Between the Tethered and the Lost

331 Days

The message played again.

“—waves sound like old lullabies. I think this is what I needed. To find beauty again—”

Rika stirred the coffee in her mug.

It took her another week to pull herself together. She was finally clean. Finally showered. Wearing fresh clothes. Holding a new mug she had picked up on the walk back from the convenience store. She knew it would go untouched again, growing cold on the desk. But still, she made the effort. Not for healing. Not for some breakthrough in her mental state. Just for the ritual of it. A fragile performance of progress.

All of it, just to press play on the voicemail she had ignored for almost seven days straight.

It was the fourth time this morning she’d listened to it, and it was starting to feel like mockery.

Her desk was a warzone—notes scattered like shrapnel, some barely legible, others crossed out with such force they tore the paper. Screens lit up the room with overlapping simulations and error messages. A whiteboard in the far corner was packed with equations, each boxed in red as if under surveillance. The walls hadn't been spared either—covered in pinned documents, torn blueprints, strings of red yarn zigzagging like a conspiracy map only she could read.

The once-shared apartment was a wreck. But she refused to leave.

Not yet. Not until she built something real.

She took a sip of her coffee. Warm and new, at long last. It burned her tongue a little. Good. She was still alive.

The voicemail played again.

She hadn’t deleted it. Hadn’t replied either.

Instead, she worked.

The lunar tether system wasn’t a guaranteed solution. It was a patchwork of desperation—half equations, half faith. No one else had gotten this close. No one else was foolish enough to try. The science barely held together in theory, let alone reality. She was essentially trying to create a counter-gravitational stabilizer from scavenged tech and a handful of simulations.

But it was the most viable theory on the board.

The only one she could build without waiting for the world to end.

The message buzzed back into focus.

“I wish I could explain everything better. I just… needed to breathe, Rika.”

Rika scoffed under her breath. “I was the one choking.”

She turned back to the tablet in her hand, dragging a finger across the rotating 3D model. It was ugly. Unpolished. A brute-force solution with no elegance to it.

It didn’t matter. Function came first.

She fired off another email. Professor Kimura. An old colleague. Maybe still in the field. Maybe still willing to look past everything.

Subject: URGENT — re: LTS-Prototype
Body: Need a second pair of eyes. Don’t ask about Sayo.

She hesitated. Deleted the last line. Sent it.

The message played again.

“I found a place to stay. It’s not much, but there’s something comforting about it…”

She wanted to shout.

Was this comfort really worth leaving everything behind? Worth leaving her behind? Was this what Sayo had wanted all along—to run away and find some fragile peace in a world that was actively tearing itself apart?

Rika reached for her phone. Her fingers hovered over the screen, unsure.

Typed:

I’m glad you’re comfortable, have fun there, and take lots of pictures. I’d like to see.

She stared at it. Deleted it.

Typed again:

You said you needed to breathe. Are you trying to brainwash me into thinking this is the right choice? Because it isn’t. You gave up.

Deleted that too.

Her thumb hovered over the play button again.

Why did she even keep it?

Why not just delete the message if it made her so angry?

Because it was all she had left of her. Of Sayo. Sure, the girl’s belongings are still here, but this apartment is so unrecognisable now.

Rika leaned back in her chair, the fabric creaking beneath her. Her eyes were tired. Her hands hurt. Her shoulders ached. She closed them—her eyes, not her shoulders—and let the message play once more.

“...waves sound like old lullabies.”

This time, she let it run. All the way through. She didn’t interrupt it with a scoff or a mutter. She just… sat. Breathing. Listening. The moonlight filtered through the blinds, painting pale bars across the wall.

It looked bigger tonight.

But that wasn’t a surprise.

She still hadn’t replied.

And yet, the work didn’t stop. It never did, never would.

A blinking light caught her attention—one of the simulations had finally reached the final stage. She blinked blearily at the screen. No explosion this time. No catastrophic failure. The numbers weren’t good, but they weren’t impossible either.

She opened a new window. Started sketching a redesign for the stabilizer's core module. Slimmer. Less heat leakage. A better conductor.

Time passed without her noticing. Maybe hours.

At some point, she found herself whispering aloud.

“I could’ve done all this with you, you know.”

It startled her, hearing her own voice. She didn’t speak much these days.

But she didn’t stop either.

“You could’ve stayed. We could’ve tried. But you wanted beauty.”

The word tasted like bitterness on her tongue. She thought of waves. Of lullabies. Of a world Sayo had found without her.

Her hand moved faster on the tablet, redrawing the structural supports. The lines weren’t straight. She didn’t care.

The voicemail pinged again.

She almost laughed.

She didn’t need to replay it. The words had etched themselves into her skull. Every soft sentence. Every pause. Every breath Sayo took between phrases.

Rika set the tablet down. Got up. Stretched.

She walked over to the window and pressed her forehead to the glass.

“Do you ever think about coming back?”

Her breath fogged the glass. She traced a circle in it. Just to feel like she could draw something whole.

No one answered, of course.

Only the moon.

Only the silence.

She stood there a while longer, as the simulation restarted behind her.

And in the distance, somewhere deep in her mind, the message played again.