Chapter 13 – Ghost Relays
The wind howled through the trees at Raven’s Roost.
The lookout tower was barely standing—leaning westward with age, its metal frame rusted and clinging to the stone ledge like a memory refusing to fall. Around it, pine needles and lichen-covered stone whispered the passage of time.
Thomas was the first to climb the uneven steps, testing each one before putting his full weight down. Naomi and Leah followed close behind, the analog burst recorder clutched tightly under Leah’s arm.
At the top, they found the repeater.
A narrow metal cabinet bolted into the stone wall, its solar panel shattered, its interface panel open to the elements. But inside, the analog heart of it still pulsed—barely. A small LED blinked red once every ten seconds.
“It’s alive,” Thomas whispered.
Naomi knelt beside it. “Not broadcasting. But still listening.”
Leah inserted the analog burst recorder.
For a long moment, nothing happened.
Then—click.
The recorder’s dial spun. Static hummed.
A voice emerged.
Not mechanical. Not encrypted.
Just human.
“If you’re hearing this, the Watchtower remembers. You are not alone.”
Leah froze.
The voice was old. Worn. Familiar.
Naomi leaned closer. “That’s not a pirate.”
The transmission continued:
“This is Station 5, Dominion Ridge. We abandoned analog protocol in 2039. Too vulnerable. But the glyph system survived. If you found this, you found the map.”
A pause. Then:
“The pirates didn’t make this. We did.”
Leah sat back, stunned. “Ezra said the pirates were the ones scrambling the Beast.”
Thomas ran a hand through his hair. “But what if the pirates were Watchtower? A splinter group—ones who refused to digitize?”
Naomi tapped the panel. “And they’ve been trying to reconnect us ever since.”
The message repeated once. Then the system clicked off for good.
The burst was spent.
They camped that night beneath the shadow of the broken tower, firelight flickering on the stone.
Naomi wrote down every word of the message in her journal, including the cadence and phrasing. She traced the glyphs on the recorder casing and mapped them against her notes from Ezra’s book.
Three of them matched the Star’s signal pattern.
“It was all one network,” she said. “Before the split.”
Leah nodded. “Before the Beast.”
The next morning, they searched the base of the tower and found something else—an old steel lockbox, hidden beneath a false stone slab. Inside were two reels of magnetic tape, labeled in faded ink:
TAPE A – Charleston FragmentTAPE B – Toronto Node Echo
They couldn’t play them here. But Clara might be able to rebuild a reader from parts back at Roanoke.
Thomas looked down the ridge toward the Parkway. “Time to head back.”
Naomi didn’t move.
She stood still, eyes focused on the distant ridgeline. In the trees ahead, etched in rusted steel on a bent road sign, was a single glyph:
🌊
“Water,” she whispered. “But… not just water.”
Leah stepped beside her. “It’s a path.”
And in a control loop deep within the Beast, the glyph’s echo registered as meaningless.
But the system flagged it anyway.
Too many untracked variables. Too many references beyond its schema.
The Beast adjusted its search radius.
And for the first time, it deployed something new.
Not a drone. Not a broadcast.
A question.
It transmitted a single prompt into the analog airwaves:
What are you building?
American Prophet 