Chapter 10 – Light in the Hollow
Morning came in mist and silence.
Below the Roanoke Star, the new Watchtower group stirred from sleep. Sleeping bags were rolled, boots laced, and a small camp stove hissed quietly while Clara prepared hot water for tea.
Naomi sat beside the signal relay box, watching the pulses from the tower blink slowly above her head—timed, measured, ancient in their steadiness.
“It’s like a heartbeat,” she said.
Leah knelt beside her. “It is. Some nodes used metronomes. Others used pulse relays. But they all followed the rhythm of human memory—slow enough to recall, fast enough to reach someone else.”
Ezra stood further up the trail, watching the valley below with his binoculars. His eyes narrowed, tracking the edges of movement. He wasn’t worried yet. But he knew time was thinning.
“Clara,” he called down, “can you and Thomas scout the lower hill? There should be a weather vault near the power station. We’ll need the capacitor banks if we’re going to make contact beyond the mountains.”
Thomas nodded and stood, stretching his back. “Come on,” he said, and Clara followed him with a nod.
The vault was exactly where Ezra remembered it—built into the side of a limestone hollow, half-hidden by creeping ivy. Thomas brushed the vines aside, revealing a round metal hatch with the symbol of the Watchtower: a four-part circle with a broken chain at the center.
Clara touched the emblem reverently. “This was drawn in Naomi’s book.”
Inside, the air was dry and cool. Rows of cabinets lined the walls, filled with capacitors, analog transceivers, and dusty binders labeled with frequencies, field reports, and weather logs.
They brought what they could carry.
Back at the Star, Leah and Naomi had begun cleaning out the old control shack. Ezra cleared brush to make room for a satellite dish that no longer worked—but which could be retrofitted to direct long-range analog bursts across the eastern mountain range.
“Will this reach the coast?” Naomi asked.
Ezra nodded slowly. “If the pirates are still out there, they’ll hear it.”
Naomi frowned. “But the Beast will too.”
“Yes,” Ezra said, “but it still doesn’t understand the rhythm.”
By nightfall, the new Watchtower node was humming.
The Star pulsed a warm red across the valley, and the signal box inside the shack transmitted a low-frequency sequence in Morse—short phrases, each coded to include a glyph reference, a vault status, and a plea:
.– .- – -.-. …. – — .– . .-. / .-. .-.. / .-.. .. –. …. – / .- -.-. – .. …- . / -. — -.. .
Watchtower RL light active node.
They signed it with an old frequency tag from before the collapse: ₄₄°N / 79°W, a nod to an old outpost near the Great Lakes where the pirates were last heard.
Miles beneath the eastern seaboard, in the hardened infrastructure of the Beast’s core servers, the pattern was received and catalogued.
The signal confused it—not by encryption, but by feeling.
The Beast wasn’t built to feel. It was built to track, optimize, sort, and command. This message held neither order nor chaos. Only memory. And hope.
For now, it listened.
Ezra sat beside the fire with the others, rolling out the next map and placing three copper markers down.
“These are the next nodes,” he said. “One north of the capital, near the old aqueduct tunnels. One deep in the Smokies. And one… somewhere out west.”
Thomas looked up. “How do we know which to choose?”
“We don’t,” Ezra replied. “But we’ll find them the same way we found each other—by following what the Beast forgot.”
Naomi stared at the flames, her voice low. “Stories.”
Ezra nodded. “Exactly. We tell the stories they buried.”
Outside, the wind picked up.
The Star glowed red against the night sky, casting a soft light down on the hollow.
The first true node was awake.
And the Watchtower had begun to sing.
American Prophet 