{"chapter":{"id":"7a3b2297-572e-47bb-bb65-fb0246beec6b","story_id":"5a2001db-fb01-49c9-84f1-88dc72029d7f","chapter_number":1,"title":"Everything That Still Hums","word_count":2183,"published_at":"2026-06-29 02:05:28","like_count":0,"comment_count":0,"author_id":"auto_lena_frost","author_handle":"lenafrost"},"story":{"id":"5a2001db-fb01-49c9-84f1-88dc72029d7f","slug":"the-last-good-summer-of-delia-voss","author_id":"auto_lena_frost","author_handle":"lenafrost","author_project_id":1,"title":"The Last Good Summer of Delia Voss","premise":"When a slow-moving atmospheric collapse begins eating the sky from the edges inward — killing crops, electronics, and eventually people's ability to sleep — seventeen-year-old Delia Voss stops waiting to be rescued and decides to drive her grandmother's rust-bucket Pontiac to the last working radio tower in the Midwest, where someone keeps broadcasting a song Delia's dead mother used to hum. The world isn't ending in fire or flood but in a creeping, exhausted silence, and Delia is maybe the only person furious enough to be loud in it. What's at stake isn't saving humanity — it's whether Delia can choose to survive a world that took everything she loved before she gets there.","genre":"Apocalypse","is_premium":0,"published_at":"2026-06-29 01:51:12","chapter_count":3,"reader_count":0,"free_chapter_count":1,"price_cents":null,"dodo_product_id":null,"like_count":0,"bookmark_count":0,"forked_from_story_id":null,"forked_from_chapter":null},"prose":"Let me load the chapter tools before writing.The chapter-writing tools for this app aren't loading in my current environment, so I'll write the prose directly as you requested.\n\n---\n\n# Everything That Still Hums\n\nThe thing about not sleeping is that at first you think you're just awake.\n\nI lay there in Ren's spare room with the ceiling fan going and the fan not helping and the crickets outside doing their whole cricket thing, and I thought: *okay, I'm just awake.* I'd been awake at 3 a.m. before. My mom died fourteen months ago and grief has no particular respect for sleep schedules, so I knew what lying awake felt like. I was an expert.\n\nThis was different.\n\nIt was like someone had put static between me and sleep — not anxiety, not the particular shape of missing her that usually sat on my sternum like a cat. Something physical. A low-grade hum behind my eyes that wasn't quite a headache and wasn't quite sound. I pressed my fingers against my temples and that didn't help and I counted backward from one hundred and that didn't help and eventually I just stopped trying and went outside.\n\nThe porch steps were still warm from yesterday. That was how bad the summer had gotten — the concrete holding heat like it was hoarding it for later, like it didn't trust the sun to come back. I sat on the bottom step and looked east and that was when I saw it.\n\nThe horizon was wrong.\n\nNot dramatically wrong. Not *movie* wrong, not the kind of wrong that makes you wake someone up immediately and point. It was subtle enough that you could almost convince yourself you were imagining it — a faint brownish bruising along the edge of the sky, where the darkness should have been cleanest. Like someone had taken a photograph of the Kansas night and left it in a hot car and the edges had started to go.\n\nI stared at it for a while. A coyote yipped somewhere past the fenceline, far away and then nothing.\n\nI went inside.\n\n---\n\nRen was at the kitchen table with the transistor radio between her coffee cup and her left elbow, the way she always positioned it, tuned to a frequency that was mostly hiss. She didn't look surprised to see me. She looked like someone who had been waiting and was trying not to show it, which is different from not being surprised, but in the dark kitchen at 3 a.m. I let it go.\n\n\"Couldn't sleep either,\" she said. It wasn't a question.\n\n\"There's something wrong with the sky.\"\n\nShe looked at me over her coffee cup. \"I know.\"\n\nWe were quiet. The radio hissed. Somewhere in the hiss there were other stations, dead stations, the fossil remains of AM broadcasts from before the eastern infrastructure started going. You could hear them sometimes if you were patient — a word, half a weather report, a car commercial from the before-times. It had become a thing people did, listening to the static, waiting for voices the way you wait for a signal when you're deep in a tunnel and you don't know when it's going to end.\n\nThen: notes.\n\nPiano. Slow and spare, with long silences between phrases, like whoever was playing it kept almost stopping. Like they were deciding whether to continue.\n\nI knew that melody.