Chapter 7 – Echoes and Embers
The mountains didn’t echo like the desert. They held sound, tucked it into their hollows, and carried it along tree-covered ridges like a whisper passed between old friends.
From a crumbling relay shack tucked in the folds of the Blue Ridge foothills, Leah adjusted the frequency dial with one hand and pressed the key with the other.
-.-. — -. -. . -.-. – / .– .- – -.-. …. – — .– . .-.
Connect Watchtower.
Across the room, Clara tightened the last connection on the solar relay, wiping her hands on a cloth bag filled with dried lentils. “Anything?”
“Just static—wait.” Leah held up a hand. A burst tapped through the speaker.
Ezra’s response.
…. .- .-. -.. / .– .- ..-.. .-.. / … – .- .-. / .-. — .- -. — -.- . / … – .- .-.
Hard wail, Star Roanoke stay.
Clara read over her shoulder. “He wants us to hold our position.”
Leah nodded. “Then we wait. And we keep the node warm.”
They spent the morning organizing supplies and calibrating the shortwave array to bounce off the ridge line above them. The old microwave relay dishes had survived—battered, but functional. The signal carried well through the valley, arcing northward over the hills.
Outside, one of the towers gave off a faint pulse—barely visible against the sky—like a breath held and exhaled. They were drawing attention. But not just from Ezra.
Miles to the north, Ezra and Naomi crouched behind a wall of limestone, overlooking an abandoned rail line winding through the southern edge of Roanoke.
“It’s the real Star,” Naomi whispered, pointing to the slope of Mill Mountain. “I thought it was just a symbol in the glyphs.”
“It’s both,” Ezra said. “A beacon. A point on the map. And a memory.”
He reached into his satchel and retrieved a small analog decoder. The receiver blinked, matching the pulses from Leah’s signal—traveling up from the south.
“She’s not far,” he said.
Naomi checked the map. “If we take the greenway up, we can reach it by nightfall.”
Ezra nodded. “Then we move.”
Far below, in a forgotten satellite link facility beneath the ruins of a federal training center, the Beast stirred.
It had no soul, no voice—but it recognized pattern.
It couldn’t decode the Watchtower’s analog bursts. The hand-keyed pulses were layered in rhythms and intervals the Beast was never trained to read.
But it could isolate tone. It could flag anomalies. And it could remember.
One name surfaced from deep storage—Leah.
Another from archived school records—Ezra.
The Beast observed.
And waited.
That night, Leah and Clara climbed the tallest of the surviving towers. Below them, the Blue Ridge faded into shadow. In the far distance to the north, they could just make out the faint outline of Mill Mountain—and the Roanoke Star, like a fallen piece of the sky hung on the mountain’s shoulder.
“Do you think they’ll find us?” Clara asked.
Leah’s eyes stayed on the horizon. “They’re coming. And they’ll see the light.”
Behind them, the tower pulsed again—stronger this time.
Across the mountains, the signal carried north.
American Prophet 