Elias did not sleep.
He sat at the edge of his bed with the lights off, listening to the city breathe through thin walls. Somewhere outside, a generator coughed and stabilized. Somewhere else, a dog barked once and fell silent. The sounds should have been ordinary, but after the rail disaster, nothing in Elias's mind sounded innocent anymore.
The last transmission kept replaying inside him, not as audio, but as pressure.
Next time, listen better.
He tried to explain it away. Stress. Shock. A delayed hallucination after watching people die. He had been close enough to inhale smoke, close enough to feel the heat. Trauma did strange things to memory, to pattern recognition, to the small internal switches that told a man what was real.
But the derailment had happened exactly at 06:40.
He had not imagined that.
He got up and crossed the room to the small sink. The water that came out was slightly yellow, as it often was in this district, but it was cold and clean enough to drink. He splashed his face, stared at his reflection, and found a stranger staring back.
His eyes looked older.
Elias turned off the tap and leaned against the counter. He tried to recall every detail about the moment the signal came through. The static bending. The timestamp. The fact that the logs showed nothing afterward.
That part bothered him most.
A radio transmission could be jammed or spoofed. A time stamp could be faked if someone had access to the hardware. But deleting a record without leaving a trace meant the signal had never entered the system in the first place.
Or it had entered from somewhere that did not obey the system's rules.
His fingers clenched around the edge of the sink until his knuckles whitened. He realized he was shaking again. He forced himself to breathe slowly and stepped back.
He needed data.
Fear was useless without facts.
At 02:10 a.m., he left his apartment.
The streets were emptier than usual, still tense from the rail incident. Word had spread, as it always did, through whispers and rumor and the sharp glances people exchanged when they thought no one was listening. Guards patrolled more aggressively. Floodlights stayed on longer. The city was anxious, and anxiety made people dangerous.
Tower Seven rose from the industrial district like a dead monument. A black spine of concrete and steel, surrounded by fences and warning signs that no longer had the authority they pretended to hold.
Elias had clearance. Technically.
The security checkpoint was manned by a young guard with tired eyes and a posture that suggested he wanted trouble, or wanted an excuse to avoid it.
Elias showed his badge.
The guard glanced at it, then at Elias's face. "You work nights?"
"Sometimes," Elias said.
"City says the towers are being audited," the guard replied. His tone implied Elias should not ask questions.
Elias kept his voice flat. "I am not here for the city. I am here for the equipment. If the scanners fail, your alarms fail."
The guard hesitated, then waved him through.
Elias walked quickly, not running, but moving with purpose. He did not want anyone to remember him being here. Not tonight.
Inside the monitoring room, the same stale air greeted him. The console glowed faintly, a stubborn relic that refused to die. He powered it on, fingers moving without hesitation, the sequence burned into his muscles.
The displays lit up. Frequency bands spread across the screen like wide, empty highways. Most of them were quiet.
Elias wore headphones and began sweeping slowly, listening for the slightest change in texture. That was what his work had become in recent years. Not communication. Not discovery. Just maintenance. Making sure dead channels stayed dead.
Tonight, he wanted them to live.
He searched the band where the signal had appeared, hunting for a signature. Anything. A harmonic, a carrier pattern, a repeating artifact. The silence was steady, almost mocking.
Then, at 02:17 a.m. exactly, the static leaned again.
Elias went rigid.
It was not dramatic. It was not cinematic. It was a subtle alteration in the density of noise, like the air itself had shifted. If he had not heard it before, he would have ignored it as nothing.
This time, he captured it.
He hit record, duplicating the raw feed onto a private storage drive. The console should have registered the input. The system should have stamped it. He watched the recording indicator light blink.
The screen flickered.
For half a second, the same timestamp appeared.
Three days in the future.
Then it vanished.
Elias's pulse hammered.
He opened the log file and searched for the entry.
Nothing.
The record did not exist.
His recording indicator still blinked, though. The drive icon showed transfer activity. He leaned closer and realized something that made his stomach tighten again.
The system was recording, but the system did not believe it was.
The data was being written somewhere beneath the operating layer, bypassing the normal architecture. Like a signal slipping through cracks too small for the city's software to see.
Elias began building a manual trace, using the only method that still worked in a world like this. He watched power draw. He watched buffer spikes. He mapped the noise by its shape rather than its label.
The static deepened.
A voice came through.
Not his.
At least not at first.
A series of numbers spilled out, slow and precise, spoken in a neutral tone that sounded like a person trying to imitate a machine.