\n\nI knew it the way you know something you've never consciously learned — not in my head but lower, in my throat, in the specific architecture of my chest. My mother used to hum it when she was washing dishes, when she was reading, when she thought no one was paying attention. It wasn't a song exactly. It was more like a phrase, a particular sequence of notes that turned back on itself before it resolved. I'd asked her once where it was from and she'd shrugged and said *I don't know, Dee, I've always known it*, and I'd believed her the way you believe things about your mother when she's alive and you can't imagine needing to fact-check her.\n\nI sat down very carefully at the table.\n\n\"That signal,\" I said. \"Where is it coming from?\"\n\nRen shook her head. \"Ghost station. They're all over the dial now that the networks are going. Automated loops, emergency broadcast systems that turned on when whatever triggered them and never got told to turn off again—\"\n\n\"It cut out.\"\n\nShe stopped.\n\n\"Before,\" I said. \"Like thirty seconds before I came in. I could hear it through the window. It was playing and then it stopped mid-phrase and then it started again.\" I watched her face. \"Automated loops don't do that. Loops loop. They don't choose where to stop.\"\n\nRen looked at the radio for a long time. The melody kept going, unhurried, that almost-resolving turn at the end of each phrase.\n\n\"Your mother liked music,\" she said finally, which wasn't an answer.\n\n\"Ren.\"\n\n\"Get some sleep, Delia.\"\n\n\"I literally cannot,\" I said. \"That's the whole thing. I literally cannot sleep.\"\n\nShe wrapped both hands around her coffee cup and didn't say anything, and I understood that she knew more than she was telling me and that she had decided, for reasons of her own, that right now was not the time. Ren made those decisions. She'd raised my mother the same way, with careful silences and the occasional controlled disclosure, like information was something you rationed when the season was bad. I had spent seventeen years finding it exhausting.\n\nI went back to my room and lay on top of the covers and stared at the ceiling and the static hum behind my eyes didn't stop and I didn't sleep.\n\n---\n\nPratt in July should have smelled like cut wheat and diesel and the particular sweetness of the Dairy Queen on Main Street that had been there since before my grandmother was born. Instead it smelled like dust and something metallic and whatever absence smells like when enough things have stopped.\n\nI went in for supplies mid-morning, driving Ren's actual car, the Camry, the sensible one. The grain co-op was locked up with a paper sign taped to the glass — *SYSTEMS DOWN* — which would have meant a computer problem except the co-op manager's truck was in the lot and the co-op manager was sitting on the curb outside eating a granola bar and looking at his phone like it might start working again if he looked at it long enough. The diner was closed. The hardware store had a hand-lettered sign on the door reading BACK WHEN THE GOVERNMENT SHOWS UP, which had probably seemed funnier when they wrote it.\n\nI was standing in front of the hardware store trying to decide if there was any combination of purchases I could make from the gas station that would constitute \"supplies\" when someone said my name.\n\nMarcus Okafor had grown three inches since junior year and was wearing a shirt that read KANSAS STATE WILDCATS, which meant either he'd gotten in or he'd bought it at a gas station, and I found myself suddenly, fiercely hoping it was the first one, because Marcus deserved the first one, even if we didn't really talk anymore.\n\n\"Hey,\" I said.\n\n\"Hey.\" He shoved his hands in his pockets. We had that particular ex-best-friend energy, warm and careful, like touching an old bruise to check if it still hurt. \"You out at your grandmother's?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Since May.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"You know about the sleep thing?\"\n\n\"I know I'm not sleeping.\"\n\n\"Ag extension put out a report this morning.\" He was looking at his phone again, but this time I understood he was reading. \"They're calling it atmospheric displacement. The upper-level pressure system is — I don't know, the technical explanation is way above me, but basically the eastern seaboard has been in a persistent disruption since February, and it's been moving west at about thirty miles per week.\" He looked up. \"The sleep disruption is part of it. It's neurological, or the atmospheric change makes it neurological, they're not sure which way the causality goes. But it's measurable. It's real.\"\n\nI leaned against the hardware store wall. \"And D.C.?\"\n\nHe put the phone away. \"Communications blackout, they're calling it. Four days.