Chapter Text
The last thing Ena ever sent me was a corrupted file.
It arrived at 2:17 am, a silent data packet in the dead of night. My phone lit up the dark of my room—a notification from nightcord. I’d been half-asleep, scrolling mindlessly, waiting for a message that hadn’t come. And there it was. An audio file, titled vocal_take_3_bad.emoji. No text. Just the file.
Typical Ena. Sending her raw, vulnerable work with a joking filename, pretending it didn’t matter.
I plugged in my good headphones. The world shrank to the space inside the cups. The first forty-one seconds were pure ena—a little rough, a little raw, charged with that frustrated passion she got when a take wasn’t perfect but had the right feeling. I could picture her, brow furrowed, leaning too close to the mic.
Then, at the forty-second mark, her voice cut out.
It wasn’t a pause. It was an erasure. One second of perfect, absolute digital silence. And in that silence, a sound bloomed.
A single piano note. It was clear, cold, and utterly alone. It hung in the void where her voice had been, resonant and final, like a door closing in an empty house. It was a note that wasn’t in the song’s key. A note that had never been in any of our sessions.
A shiver, sharp and electric, went down my spine. The hair on my arms stood up.
Then, as abruptly as it had vanished, Ena’s voice rushed back in, mid-word, as if nothing had happened. The rest of the track played out normally.
I sat in the dark, the note still ringing in my skull. My heart was doing a strange, stuttering rhythm. I tapped my phone screen awake, my thumbs moving on autopilot.
to: enanan
lol, your file’s haunted. ghost in the machine :)
sounded good though. the feeling’s there.
I hit send. The message showed delivered. I watched it, waiting for the seen to appear. For the little typing bubbles to dance.
They didn’t.
The clock ticked over to 2:23 am. The silence in my room felt heavier, charged. I played the file again, just that one second. Silence. The note. Return. It was a glitch. It had to be. A weird encoding error, a buffer problem. A ghost in the machine. I laughed at my own joke, the sound thin in the quiet.
But the note didn’t feel like a mistake. It felt like a message.
She came online an hour later. Her status blinked to active. My heart did a stupid little flip. The typing bubbles appeared, then vanished. Appeared again. Finally, her message.
from: enanan
its not haunted its just bad.
why are you still up.
to: enanan
artist’s hours! you know this. why are you up?
can’t sleep unless you’ve properly criticized my life choices?
The call request came through seconds later. I accepted, and her face filled my screen, lit by the cool blue glow of her monitor. She looked tired, the usual defiant set of her jaw softened by shadows.
“You’re one to talk about life choices,” she said, her voice scratchy with sleep and irritation. “You disappeared after practice again. Mafuyu asked where you went.”
“Ah, you know. Places to be, people to haunt.” I aimed for my usual breezy tone. It landed flat.
“Don’t do that.” her eyes narrowed. “Don’t just deflect. We were supposed to talk about the mv storyboard tonight. You said you had ideas.”
I had. I’d also had a looming, formless dread about making those ideas real, about having them seen and judged. So I’d vanished. “Got caught up,” I murmured, tracing a pattern on my bedsheet.
“You always get ‘caught up’ when it’s something important.” the frustration in her voice was familiar, a well-worn groove in our conversations. It was usually followed by my cheerful evasion, her exasperated sigh, and then the mutual, unspoken agreement to move on.
Tonight, it felt different. The strange note was still a cold weight in my stomach.
“It is important to me, ena,” I said, and the lack of a performative lilt in my voice made her pause.
“Then act like it.” she looked away from the camera, at something on her screen. “Sometimes it feels like you’re not really here. You’re just… a very good profile picture.”
The words hit with a physical precision. She’d never put it quite that way before. A profile picture. A carefully constructed image. A ghost.
“I’m right here,” I said, but it sounded weak, even to me.
“Are you?” she finally looked back. Her gaze was too direct, too seeing. It was the look she got when she was trying to capture a difficult shade in a painting—unblinking, wholly focused. “Or are you just waiting for this conversation to be over?”
I had no good answer. The silence stretched, filled only with the faint digital hum of the call.
“Forget it,” she finally said, the fight draining out of her, replaced by something worse: disappointment. “I’m going to bed. Don’t stay up too late… haunting.”
“Ena, wait—”
But the call disconnected. Her status flickered back to offline.
I was left with the silence and the echo of that piano note. I drafted three different messages.
sorry.
you’re right.
the idea i had was about a ghost who forgets they’re dead.
I deleted them all.
The next day passed in a blur of half-finished tasks and the constant, low-grade hum of anxiety. The note played on a loop in the back of my mind. I sketched aimlessly, my lines shaky. I scrolled through our old messages, looking for… something. A sign I hadn’t been a complete ghost.
By evening, the need to hear her voice—the real one, not the glitched recording—was a physical ache. I opened nightcord. She was offline. I stared at the last, unresolved fight hanging in our digital space. I clicked on the corrupted file again.
Silence. The note. Return.
Silence. The note. Return.
It was a tiny pocket of wrongness in our world. A one-second rift.
My phone rang, shattering the repetition. An unknown number. A Tokyo area code. My breath caught. Nobody called. We texted. We messaged. We called on scheduled apps.
“Hello?” my voice was barely a whisper.
“Is this Akiyama Mizuki?” a man’s voice, older, strained.
“Yes.”
“This is Shinonome, Ena’s father.” a pause, thick and terrible. “There’s been an accident.”
The world didn’t go dark. It went silent. The kind of silence that comes after a catastrophic sound. All the background noise of my life—the distant traffic, the hum of my pc, the beat of my own heart—vanished. I was floating in that one second of dead air from her file.
“She’s alive.” the words came from far away. “She’s at Tokyo Metropolitan hospital. She’s… she’s not awake.”
I don’t remember what I said. I don’t remember hanging up. I remember the cold of the floor under my knees. I remember my phone, dark and silent in my hand.
I remember the note. That cold, alone, final piano note.
It hadn’t been a glitch.
It had been an echo. And it was all that was left.