"Seven. Three. Four. Nine. One. Six. Two."
Elias grabbed a pen, scribbled them on a scrap of paper, and waited.
The numbers repeated.
Then the voice changed.
It was his again.
"I do not have long," it said.
Elias's mouth went dry. "Who are you?"
A pause, filled with crackling distortion.
"You already know," the voice said. "I cannot explain without making it worse. Your questions cause ripples."
Elias felt his anger rise, hot and immediate. "People died."
"So fewer will," the voice replied. It did not sound sorry. It sounded certain.
Elias stared at the numbers he had written. "What are those?"
"Coordinates," the voice said.
Elias swallowed. "Coordinates to what?"
Another pause. Static folded over itself, like fabric being twisted.
"A relay node," the voice said. "A buried repeater. You will find it if you go tonight."
Elias's hands tightened around the headphones. "Why should I trust you?"
The voice did not answer right away. When it spoke again, its tone was sharper, almost impatient.
"Because you will not survive the next event if you stay in the tower."
The room felt colder.
Elias slowly removed the headphones. He looked around the monitoring room, as if the walls might reveal what he was missing. Everything looked the same. Old screens. Cables. Dust. A room built to listen to a world that no longer talked.
He checked the building schematics on his terminal. Tower Seven had a maintenance sublevel beneath the monitoring room. A narrow corridor of utility lines. An access hatch that led to the outer cable run.
He had been down there once, years ago, and had never wanted to return.
His gaze drifted to the power monitor.
The draw spiked.
A quiet, unnatural spike.
Elias felt his skin prickle.
The voice had said there was no time.
He moved fast, shutting down the main interface and pulling his private drive. He pocketed the scrap paper with the coordinates. He grabbed a small flashlight and a compact toolkit and headed to the maintenance hatch.
The corridor beneath the monitoring room smelled worse. Oil, mold, and something metallic, like old blood. His light beam cut through the darkness in a narrow cone. The concrete walls sweated with condensation.
Halfway down, his radio crackled.
Not the console radio. The portable unit clipped to his jacket. He had not turned it on.
He froze.
A whisper brushed through the speaker.
"Wrong way."
Elias's heart lurched. He backed up instinctively, and his foot bumped something on the floor.
A cable.
But not one that belonged there.
He lowered the flashlight.
A thin line ran along the corridor, almost invisible in the dark. A fiber strand, newly laid. It pulsed faintly with a green glow, like a vein under skin.
Elias stared at it.
That was impossible. Fiber in this district was regulated. Installation required permits, crews, security escorts. Someone would have noticed.
Unless no one was supposed to notice.
He traced it with the light, following it toward the far end of the corridor, where the access hatch to the cable run waited.
His instincts screamed at him to leave.
But the other part of him, the part that had kept him listening to dead air for years, stepped forward.
Elias knelt beside the fiber and examined it with trembling fingers. It was warm, faintly vibrating, as if carrying an active load.
He pulled a small connector probe from his toolkit and hesitated only once before clipping it onto the line.
The probe lit up.
Data flowed.
Not city data. Not the crude local packets the council allowed. This stream was dense, layered, almost elegant. Elias did not understand the structure at first, but he recognized the discipline behind it. Whoever built this knew exactly what they were doing.
The probe pinged a handshake.
A response came back instantly.
Elias's console would have taken seconds to negotiate. This answered like it had been waiting for him.
A small window appeared on the probe display, not branded, not official. Just plain text.
YOU ARE LATE.
Elias's throat tightened. His hands hovered over the device as if it might bite him.
Another line appeared.
DO NOT TOUCH THE HATCH.
Elias looked up, flashlight beam catching the metal latch at the end of the corridor. It looked ordinary. It always had.
Then he saw the difference.
The bolts were new.
His stomach dropped. He stood up slowly, backing away from the hatch.
A soft click echoed down the corridor.
Not from the hatch.
From behind him.
Elias spun, flashlight swinging.
A figure stood at the top of the stairs, half hidden by shadow. The outline was human, but the posture was wrong. Too still. Too balanced. Like a machine pretending to be a man.
The figure's voice carried easily through the corridor.
"Elias Rowe," it said. "Step away from the line."
Elias's mouth went dry. His hand tightened around the probe.
He realized, with sudden clarity, that the signal was not just warning him about disasters.
It was leading him into a war he did not understand.
And now someone else knew he had heard it.