Luma ducked beneath a twisted pipe jutting out of the cracked tunnel wall, her boots squelching in the moist floor as she followed Juno through the narrow underpass. The air smelled of rust and static, a strange combination that somehow made her gauntlet buzz like it was bracing for a lightning strike.
"I swear this is the last turn," Juno said for the third time.
Ion, trailing behind with his coat soaked from the marsh drizzle above, grunted. "Your 'last turn' record is currently zero for three."
"I prefer to think of it as suspenseful navigation," Juno replied, flashing her toothy grin.
Finally, the tunnel opened into a wide chamber—a natural cavern reinforced with salvaged metal and stone. In the center stood a bizarre, patchwork structure: half antenna, half treehouse, all chaos. Coils hummed. Screens flickered. A ceiling of speakers buzzed with faint pulses. It looked like a radio station designed by mad squirrels.
Two figures popped into view atop a scaffold: one with a welding mask and the other with a mop of frizzled hair and goggles askew.
"Welcome to the broadcast bunker!" the first one yelled, voice echoing across the cavern. "You're just in time for showtime!"
Selka and Rhon, the infamous twin engineers of the underground resistance.
"Please tell me they don't mean that literally," Ion muttered.
Rhon bounded down the ladder like a hyperactive spring. "We got wind you were nearby. Couldn't resist luring you in. Hope you enjoyed the sound-dampening maze—we modded it ourselves. Echo-cancellation zigzags. Took ages."
Luma blinked. "You lured us in… for a podcast?"
Selka dropped down behind her brother and cracked her knuckles. "Not just a podcast. The podcast. The last illegal frequency still broadcasting resistance education without Bureau filters."
Rhon tossed Luma a headset cobbled from copper wire, sponge, and what looked like a slingshot. "You're our guest of honor tonight. Topic: how a girl with a glowing glove and zero patience is outsmarting entropy itself."
Luma caught the headset midair and deadpanned, "Do I get a juice pouch and a snack break?"
Selka's grin widened. "We have marshmallow bars and encrypted tea."
Ion blinked. "Encrypted… tea?"
"Flavor packets scrambled at the molecular level," Rhon whispered, as if it were a secret weapon. "Can't be decoded unless you're worthy. Or just really thirsty."
Juno was already sprawled in a hammock made from repurposed seat belts. "I love this place."
Within minutes, they were on the air. A rusted microphone hung from the ceiling, buzzing slightly with static. The bunker lights dimmed, replaced by flickering panels around the room, each tied into the frequency relay embedded in the rock walls.
"Broadcast initialized," Selka intoned, switching on the signal. "All rogue minds, lend us your ears."
Luma cleared her throat, suddenly feeling awkward under the glowing lights. "Hi, uh… I'm Luma. I didn't study broadcasting, but I do have a talking gauntlet and recently stopped a small town from melting sideways."
The bunker erupted with laughter.
Rhon cued the science segment. "So today's topic is wave-particle duality—"
"—Explained by snacks," Luma interrupted. "Because let's face it, if photons were people, they'd be the friend who can't decide whether to be solid or just vibe."
Selka snorted. "That's… actually kind of brilliant."
Luma continued, warmed up now. "Imagine tossing a marshmallow across a room. If someone's watching, it lands in a nice, neat arc. If no one watches, the marshmallow kind of… spreads into a probability cloud. Both marshmallow and mystery."
Ion, listening with arms crossed and one eyebrow raised, gave a reluctant nod. "It's disturbingly accurate."
Rhon leaned in. "So you're saying photons are emotionally needy snack particles?"
"Exactly," Luma grinned. "And the moment you observe them, they get self-conscious and choose a path."
As the night wore on, the broadcast covered entropic pulses, spectral interference, and the ways the Bureau was manipulating public data. Luma told stories from her travels. Juno threw in sarcastic commentary. Even Ion shared a quiet theory, admitting for the first time that he once failed a field test in Silex because of an entropy distortion he didn't report.
"We don't grow if we don't share the cracks," he said simply. "Physics is made of failures."
By midnight, the signal had reached over twenty remote nodes—villages, students, even rogue Spire apprentices tuning in secretly from under their desks.
Luma leaned back in her creaky chair and whispered to no one in particular, "We're actually changing something."
Selka raised her mug of encrypted tea. "To wave rebels and probability punks."
Rhon added, "To snacks that defy observation."
And together, beneath the Verdant Expanse, in a cave wired like a dream and held together by hope and wire mesh, the Resistance broadcasted its truths to the world.