at you the way I did, just so you can see how much it hurts when they stop."
But then there were the other ones. The ones that made my throat tight even months later.
"I found the page in my old Python manual today—the one where you drew that little ghost with the binary eyes when we were supposed to be studying. I remember how you laughed when I told you it looked like me. You said ghosts were just people who hadn't found their way home yet. I'm still sitting in the same spot, Aurora. I'm still the ghost you left behind, and I think I've forgotten the way back."
I couldn't throw them away. They were the only proof I had that the night on the pier wasn't a hallucination.
☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆
The only person who still had the clearance to enter the bunker was Sam. He'd show up after school, his skateboard clattering against the basement steps, and he'd sit in the chair at my desk as if I hadn't spent the last three weeks dodging his calls. He'd pull out a bag of cheap weed, and we'd sit in the dark, passing a joint back and forth.
"You're still stuck, aren't you?" Sam asked one afternoon. The smoke curled around his blonde hair. He didn't say it to be mean; it was just a quiet observation.
I took a long hit, the heat grounding me. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Aurora," he said. "It's been months, Seb. You're living in a tomb. You've stopped playing, you've stopped coming out... you're literally fading into the floorboards. Is she really worth the total blackout?"
"It's not a choice, Sam," I snapped, the honesty finally coming to surface. "It's like she took the remote and just pressed pause on me. I see her posts, I see her life, and I'm still here waiting for a signal that isn't coming. I still have feelings for her that I don't know where to put. They're just... rotting."
Sam looked at me with a weary, heavy kind of empathy. He reached out and kicked the wheel of my chair, a small, grounding gesture.
"I know it feels like the end of the script, man," he said quietly. "But the signal isn't dead. It's just... long distance. And if she's too blind to see what she left behind, that's on her. But I'm still here. Abigail's still here. Don't forget about the people who are actually in the room with you."
I looked at him, the smoke stinging my eyes, and for the first time in months, the "static" felt a little less deafening. "Yeah," I murmured, leaning back into the shadows. "I know."
We sat there for a long time in the quiet. I wasn't fixed, and I wasn't okay, but for one afternoon, the basement felt a little more like a home.
☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆
A year had passed since Aurora had moved out of Pelican Town. The basement smelt of cold coffee and cigarette smoke. It was nearly 3:00 AM—the hour when my head usually reached its peak. My ritual was always the same: a final, masochistic scroll through the "Zuzu City" version of Aurora.
I opened the app, my thumb moving with a practiced, muscle-memory rhythm toward her profile. I didn't even have to type the name anymore; it was the only thing my history knew. But this time, the screen didn't load the usual grid of neon-lit skylines and blurred party photos.
The spinning wheel of death circled for a few seconds, and then the screen went white.
User Not Found.
My heart didn't just drop; it felt like it stopped beating entirely, the blood in my veins turning to ice. I refreshed the page. Once. Twice. I searched the handle manually, my fingers trembling so hard I kept hitting the wrong keys.
Nothing.
I tried a secondary account. The profile was still there, but when I switched back to my main, it was a total blackout. I wasn't just being ignored anymore; I had been systematically deleted. She had clicked a button and erased the only window I had left into her world.
It wasn't just a block; it was a definitive statement. I stared at the phone until the light burned my eyes, the words User Not Found etching themselves into my brain. I had spent a year waiting for a signal, and she had finally decided to pull the plug.
I was officially offline.
After the blackout, I didn't just pull away from the group; I became a ghost.
The label of "emo kid" was a joke—a shallow, high school caricature that didn't even come close to the reality of what I was. I moved through the halls of Pelican Town High like a glitch in the background. I was a body in a black hoodie, a name on a roll sheet...
I stopped sitting at the lunch table with Sam, Abigail, and Elliot. Their laughter felt too loud, their problems—who was dating who, which band was playing at the community center—felt like they were happening in a different language. I'd spend my lunch breaks behind the woodshop or in the library, hidden in the stacks where the silence was at least honest.
"You're not even here, are you?" Abigail asked one afternoon, catching me by the lockers. She looked at me with that sharp, observant gaze that usually made me want to run. She didn't have the "pity" look yet, just a weary kind of frustration. "You're like a projection, Seb. Like you're being broadcast from a basement fifty miles away."
"Maybe I am," I muttered, not looking at her. My eyes were fixed on the floor, on the scuff marks left by a thousand people who actually had places to go.
"Well, the signal sucks," she snapped, but her voice cracked at the end. "We're trying to keep the band together. We're trying to keep you together. But it's hard when you're a ghost inhabiting your own body."
I didn't answer. I didn't have anything left to say. The distance wasn't a choice; it was a survival tactic. If I didn't connect to anyone, they couldn't delete me. If I stayed in the dark, the lights couldn't blind me.
Then there was Emily.
She was the polar opposite of Aurora. She was persistent in a way that felt aggressive, a force that refused to acknowledge the "Do Not Disturb" sign hanging around my neck.
