The night air was tepid, stagnant—warm enough to cling, not warm enough to comfort. Yu still felt something brush his cheek, though, a faint touch that might have been nothing more than his own nerves. A weak draft slipped through the narrow gap in the window and stirred the dust motes drifting in the pale glow of the streetlight outside, turning the air into a slow, lazy snowfall of grit.

  He sat on his bed with his knees pulled to his chest, back pressed against the cold wall as if the chill could pin him in place. His smartphone rested in both hands. The screen was dark, not asleep—he hadn’t let it sleep—just black in that quiet way glass becomes when it reflects more than it shows. When he tilted it, the orange light from the curtains smeared across it, and his face appeared only as a vague shadow, like a stranger standing behind a window.

  The room itself looked the same as it always did, and that was part of what made it feel wrong. The curtain glow dyed everything in muted tones, turning the bookshelf into a jagged silhouette and the desk into a block of shadow with the faint suggestion of stacked notebooks. In the corner of the ceiling, the ventilation fan hummed with a thin rhythmic vibration, steady enough to become background, steady enough to feel like mockery once he listened for it. Far away, an ambulance siren rose, wavered, then faded into the distance until it became a memory of a sound.

  It was a night where nothing was happening. A night like any other. But the noise in Yu’s chest wouldn’t settle. Last night’s event—Emera’s stream—had ended wrong. Not “cliffhanger” wrong, not “technical issues” wrong, not even “the broadcaster panicked and hit the button” wrong. It had ended like a throat being cut mid-word. No warning, no crescendo, no sense that the moment had reached its natural conclusion. The video and audio had simply cut out, leaving behind that bland, generic “Stream Ended” screen, an indifferent rectangle of text that looked the same no matter what came before it.

  And yet, deep in his ears—no, deeper, branded somewhere behind hearing itself—that voice remained. Not a clean line he could replay. Not a quote he could type into a search bar. Just the shape of a sound that tightened his chest so painfully he sometimes forgot to breathe. Whose voice was it? Why did it feel like it had sunk hooks into him? The reasons were hazy, undefined, like trying to remember a dream the moment after waking.

  But one thought had hardened in his mind with terrifying clarity. In that moment… someone vanished. Social media was still buzzing with lighthearted speculation, because social media never knew how to do anything else. Yu’s thumb moved through the timeline in short, tired swipes. Posts spilled past—clips of other streams, memes, reaction threads—and then the comments, bright and careless, swarmed the gap where Emera had been.

  “There’s a theory it was all staged.” “Maybe the actress inside just retired?” “Definitely a ban for gore lol.”

  The scrolling strings of text were frivolous, irresponsible, and cruel, and the worst part was how easy it was for people to be that way when the screen protected them. Yu exhaled a dry breath as he swiped, his eyes cold. If that was “staged”… then which world is the lie? The question didn’t feel clever. It felt like a splinter driven under a nail.

  He tried to search for her anyway, because searching was something he could do with his hands, and he needed his hands to do something. He typed her name. He tried the group label. He tried keywords that had been attached to her streams for weeks. The results came back blank in a way that didn’t feel like “no matches,” but like “this concept has been deleted.”

  There was not a single trace of Emera left. Her account was gone. Not suspended, not private—gone. Her name was missing from his following list, not grayed out, not broken-link, simply absent, as if it had never been there. Even related keywords returned blank results, the search suggestions refusing to autocomplete, as if the system itself didn’t want to mouth the words. It felt like she had been forcibly scrubbed from human memory by the cold fingertips of an algorithm.

  A chill ran down Yu’s spine, clean and sharp. It felt like the system was commanding him: Forget.

  His finger hovered over the archive button out of habit, the muscle memory of a viewer who could always rewind, always confirm, always prove to himself what he’d seen. But he stopped naturally. There’s no point in looking back. Whatever had happened in that final moment, the “something” he heard just before the screen died—it wasn’t in the records anymore. It existed only inside him. It rang like tinnitus behind his eardrums, persistent and intimate, refusing to let him forget even while everything else tried to smooth the world over and move on.

  “It doesn’t matter if my voice reached her or not…” he whispered, and the words sounded too loud in the quiet room, like he was confessing to an empty witness. He stared at his own hands, at the phone nestled in them, at the faint tremor in his knuckles. His throat felt dry, his tongue thick, as if his body had decided speaking was dangerous.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “…It matters what I do next.” The moment he voiced his resolve, his smartphone vibrated. The buzz was short, sharp, and it traveled up his fingers like a warning. A single notification floated to the top of the screen.