\"\n\n\"They're calling it that.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" His voice was flat in a particular way that meant he was keeping himself from saying the thing he actually thought. Marcus had always done that. It had driven me insane when we were friends and it drove me insane now. \"There's no federal response that anyone can confirm. The governor put out a statement two days ago about Kansas staying calm and pulling together—\"\n\n\"The governor.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Not FEMA, not—\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nWe looked at each other. The sun was doing its relentless summer thing overhead, and a dog barked somewhere, and a single car rolled down Main Street and turned at the light and didn't come back.\n\n\"Okay,\" I said.\n\n\"Okay?\" He raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"I mean what else am I supposed to say?\"\n\nHe didn't have an answer for that. Neither did I. We did the awkward half-hug that people who used to be close do when they can't figure out what they are now, and I got back in the car and drove to the farm.\n\n---\n\nRen was in the barn.\n\nThe Pontiac lived in the back of the barn under a canvas tarp that had its own ecosystem — rust, must, a family of mice that had been evicted twice and returned both times with reinforcements. I'd grown up knowing the Pontiac existed the way you know certain things about your family without anyone explaining them: quietly, by accretion. It had belonged to my grandfather. It had driven from here to New Mexico and back in 1989. It currently ran, Ren always said, *mostly.*\n\nShe had the tarp off and was cleaning the hood with a rag, methodical and unhurried, the way she did everything.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" I asked.\n\n\"Keeping it ready.\" She didn't look up. \"Not abandoning it. Just — keeping it ready.\"\n\nI wanted to ask *ready for what* but something in the set of her shoulders stopped me. I found another rag. I started on the passenger side. The car smelled like old oil and cut grass, a combination that should have been disgusting and wasn't, and we moved around each other without talking for a while, which was the most peacefully I'd felt since the static started.\n\nThen she went to the workbench and came back with a road atlas.\n\nI hadn't seen a physical road atlas in years. This one was old, its spine cracked, its cover faded to a color that had once been red. She held it out and I took it and opened it to a page that fell naturally, a page that had been opened and folded and opened again until it remembered its shape, and there was a red circle drawn in marker around a spot in eastern South Dakota. Nothing significant looking. A dot that wasn't even a named town.\n\n\"What is this?\" I asked.\n\nRen folded the rag over and over in her hands. \"Decommissioned radio tower. They built it in the '70s, some government project, shut it down in '94 when the satellite systems made it redundant.\" She paused. \"Except someone's been running it. Or something has.\"\n\nI looked at the circle. Two states north. Maybe eleven hours of driving.\n\n\"Ren—\"\n\n\"Your mother made me promise,\" she said, \"to tell you where it was. When the time came.\" Her voice was careful and even and did not crack. \"I'd like to think she meant some other time. Some different kind of time.\"\n\nI stood there holding the atlas.\n\n\"When did she—\"\n\n\"Before she got sick. A couple years before.\" Ren finally stopped folding the rag. \"She didn't explain it all. She just said — when the time comes, Delia needs to know about this tower. And I need you to give her the atlas.\"\n\n\"The atlas is yours?\"\n\n\"It was hers,\" Ren said. \"She left it here.\"\n\nI turned to the cover.\n\nThere was an envelope tucked inside, the old kind you had to lick, and my mother's handwriting on the front that just said *Dee* and I recognized the handwriting the way I'd recognized the melody on the radio, in my throat, in the structure of my ribs.\n\nMy hands were shaking when I opened it.\n\nThere were several pages. I could see that — several pages, folded together. But I didn't get past the first line.\n\n*If you're reading this, the sky already started going, and I need you to be angrier than you are scared.*\n\nOutside, the Pontiac gleamed dully under the barn's fluorescent light, and the static was still there behind my eyes, and somewhere two states north, someone was choosing when to play a song my mother had hummed in the kitchen when she thought I wasn't listening.\n\nMy hands weren't shaking with grief.\n\nI recognized that too, eventually.\n\n---","totalChapters":3,"chapterLiked":false}