"You look like you need a crystal, Sebastian," she said one afternoon in the library, sliding into the chair across from me without asking. She held out a piece of jagged amethyst, her blue hair a shocking contrast against the dull, brown bookshelves. "Your energy is very... grey. It's like a storm cloud that forgot how to rain."
I looked at the stone, then at her. I wanted to tell her to leave. I wanted to say that her "vibes" were a joke compared to the blackout I was living in. But as I looked at her, I felt a sudden, desperate urge to use her as a human shield.
She was effort. She was a girl who actually showed up, who didn't block me, who didn't move to Zuzu City and leave me in the dust. She was a distraction that worked because she was so loud I couldn't hear the silence from Aurora anymore.
"Sure, Emily," I murmured, taking the stone. It was cold, but the weight of it felt real. "Grey is a good color. It hides the dirt."
She laughed—a cheerful sound that made the librarian shush us—and for a second, the pressure behind my ribs eased just a fraction. I didn't love her. I knew, even as I let her walk me to the bus, that there was no "Source Code" connection between us. She was a placeholder, a way to prove that I wasn't completely invisible.
She provided the effort, and I provided the vacancy she was so determined to fill. It was a trade: she got a project, and I got a reason to stay above the surface for one more day. I let her into my orbit not because the signal was back, but because I was terrified of what would happen if the only thing I had to listen to was the static.
☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆
The basement had become a vault for everything I couldn't process in the light. By sixteen, I'd mapped every crack in the concrete floor and every hum of the server I'd built to drown out the sound of my own thoughts. I was deep into a freelance script when the basement door opened. I didn't look up. I knew the weight of Abigail's step—it was heavier today, lacking its usual "unhinged anarchist" bounce.
She sat on the edge of my desk, her shadow falling over my monitors. For a long time, she just watched the lines of code scroll by.
"I talked to her, Seb," she said. Abigail was the only one who still had a direct line.
"I don't care," I muttered, my fingers flying across the keys in a desperate attempt to stay in the logic of the program.
"You do," Abigail argued. "She's not coming back. Not really. She told me about him. His name is Josh. He's twenty, lives in a high-rise near the harbor, and he's... he's the reason for the block. He doesn't like her "valley friends", Sam and Elliot also got blocked. He's the one who made her wipe her socials, Seb. He's the one holding the leash."
The "Demon Lord". The nickname Abigail had spat out earlier felt too light for the weight of the realization. This wasn't just a boyfriend; he was a cage. I felt a surge of protective rage so violent it made my hands seize up on the keyboard. I wanted to drive to Zuzu City and rip out his throat. But right behind the anger was a bitter, toxic resentment.
She had let him. She had traded the boy on the pier—the one who gave her the moon—for a guy who treated her like a project to be managed.
"She sounds happy, in a weird, quiet way," Abigail whispered, looking at her boots. "Like she's finally found someone who tells her who to be so she doesn't have to figure it out herself."
After Abigail left, the silence attacked. The "static" in my head reached a deafening, white-noise scream of abandonment. My father was a stranger on the coast, and Aurora was a possession in a Zuzu City high-rise. I was the only one left in the wreckage.
I hated her. I hated her for leaving, for the silence on my birthday, and for letting a guy like Josh overwrite her. But I also felt her absence, a space in my chest that no amount of smoke or coding could fill.
I reached for the nightstand drawer. My movements were slow and entirely devoid of hope. I pulled out the blade, the cold steel catching the ghostly light of the monitors. I needed to feel a sensation sharp enough to cut through her betrayal.
I pushed the sleeve of my black hoodie up, exposing the pale, thin skin of my forearm. The internal war reached its peak—half of me calling myself pathetic, the other half just wanting the noise to stop. I didn't hesitate this time. I pressed the edge down, the metal biting deep and fast.
The pain was an explosion of clarity. I watched the first, slow beads of bright crimson bloom against my skin, the heat of it a shocking contrast to the chill of the basement. It wasn't a relief; it was a grounding wire. I focused on the sight of it—the raw, honest reality of my own blood—until the room stopped spinning and the "static" faded to a dull, manageable hum.
I was still sitting there, my head leaned back against the concrete wall and my arm throbbing with a grounding heat when my phone buzzed on the desk.
The sound was a digital intrusion into the tomb. I looked down, my vision slightly blurred. It was Emily.
Emily: "Seb!!! Help! I'm literally staring at this history worksheet and I think my brain is melting. Did the 1890 collapse happen because of the mines or the railroad?? Pls answer or I'm going to start interpretive dancing in the library."
It was so aggressively normal. So mundane. She was worried about a history assignment while I was sitting in the dark, covered in the evidence of my own collapse. The sheer absurdity of it—the colorful energy of a girl who cared about worksheets—snapped something inside me.
