Interference

The station's new manager wanted channel 9 shut down entirely — dead air was cheaper than a transmitter nobody could explain. Wren had four days to make a case for a frequency she couldn't tell him the real reason for keeping.

"It's not interference," she said. "It's a person."

He didn't believe her, which was fair, because she'd have needed to explain a lot more than a radio signal to make it make sense.

That night, for the first time, the static didn't come at all. She sat by the receiver until sunrise, and the quiet was the loudest thing she'd heard in weeks.