The Signal 1

Prologue: The Arrival and Chapter 1: The Rebels, Utah Territory

The code on Rei’s screen hadn’t changed in three minutes. She knew this because she had been watching it the way you watch something you no longer trust to work correctly, like a flimsy shelf that’s been holding up too many potted plants for too many years.

Her coffee had gone cold beside the keyboard and somewhere behind her, Davan was moving quietly between the camp stove and the shelf. The scent of whatever he was making moved through the bunker like a neighborhood rumor as the light strung along the equipment racks created the color of late afternoon, though it was always that color in this bunker, the bulbs making no distinction between morning and night, between eleven days ago and now.

She was reaching for the coffee, already knowing it was cold, when the lights flickered off. She looked at the generators. It was not a power failure but a subtle disturbance — a single pulse, a blink, as if the bunker itself flinched. The equipment racks started humming at a frequency she had never heard before. The volume swelled in seconds, filling the bunker floor to ceiling until there was nowhere for it to go. Liora felt it in her gut. And then, it all went silent, and every person in the room stopped what they were doing.

Davan’s spoon rested against the edge of his coffee cup. Rei’s fingers lifted from the keyboard. The air tasted of something she could not identify, metallic and clean and very ancient, the way certain stones smell when you split them open.

The machines once again hummed a familiar tone and returned to their usual register. The lights held steady. Nobody spoke. Nobody looked at anyone else. They just stood in the uneasy stillness of people waiting to find out whether what just happened was real.

On Rei’s center monitor, a dot appeared that had not been there a moment before. A small, glowing speck of light, right there, in the middle of her screen, uninvited and waiting to be seen.

Chapter 1: The Rebels, Utah Territory, 11 Days After

The bunker was cut into the side of the Wasatch Mountains sometime in the previous century by people who believed the world was going to end in a predictable way. They were wrong about the specifics. They were not wrong about the end of the world.

Davan cooked. He also kept the med kit inventoried with the same attention he gave the provisions, and in a cell of nine people he spent a great deal of time hoping the second shelf would never outrank the first.

The “kitchenette” was a two-burner propane camp stove propped up on cinder blocks, a small refrigeration unit that groaned intermittently, and a shelf of provisions that Davan managed with the focus of a Michelin-starred chef. Whatever he made from the leftover food stock always tasted better than its occasionally questionable ingredients.

Three weeks in the bunker had taught Davan a new way to exist in the room. The ceiling sat at exactly the wrong height — not low enough to force a full crouch, but just low enough that standing straight meant a constant dull ache at the base of his skull. He moved, folded slightly at the neck and shoulders, as if perpetually about to say something he’d thought better of.

The bunker was raw concrete, the color of old snow, and sweating slightly in the cold. Someone had strung lights — warm Edison bulbs on a wire looped between the equipment racks — that in a different life might have looked festive. Here, they looked like the forgotten last lights of a party after everyone had gone. Which, in a way, they had.

He went outside.

From the precarious balcony, Davan saw that the Salt Lake Valley had vanished completely under a thick, grey inversion cloud. But the sky up here was a hard, merciless blue that made the valley’s grey look almost warm by comparison.

Liora had visited the balcony twice since the event. She shivered, looking down at the grey where the valley used to be. The valley, where she and mst of the team were from. The valley where Yael died. And down there, somewhere beneath the clouds, that street was still there, the street where eleven days ago the blitzkrieg of Oppressor vehicles ended what she, Yael, and the rest had spent four years building together.

There were nine of them in the bunker now. There once were twelve, but now they were nine, and nobody talked about that directly, the way you don’t talk about a crack in a structural wall you’re depending on not to collapse.

In the far corner, Rei ran the communications array from a setup she assembled herself from a combination of salvage and pure obstinacy. Multiple monitors, propped up and held together by duct tape, angled around her head like a cockpit, while a headset hung perpetually around her neck. Rei’s fingers moved across her keyboards with trancelike grace and accuracy.

It was Rei who first intercepted the Oppressor coordination frequencies. She was the one who had taught the resistance how to listen before they learned how to disrupt. Yael once remarked that Rei didn’t hack systems; she had conversations with them. And that was close enough to true to be true.

The others moved through their functions with the efficiency of people who have learned to take up less space than they need. They were intentionally kind in practical ways and avoided the spaces — physical and otherwise — where their grief was still too raw to discuss.

Liora sat at the table with a long crack down its center, her workspace by unspoken agreement. Notebooks stacked high and leaned into each other, surrounding her computer in an imitation of the Wasatch mountains embracing Salt Lake. Her current task involved dismantling three languages to discern what they might reveal about the Oppressors’ internal communications.

Liora was a student of the gap between what language says and what it is designed to make you believe, a space filled with the residue of power, desire, and fear. She dedicated her career to learning how language separates and unites people. For nearly a decade, the Oppressors had used language as a weapon. But Yael never used language that way.

Yael communicated in frequencies that language approximated but never quite reached. You understood her before she finished speaking, sometimes before she even began. It wasn’t a mystical thing, or it wasn’t only a mystical thing, but the effect of someone who was so present with you that their spoken words were almost a courtesy, a translation offered for the sake of convention. Liora missed Yael the way you miss a frequency you didn’t know you were receiving until it stopped.

It was Rei who noticed it first. “Liora.”

One word, barely above a breath. Liora looked up from her notebooks. In four years she had never heard Rei use that tone for anything small.

Liora walked to Rei’s chair and stood behind it. The monitors showed the familiar sawtooth waveforms of Oppressor communications, jagged and encrypted and exactly what they expected. Except for one, a signal so clean it looked almost crafted, arriving on a frequency their equipment had no business receiving.

Liora said, “What is that.”

It wasn’t a question.

“This started four minutes ago,” Rei said, “and it’s not the Oppressors or any government signal I have a record of.”

Liora looked at the waveform. She recognized the structure, the irreducible signature of something with meaning. “It’s saying something,” Liora said.

“I know,” Rei replied. “I just can’t find the edges of it. There’s nothing recognizable to hang on to, to decipher with. It doesn’t start, and it doesn’t stop. It just transmits as if it’s been transmitting forever and we just — “ she stopped. “Just started listening,” Liora finished. “You said this just started?”

“Well, I just noticed it. I might have thought it was a glitch. I’ll check the logs.”

The room went silent. Then Davan said, “Is it dangerous?”

Liora had already considered the question. But looking at the waveform, she felt — not the absence of fear, but its irrelevance, as though whatever this was existed at a frequency where fear was not — she struggled for the word — appropriate?

“No,” she said. And then, more quietly, almost to herself: “It’s familiar.” Nobody asked her what she meant. She wasn’t sure she could have answered.

Rei’s hand instinctively moved toward the equipment to chronicle. But she stopped before she touched anything, her hand hovering over a voice recorder.

“It’s changing,” she said.

They all looked at the waveform shifting. It was still pristine and patterned, but it was reorganizing itself, resolving, the way a radio signal clears up when you find the right frequency, the static falling away to reveal what was always there, hidden in the noise.

Liora’s hand found the back of Rei’s chair and held it. She knew this shape.

She had just spent eleven days grieving the absence of it.

To be continued…

Question: When have you experienced a frequency you didn’t know you were receiving — until it stopped?