I looked at the razor on the bed, then at the glowing blue text on the screen. Emily would never understand the weight of the pier or the darkness of the basement. But she was there. She hadn't blocked me. She hadn't replaced me with a controlling asshole in the city. She was a girl who actually showed up, even if it was just to ask a stupid question about the 1890s.
I felt a wave of cold, hard resentment toward Aurora wash over me. Fine, I thought, my jaw tightening. You want the city? You want the cage? You can have it.
I reached out with my clean hand and picked up the phone. I didn't wipe the blood away yet; I made a choice—not a choice for love, but a choice for survival. I was going to let Emily's bright, noisy energy drown out the silence Aurora had left behind.
Sebastian: "It's the railroad, Emily. Read the textbook for once. I'm coming over."
I watched the "typing" bubbles appear instantly, a burst of energy on the other end. I stood up, pulling my sleeve down over the fresh, stinging heat on my arm. I wasn't okay, and the "Source Code" was still corrupted, but as I headed for the stairs, I realized that I didn't want to be a ghost anymore.
If Aurora wanted to be a memory, I'd let her. I was moving on with the girl who actually saw me, even if she was only seeing the version of me I allowed her to see. I was choosing the distraction. I was choosing to stay above the surface, even if it meant living a lie.
☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆
Sam's garage was my designated safe zone. For the last year, this was where the "static" was kept in check, buried under the low-frequency pulses of my synthesizer and the rhythmic thrum of the band.
I sat behind the keyboard, my fingers tracing the weighted keys. They felt solid, logical—unlike everything else in my life. For the last year and a half, I'd finally been running a new version of my existence. I had a routine. And I had Emily.
I had spent a little over a year building a connection with Emily. She was a prismatic explosion in a world I'd tried to turn greyscale. She didn't ask about the basement or the silence; she just filled the room with talk of crystals and the alignment of the stars, and for a long time, I let myself believe her light was enough to overwrite the original code. I was content. I'd convinced myself that the signal from the pier was dead and buried under layers of vibrant, noisy distraction.
I was messing with a new patch on the synth, a cold, atmospheric pad that felt like a winter morning in the middle of summer, while Sam and Elliot argued over a bridge transition near the drum kit. It was a normal Tuesday. The kind of day where you finally start to believe you've won the war against your own head.
Then Abigail walked in.
She didn't have her sticks, and she wasn't wearing that defiant, sharp-edged armor she usually carried. She looked like a zombie, her violet hair a contrast against the dull, grey light filtering in through the half-open garage door. She walked to the center of the concrete floor and just stood there.
"Practice is cancelled," she said. Her voice was flat, making the hair on my arms stand up.
"What? Why?" Sam asked, looking up from his guitar. "We finally got the tempo locked in, Abby. We were actually sounding like a real band for five minutes."
Abigail didn't look at Sam. She looked at me. Her eyes were dark, heavy with a weight that made the air in the garage feel almost like it was suffocating me.
"My parents just got a call from the city," she whispered. "There was an accident. A pile-up on the Zuzu City expressway. Aurora's parents... they're gone. It was a total loss."
The world didn't stop, but I felt my fingers slip off the keys, my hand hitting a dissonant chord that echoed off the garage walls like a scream. My heart hammered frantically—a jagged, visceral panic I hadn't felt since the total blackout a year ago.
"She's coming back," Abigail continued, her voice cracking. "Caroline and Pierre are taking her in. She's finishing her senior year here. She'll be back in the valley in a few weeks."
The news was almost enough to knock me over. Aurora was coming back. The girl who had deleted me, the girl who had let a "Demon Lord" hold her leash in a Zuzu City high-rise, was returning as a "survivor" to the house just across the road. The resentment I'd been nursing—the cold, hard anger at her for leaving and for the silence on my birthday—suddenly felt petty and disgusting in the face of her wreckage.
But beneath the pity, there was the fear. The absolute, soul-crushing terror of the signal returning.
"Seb?" Sam's voice was cautious, reaching out through the vacuum of the room. "You still with us?"
I looked down at my hands. They were shaking—that same tremor I thought I'd coded out of my system. I thought about Emily, who was probably at the saloon right now waiting for me with a smile and a new "healing" stone. I'd spent a year trying to overwrite the "Source Code" with a new narrative. I'd chosen the distraction. I'd chosen to be content because the alternative was a flatline.
But as I stood there in the garage, the reality of her return felt like a virus crashing the entire system. I hated her for coming back. I hated her for threatening the peace I'd bled for, and most of all, I hated the way my heart was currently trying to find her frequency again.
"I have to go," I muttered, the words tasting like ash.
I didn't wait for them to answer. I shut down the synth, the digital light fading into a dead black, and walked out of the garage. The blackout was over. The girl who had broken me was coming home, and I knew, with a terrifying certainty, that the life I'd built was about to be deleted.
𓍊𓋼𓍊𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊𓋼𓍊