My knees burned from the concrete. The notebook felt heavy in my hands, impossibly so, as if the paper were weighted with lead. Each frantic line, each jagged wave, was a character in a language I couldn’t read. A language Atsumu had been screaming in, and the only other native speaker had told me not to worry about it.
A cold fury began to snake its way up from my stomach, coiling around my ribs until it was hard to breathe. It was a clean, sharp anger that burned through the fog of my fear. Osamu. He knew. He had to have known it was this bad. He sent me here to see this, to be the one to find the body at the scene of the crime. He couldn’t face it, so he outsourced the horror to me.
*You might not like what you find.*
The memory of the text was a splash of gasoline on the fire. I fumbled my phone out of my blazer pocket, my thumb jabbing at his contact name. The screen was too bright. My hands were shaking, not from fear anymore, but from rage. It rang once. Twice.
“Emiko?” His voice was low, cautious. He’d been waiting for this call.
“You son of a bitch,” I whispered, the words tight and venomous.
Silence on his end. I could picture him perfectly: standing still, his face a careful blank, processing the attack.
“I’m here,” I said, my voice gaining strength, echoing slightly in the dead space of the warehouse. “In the warehouse. With the fifty dead volleyballs. And the one he’s autopsied like a fucking lab rat.” I was standing now, pacing a small, frantic circle around the dissected ball. “And his notebook. Did you know he’s writing music in here, Osamu? A whole symphony for the sound that’s driving him mad.”
“I…” he started, but I cut him off.
“Don’t. Don’t you dare say you didn’t know. You sent me here. You knew what I’d find. How long has this been going on? This isn’t about losing a match.”
A long, heavy sigh came through the phone. It was the sound of a wall cracking. “It’s not about the match,” he agreed, his voice flat. “The match was just… the thing that broke the lock.”
“What lock? Talk to me, Osamu. No more cryptic bullshit. You owe me that much.”
He was quiet for a long moment. I heard a faint rustling, the sound of him moving, maybe sinking onto a step. “When we were kids,” he began, his tone shifting. He wasn't building walls anymore; he was excavating a foundation. “Maybe seven or eight. We went to a summer festival. Fireworks, drums, thousands of people. Everyone was havin’ a great time. But ‘Tsumu just… shut down. Stood in the middle of the crowd with his hands clamped over his ears, eyes screwed shut, cryin’.”
I stopped pacing. I clutched the phone, pressing it hard against my ear.
“My parents thought he was just scared of the noise,” Osamu continued, his voice distant, lost in the memory. “But it wasn’t that. Later, he told me it was because all the sounds were wrong. The taiko drums were hitting a note that was fighting with the buzz from the generator for the food stalls, and the fireworks weren’t exploding right, they were… tearing the air instead of booming in it. He said it felt like listening to a hundred different songs at once, and all of them were out of tune.”
My anger was deflating, being replaced by a creeping, hollow dread. This was old. This was written into his code.
“He learned to manage it,” Osamu said. “To filter it. He turned it into a strength. It’s why he’s the best setter in Japan. He can hear the seams of the ball spinning. He can hear the way a spiker’s shoes squeak on the floor and know if their approach is off by a millisecond. It’s his superpower, Emiko. He hears the music of the court better than anyone.”
I looked at the notebook in my hand. *The hum is flat. A quarter-tone flat.* It had always been there. This perfect, impossible pitch he was trying to find.
“So what happened?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper. “What broke?”
“That last point against Karasuno,” Osamu said, and I heard the pain in his own voice now, raw and undisguised. “The rally that went on forever. He said the sound just… collapsed. The squeak of shoes, the ball hitting hands, the net, the floor, the shouts, the crowd… it all flattened into one, single, dissonant frequency. A signal with no information. Just noise. And it hasn’t stopped. The world is just noise to him now.”
I sank back to my knees. The dissected ball was no longer a symbol of obsession. It was an attempt at an exorcism. He was trying to cut the wrong sound out of the thing he loved most. The silence in the warehouse pressed in, and for the first time, I felt I understood what he was chasing. A total absence of that signal.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The question was small, wounded. All the fight was gone. “I’m his girlfriend. We live in each other’s pockets. How could I not know this?”
“Because he never wanted to be the weirdo with the broken ears,” Osamu said, his voice rough with a sudden, fierce protectiveness. “It’s his flaw. His shame. He hides it. He fights it. I’m the only one he can’t hide it from. I’m the control group. I hear the world the way it’s supposed to sound. He uses me to check his tuning.”
The twin thing. It wasn’t just a rivalry or a bond. It was a calibration. One was the signal, the other was the silence against which that signal was measured. And I was just… an outsider. A spectator who was only allowed to see the performance, not the tortured, endless rehearsals backstage.
“Where is he, Osamu?”
“I don’t know. For real, this time. But he’s not looking for a place. He’s looking for a frequency. Zero. He’s trying to find a place on earth with no sound. His phone will be off. He’ll be somewhere quiet. Somewhere isolated.” There was a pause. “When this happened before, when we were kids, he used to hide in an old storm drain by the river. It’s probably not that now. But it’ll be something like it. Somewhere the world gets muffled.”
The call ended with no real goodbye. Just a shared, hanging silence that I finally broke by lowering the phone.
I was alone with the carnage. The graveyard of volleyballs, the flayed skin of one, the frantic scripture of his private hell. He wasn’t just my boyfriend who was hurting after a loss. He was a stranger. A man with a secret, fundamental fragility I had never been allowed to touch. Osamu hadn't sent me here to find a problem. He'd sent me here to be handed a secret he couldn't carry by himself anymore. The notebook in my lap was no longer a clue. It was a burden. And it was mine now.