They decided to go toward the light because people are stubborn and curiosity is cheaper than courage.
The convoy rolled out just before dusk, engines coughing like old men clearing phlegm. Jerren navigated by memory and a compass that no longer believed in north. The beacon's column winked intermittently on the horizon—thin as a needle, then gone, as if whoever lit it were nervous about being seen.
"Nice trap," Mira said, squinting. "Either someone's lonely, or someone wants a better kind of corpse."
"Or someone wants trade," Jerren offered, hopeful in the way old people hoard optimism like a weapon.
Kael shrugged. "Trade usually means 'bring something shiny and lose your friends.' I vote we pass."
Ashveil's voice threaded through his thoughts, amused. "You vote a lot. Democracy must be broken here."
"Shut up and be useful," Kael muttered.
They skirted the beacon, keeping a wide berth through a field of half-buried signs and rusting bus stops. The closer they drove, the less the world resembled a map and more like a confession. The beacon itself sat within a ring of broken satellite dishes, each one propped like a skeletal hand. Someone—someone careful, someone with tools that still sang—had rebuilt them into a makeshift mouth aimed at the sky.
At the center stood a person no taller than a lamppost and wrapped in strips of salvaged fabric. A halo of copper wire crowned their head; a necklace of tiny broken mirrors clinked when they moved. Their hands were steady on a wooden staff topped with what looked, from a distance, like an old radio horn.
They waved when the convoy pulled up. Not in greeting. In code—slow, offbeat, like someone tapping a rhythm into water.
"Make contact," Jerren muttered, translating the movement more by instinct than training. "Or at least don't die immediately."
Mira killed the engine. The convoy idled, lights down. The person stepped forward, and up close Kael saw their face—pale, freckled, and too young for the way their eyes measured danger.
"Name?" Mira asked, blunt as ever.
The person smiled like someone who'd practiced kindness in a mirror. "I am called Rae of the Tongue. I speak to machines and to the things machines remember." Their voice had a soft static to it, as if the words had been broadcast and caught halfway through.
Ashveil hummed, intrigued. "A translator for dead metal. How convenient."
"Why the beacon?" Kael asked.
Rae tilted their head. "The beacon listens. It learns names. It calls things that remember the pattern of light." They stepped to the edge of the dish ring and placed both hands on the lip of a broken antenna. The copper trembled under their palms like a living thing.
"Are you a Warden?" Jerren asked.
Rae laughed—a sound like wind over glass. "I am nobody's ledger. I am a translator. And sometimes a liar."
Mira did not like that answer. "We don't have time for parlor tricks. Who lights it?"
"Those who want to remember," Rae said. "Or those who can't stop themselves from being remembered."
Kael felt the shard in his jacket move, as if nudged from inside. The metal pulsed the same patient beat it had been giving since the lab. He slid a hand into his pocket and felt a heat under his thumb, a small pressure that pushed memories up into view like bubbles.
A vision came—brief, sharp: a group of technicians, white sleeves rolled, wiring the beacon into a town's grid; their hands black with soot; someone whispering a name and then pressing a switch. The memory left a taste—salt and old coffee.
He blinked and saw Rae watching him with the faintest of smiles. "It likes you," they said simply. "Metal is fond of people who remember properly. You remember."
Mira's jaw tightened. "Means enemies, then."
"Maybe allies," Rae said. "Maybe both."
They camped within the ring of dishes that night. The beacon did not so much shine as it sighed—each pulse a soft syllable. Rae explained how it worked: a lattice of tuned metal, trained to pick up the faint harmonic of living memory and broadcast it into the dark. People in the wasteland could send messages through the beacon if they had something the beacon would keep: a shard, a name, a song. The beacon would then repeat the pattern at intervals, calling others who listened.
"That's clever," Kael said, warming to the idea. "Like shouting into a well and getting an answer in Morse."
Rae chuckled. "More like listening to the well until it sings back in your mother's voice."
That night, around a ring of oil jars, Rae thumped a hollow drum and sang something that sounded like counting. The melody tugged at the edge of Kael's memory. Ashveil pressed against him, attentive as a hound.
"Why?" Kael asked later, quieter. "Why do this? Who sends messages?"
Rae's smile softened. "People who lost each other. People who gamble names for a chance to find what's left. The beacon is language for the dead and the forgetful."
A small girl from the convoy—no older than nine—walked up to Rae and pressed a scrap of paper into their hand. On it, a shaky hand had written: If anyone remembers Lysa, tell her I'm at the north ridge.
Rae kissed the scrap and tucked it into their shirt like a talisman. "We are all couriers of loss."
