Chapter 2: Static on the Line

The room changed.

Not abruptly—no movie-style dissolve or swirl of light. It was subtler than that. One moment, Miles was sitting on the threadbare green couch; the next, the walls around him had morphed into something closer to a forgotten radio station, all dials and panels coated in dust, blinking amber lights, and one long, cracked window that looked out onto nothing at all.

Cassiel stood in the corner, fiddling with a switchboard the size of a refrigerator.

Miles circled slowly, taking it all in. “Okay… creepy studio makeover. Is this supposed to help me write?”

“Not help you write,” Cassiel muttered, flipping a few levers. “Help you listen.”

A soft hum filled the room, low and pulsing, like a warm vinyl crackle. Then came fragments—notes, voices, a verse sung off-key, a guitar being restrung, a laugh, a sob. It was like a thousand audition tapes playing all at once.

Miles clutched his head. “Too much. Too loud.”

Cassiel adjusted a dial. The sounds began to fade until only a few whispers remained—clear, full, human.

“This,” he said, “is the Frequency. The signal between souls. It picks up echoes from the living—emotions strong enough to be heard across the veil.”

Miles slowly moved toward the central console. “So I’m… eavesdropping on people’s emotions?”

“You’re tuning into the ones who are trying to be heard. Musicians. Dreamers. Anyone pushing their soul through the static. The Frequency finds those with unfinished songs—like yours.”

“And then what? I sample their pain? Mix it into my album of regrets?”

Cassiel smirked. “You harmonize. Empathize. Maybe haunt a little. But tread lightly—there’s risk.”

Miles frowned. “What kind of risk?”

“Emotional interference,” Cassiel said. “Too much empathy, and you’ll bleed into them. Become obsessed. Lost.” He turned toward Miles. “You’re a ghost, not a puppet master.”

Miles sat at the console. A single switch pulsed red beneath his hand.

He hesitated. “Do I pick someone? Or does it pick me?”

Cassiel shrugged. “Usually, the right voice calls you.”

He pressed the switch.

At first, only silence.

Then—static.

And then… music.

A soft piano chord. Barely played. Then a voice, shaking and raw.

“I wrote this for no one. I wrote this because if I didn’t, I’d stop breathing.”

Miles’s eyes widened. He recognized the melody. A fragment of a song he started a year ago, recorded half-drunk at 3AM, never finished, never released.

“Someone found it,” he whispered.

Cassiel nodded. “She’s twenty-two. Leah. College dropout. Lost her mom two months ago. Found your old SoundCloud by accident.”

The audio continued. Leah was playing his chords, but with new verses, lyrics layered in grief and hope. Her voice cracked, but the emotion held.

“She’s using my song to survive,” Miles whispered. “She’s turning it into something real.”

“Bingo,” said Cassiel.

Something in Miles lit up—a warmth he hadn’t felt since before everything went cold.

He turned to Cassiel. “Can I talk to her?”

“No. But she can feel you. You can guide her. Echo a thought. Whisper a harmony. But she has to finish the song.”

Miles looked back at the console, fingers trembling.

“I’m ready.”

Cassiel stepped back. “Careful, Carter. You’re closer to the edge than you think. Don’t fall in.”

Miles drifted forward, toward the signal, into the crackling ribbon of light between worlds. As the sounds of Leah’s voice grew clearer, so did something inside him—something he hadn’t known he’d been missing in the long stretch of empty years before his death.

Purpose.