The message tower stood half-submerged in the water, its skeletal frame jutting from the river like the ribs of something long dead. But somehow, it still hummed.
Theo stared up at the metal ruin, the faint vibration of an old broadcast pulse whispering beneath his feet. It wasn't the Warden frequency. This signal carried irregularities—flickers in the wavelength like stuttered heartbeats. Human. Hand-coded.
Alive.
Ayen scanned the perimeter with her phase-blade drawn. "Doesn't make sense. Wardens gutted all open channels weeks ago."
"Unless someone reactivated a ghost line," Theo murmured, pulling the receiver from his coat. He ran his thumb along the old band dial, fingers moving with muscle memory. The dial clicked, hesitated, then locked into a stream.
Static gave way to sound.
"…If you hear this, you're not alone. We're still here. West node seven. We've held it. The Seer didn't see everything."
Theo's breath caught.
Ayen turned sharply. "That voice—was that…?"
"Rell," Theo said, chest tight. "He made it."
The transmission looped, shorter this time. Just a single phrase.
"We remember. We remember. We remem—"
Ayen stepped forward, hand hovering near the receiver. "That's a memory code loop. It's not just a callout—it's a location key."
Theo's fingers danced across the reader, translating the modulation frequency. "He's masking the coordinates in the repetition. Smart. It's buried in the timing."
Within moments, the data decrypted: a hidden bunker in the ruins of an old university district, just past the outer ring of Silver Crown.
Theo looked up. "We need to go. Now."
Ayen frowned. "You think he has more than just a beacon running?"
"If Rell survived the Seer, he's not just broadcasting. He's building something. Or protecting something."
They moved fast. The night crept in around them, cold and sharp. But Theo felt it—something shifting in the dark. A current threading through the stillness.
Not hope, exactly. But something close.
They reached the university ruins by dawn. The remains of a collapsed lecture hall marked the edge of the district, its once-glass dome shattered and buried under layers of soil and moss. A burned-out shuttle sat nearby, its fuselage gutted but strangely untouched by scavengers.
A good sign.
Theo knelt beside it, tracing a glyph carved into the frame. "This was Rell's symbol. He left it for us."
Ayen tapped a sequence into her blade hilt and projected a scanning grid. A doorframe flickered to life beneath the rubble.
Theo activated his field tool. "Help me dig."
It took an hour, but eventually the debris gave way to a set of reinforced steps descending into darkness.
Theo went first, heartbeat quickening. At the bottom was a sealed hatch, fingerprint-coded and voice-locked.
He pressed his hand to the scanner. "Theo Marlowe. Requesting access."
Silence.
Then: a whirr.
The door clicked open.
The bunker was small—half the size of a transport bay—but alive. Screens flickered. Data walls pulsed faintly. And at the far end, hunched over a console, was Rell.
Alive.
He turned slowly, eyes bloodshot and rimmed with exhaustion. But when he saw Theo, something broke across his face. Not a smile. Something more like disbelief made real.
"You actually made it," Rell whispered. "I thought the Seer…"
Theo crossed the space in two strides, gripping Rell's arm like it anchored the world. "They didn't see everything. You did that. You bought us time."
Ayen stepped in behind him, letting the hatch seal with a soft thud. "So what is this place?"
Rell gestured to the console. "A memory vault. I built it from salvaged core stacks and a pre-collapse satellite mirror node. It's not just storing info—it's projecting it. Across survivor channels. Whispering the truth into cracks."
Theo looked at the code walls, pulsing with timelines, faces, places lost. "You've been archiving the lost."
"I've been reminding people," Rell said. "That they didn't imagine it. That what happened to them was real."
Theo felt the weight in his chest crack open. Not with sorrow. With the quiet beginnings of belief.
"You've kept the story alive," he said.
"No," Rell replied. "I've been waiting for the next chapter. For you."
And in that silence that followed—heavy with everything left to do, to repair, to fight—Theo realized something he hadn't in a long time.
They weren't the last to remember.
They were the first to begin again.