Kael wanted to scoff at how poetic the whole thing sounded, but the shard in his pocket pulsed and he felt a stab of something that might be truth. "Can the beacon find Sera?" he asked.
Rae's face changed for a half-second—guarded, then polite again. "It finds echoes. Echoes are not people, Kael Vorrin. They are patterns. If she left a pattern, the beacon will sing it back. If she left a silence, only silence answers."
Ashveil's voice was layered with impatience. "Test it."
They argued for an hour like people who barter with hope—practicalities first, prayers second. In the end, curiosity won. They would ask the beacon a question and listen for an answer. Rae propped their horn-laden staff against a dish and began to hum, slow and low. The dishes picked up the pitch and amplified it into the dark.
Kael placed his palm on the shard. It hummed in sympathy.
Rae sang a name. Not Sera—something simpler, a word that sounded like a knot being loosened. The beacon pulsed in agreement, then answered—thin, wavering, as if the sound had been rescued from deep water.
> "—lynn… lynn—"
The caravan fell silent. No one except Kael had used the name—no one except the girl who had written her mother's note. The shard beat faster in his hand.
"Lynn?" Jerren whispered.
Rae closed their eyes. "There. It found a pattern. It carries it like a bead on wire."
Kael tasted a memory that wasn't his: laughter and a small kitchen where rain made the house smell like coins. It lasted a heartbeat and then was gone. He wanted to say Sera, but the sound he'd opened himself to had been someone else's thread.
"Close enough," Mira muttered. "We didn't come for a scrapbook."
They tried again—Rae changed the tune, tuned the dishes to a different frequency. Kael set the shard on the horn like a key and thought of Sera—not as a phrase but as a room: her laugh, the slant of her hand, the way she drew eyes with hesitant strokes. The beacon took the thought, processed it, and gave back a note so thin Kael heard it as a memory rather than a sound.
> "—sea—ra… se—"
It wasn't clear. It wasn't perfect. But it was there—a whisper folded into the dish's sigh.
"Is that—?" Kael started.
Rae nodded slowly. "An echo. Far. Broken. But alive."
Mira exhaled a breath that might have been a laugh. "Far enough. Broken enough."
The caravan argued about whether to follow the echo. Trade routes and fuel, safety and hope were balanced like coins on a scale. In the end, they voted—half the convoy wanted to chase the sound; half wanted to keep to known roads. Kael cast his vote without thinking: yes.
Because memory pulled him like gravity now. Because Ashveil hummed a sound that felt like assent. Because the world no longer allowed him the luxury of safe choices.
They set out at first light, the beacon receding behind them like a punctuation mark. As the miles ate the horizon, Kael kept touching the shard between his fingers. Each time he did, a new flash—another vision—kissed the edge of his mind: a room full of mirrors, a man lowering a switch, someone whispering, "Remember only what helps." The flashes left questions like seeds.
That night, as they camped beside a dry riverbed, Rae sat alone with their dish staff and whispered into the horn. No one else would hear what they said. Kael heard it, anyway—a half-formed word that tasted like rain and rust.
He leaned forward. "What was that?"
Rae looked up, eyes reflective. "Names are heavy. Some answers arrive in parts. I carry tongues for the ones who cannot. Tonight, the beacon sang someone's regret. Tomorrow, it may sing their grace. We only listen."
Kael thought of Sera's sketchbook, blanked and then faintly ridged when he tilted it to the light. He thought of Lioren's vault and jars of memory pulsing like trapped fireflies. He thought of Dr. Inari's hands gone translucent, and of the shard's steady heartbeat.
Ashveil's voice, suddenly soft, almost tender: "We are learning their language."
Kael let himself laugh—a small, uneven thing that did not feel foolish. "Then let's hope their language includes maps and not riddles."
Rae smiled. "Maps are people's way of being polite to distance."
They drifted asleep under a sky that refused to offer the moon. Somewhere far away, a shape moved along the horizon—purposeful, patient. The beacon's column dimmed and brightened on its own cadence, like a throat clearing before words.
Kael dreamed that night of a room full of people whispering names into devices, and for once the whisper returned: Sera. Not clear, not complete, but a promise in the dark.
He woke with the shard in his hand and the taste of rain on his tongue. The caravan rolled on. The beacon fell behind and then was only a memory in the sky's scar.
Ahead, the road narrowed. Beyond it lay a town the old maps had crossed out neatly. The shard thrummed in his pocket like an argument waiting to be won.
He didn't know what they would find. He only knew that when the world offered a tongue, some people would choose to speak.
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