  [Rize_channel_042: Connection Established]

  Yu frowned, the muscles in his face tightening until it ached. “? …Not ‘Live’?” Usually, it would say “Streaming Now.” Usually, there would be a red dot, a thumbnail, a viewer count—something human, something familiar. But this time, the text was different, clinical. Connection Established didn’t sound like a stream starting. It sounded like a lock clicking into place.

  He tapped without fully meaning to, and the app opened as if it had been waiting for his finger. The UI looked… wrong. The background had sunk into a pale, lifeless gray, a washed-out tone that made the white text floating on top look too sharp, too sterile. The button layout was different. The icons were smaller, their edges blurred and jagged, as if the interface had been rendered at the wrong resolution or through a bad lens. It felt as if he had wandered into a developer’s test build, a raw layer of the system he had never seen before and was never meant to touch.

  A silent timeline updated on its own, lines flickering into place without any of the normal content markers. In the notification bar, meaningless strings of code blinked and vanished before his eyes could focus, leaving only the afterimage of symbols like scratches on glass. Yu’s grip tightened until the phone creaked faintly in its case. …What is this?

  Fighting the rising unease, he tapped the EWS icon.

  The viewing page opened to a stark white screen. There was no “Loading” circle. No buffering animation. No gentle transition. Just an inorganic, empty void spreading across the display, bright enough to make his eyes water. It felt less like a page and more like a blank wall shoved in front of him.

  “…I’ve never seen a display like this before…” The moment he muttered those words, the screen automatically went black. Yu flinched, then cursed himself for flinching, then flinched again when his own heartbeat slammed hard enough to make his hands shake. He gripped the phone tighter, as if holding it could keep whatever was happening contained. Immediately, the front camera activated for a split second. No image appeared, but the lens icon flashed briefly in the darkness before vanishing, like a blink in a room with no eyes.

  In its place, small, glitchy text floated at the edge of the screen.

  –Gaze Direction: Unsynced–

  –cache_sync/err–

  The text wasn’t stylized. It wasn’t themed. It looked like a diagnostic overlay, something meant for engineers, not viewers. Yu’s mouth went dry so fast it felt like his tongue was sticking to his teeth. “Gaze direction?” he whispered, and the word came out brittle. He realized, with a slow, ugly awareness, that he was holding his breath.

  Then sound leaked from the speaker.

  It wasn’t the noise of the city. It wasn’t a system notification, no chime, no buzz, no friendly tone. It sounded like wind—soft, close, as if someone were whispering right by his ear—but undeniably blowing from “the other side.” Not the weak draft from his window. Not the ventilation fan. This wind had depth to it, a hollow quality that made his skin prickle. It was the sound of air moving through a place that wasn’t his room.

  Yu’s heart pounded violently. The thud of it filled his ears until it threatened to drown everything else, and yet the wind sound slipped between the beats, persistent, intimate, wrong. His throat went dry, and when he swallowed, it felt like sandpaper.

  The image of the girl walking in the grasslands rose behind his eyes without permission. Rize’s figure, small against a wide sky, cape frayed at the edges, boots kicking through pale grass. Then the battle in the ruined village—stone walls cracked, dust rising with every strike, her ragged breathing audible even through a stream. Then the quiet of the cave at night, the darkness pressing close, the faint light of embers, the sense of a world that didn’t have to care whether you made it to morning. Fragments of scenes he had watched through the screen flooded his mind like a wave of cold water.

  The not-knowing had lived in him long enough to become a physical ache. But Emera's disappearance had changed its shape. It wasn't ambiguity anymore. It was urgency. People didn't simply get erased like files—or they did, and that was the part he couldn't accept.

  Yu’s chest tightened until his breath stuttered. Was she still alive in that world? Or would she vanish suddenly, just like Emera? The question didn’t feel like drama. It felt like standing in front of a door and realizing the room behind it might already be empty. He shifted forward without meaning to, elbows pressing into his knees, phone lifted closer as if proximity could make a difference. The glass was cool under his fingers, too cool for something he’d been holding this long.

  The wind sound continued, faint and steady, threading through the silence of his room in a way that made his skin crawl. He could hear the ventilation fan above, could hear the distant city, and yet this wind didn’t belong to either. It belonged to somewhere else.

  “…Rize. Please, hear me.” Yu’s lips parted. His voice came out thin, like he was afraid the wrong volume might snap something fragile.

  As he whispered the prayer, the screen shifted. The blackness didn’t simply change color—it moved, as if it were a surface being disturbed from beneath. The diagnostic text flickered at the edge, then blurred, then vanished. The wind sound sharpened for a heartbeat, close enough to raise gooseflesh along his arms. Yu froze, eyes unblinking, breath caught halfway in his throat, as the darkness on the display began to reorganize into something that was no longer just a screen.