The ridge was behind them before Aria let herself look back.

The settlement had shrunk to a cluster of roofs and shimmering panels, half-hidden by morning haze. Beyond it, the ridge curved like a sleeping animal, patient and watchful. Her watch hummed with a slow, steady pulse in time with her steps.

Virel walked beside her, pack resting easy across his shoulders. The road underfoot was an old one—broken pavement stitched with roots and wild grass. On either side, scrub trees and volunteer orchards pressed close, their leaves whispering in the breeze.

“Last chance to pretend this was all a very vivid planning session,” Clem said from her wrist. “We turn around now, we can still make lunch at Samantha’s.”

Aria smiled without breaking stride. “You’re just worried about your signal strength.”

“I am a sophisticated composite empathy model,” Clem replied. “I worry about many things. Signal strength is just the loudest right now.”

Virel shaded his eyes as they crested a small rise. Ahead, the old highway curved downhill toward a distant dark line of trees—the river corridor.

“That’s the first relay tower,” he said, pointing. “About half a day’s walk if we don’t stop.”

“We’ll stop,” Aria said. “We promised to log anything odd along the way. And in my experience, ‘odd’ doesn’t schedule appointments.”

Clem let out a sound that was almost a sigh.

“I’ll start a travel log. Entry one: ‘Leaving home, carrying entirely too few snacks.’”

By mid-morning, the road narrowed to a cracked ribbon tangled with vines. Birds flashed through the branches—small, quick, bright. The air smelled of damp earth and the faint metallic tang of old rail lines buried beneath the soil.

They paused at a crossroads marked by a leaning sign whose original lettering had long since faded. Someone had painted new symbols over it—a simple map of the ridge, a line toward the river, and a small star where the relay tower stood.

Underneath, in fresh paint, were two words: KEEP LISTENING.

Virel touched the edge of the sign, eyes soft. “Jae’s handwriting,” he said.

Aria’s watch vibrated. A new icon blinked into existence—an envelope made of faint shardlight.

Clem sounded surprised.

“Whoa. First Shard Watch dispatch just came through.”

The message unfolded across her screen in simple text, relayed through the ridge’s shard hum and captured by Clem’s processes:

SHARD WATCH LOG 01

Ridge baseline holding steady. Slight increase in night-glow over east fields. Ibrahim suspects soil moisture; I suspect dramatic timing.

– Jae

Below the text, a tiny symbol pulsed: a cluster of dots arranged like the ridge seen from above.

Aria’s chest tightened in something that felt like homesickness and pride tangled together. “They didn’t wait,” she said. “They started logging as soon as we left.”

“Of course they did,” Virel replied. “You gave them a reason to treat every small thing like it matters.”

Clem tagged the message with a soft chime.

“I’m archiving these on a separate channel,” he said. “That way, when we reach San Altman, we can lay their logs alongside whatever the towers have been hearing. See where the songs overlap.”

Aria looked up at the sky. The clouds were thin and high, striped like brushed metal. Somewhere beyond them, shard towers hummed in distant cities. Somewhere behind, the ridge hummed back.

The world suddenly felt less like separate places and more like notes on the same staff.

Near midday, they found the first truly broken stretch of road. A section of the old bridge had collapsed into the ravine below, leaving a jagged gap where asphalt met empty air. The drop wasn’t sheer, but it was steep enough to make careless footing a bad idea.

Virel crouched at the edge, scanning the slope. “We could scramble down and back up,” he said. “Looks stable enough if we move slow.”

Aria shook her head, studying the fractured concrete. “Slow is fine. ‘Risking a sprained ankle on day one’ is not.”

Clem hummed thoughtfully.

“There used to be a service path down there,” he said, overlaying faint lines over Aria’s view. “If the old plans still mean anything, there might be anchor points for a maintenance ladder.”

They followed the ravine edge until they found the remnants of what Clem had described—metal brackets half-swallowed by vines, leading down to a narrower ledge. The original ladder was long gone, but the brackets were still solid.

Virel uncoiled their fiber-line and clipped one end to a buried rail spike. “We’ll fix it as we go,” he said. “A little better than we found it.”

Aria descended first, boots finding purchase on the rough stone. The rope bit into her gloved hands just enough to remind her to respect the drop. When she reached the lower ledge, she anchored another clip and signaled up.

They worked like they had practiced back at the ridge—measured, unhurried, thinking about the next travelers who might find this path. By the time they climbed the far side, a simple rope assist and two new anchors turned the broken bridge into something manageable instead of forbidding.

Virel looked back once they were across. “Think it’ll help?”

“It already did,” Aria said. “It got us through.”

Clem added a note to the travel log.

“Entry two,” he narrated. “Minor infrastructure repair, zero injuries, high cooperative efficiency. Recommend future travelers bring gloves and emotional readiness for heights.”

The land sloped more steeply as afternoon wore on. Trees thickened, their trunks damp with moss. The hum of insects grew louder, layered over the distant rush of water.

Aria caught the first glimpse of the riverline through the trees—a glimmer of pale silver-blue cutting across the landscape. As they drew closer, another color emerged: a faint, shifting teal where sunlight hit the water at certain angles.

“What is that?” she asked.

Clem adjusted his focus.

“Preliminary guess? Micro-shard reflection patterns. Or extremely stylish algae.”

They stepped out onto a rise overlooking the waterway. The old river had been reshaped generations ago—its course guided by gentle embankments and reinforced with geo-textiles now half-hidden by plant growth. Solar-barges drifted in the distance, low and wide, their panels angled like dark wings.

At the near bank, a small dock jutted into the water, its posts wrapped with climbing vines. A weathered sign bore the co-op’s symbol and a hand-painted schedule that had clearly been updated and revised many times.

Virel exhaled slowly. “We made it by last light,” he said. “First checkpoint: complete.”

Aria let her pack slide from her shoulders, muscles singing with that particular mix of exhaustion and accomplishment. The river smelled of mud, clean rot, and something sharper underneath—an almost metallic edge that hinted at shard presence carried downstream.

Her watch vibrated again. Another Shard Watch message unfolded:

SHARD WATCH LOG 02

Brief flicker along west patrol route. Samantha says it felt like a held breath. No anomalies in soil readings. Bread came out perfect.

– Samantha

A second later, a third message arrived, tagged with Ibrahim’s name:

SHARD WATCH LOG 03

Adjusted two watches. Both synced to ridge hum more cleanly afterward. Feels like tuning an instrument that’s learning its own song.

Aria read them twice, then looked out over the water. The river’s surface rippled, catching the last of the light. In the reflections, for an instant, she thought she saw faint patterns—lines of brightness converging like paths on a map.

“Do you see it?” she asked quietly.

Virel nodded. “The shard’s already here,” he said. “In the water, in the towers it’s feeding, in the people carrying news along the banks.”

Clem’s voice softened.

“And in the inbox, currently receiving more feelings than your average pre-Collapse social network.”

Aria laughed, the sound carried away on the breeze.

“We’ll camp here tonight,” she decided. “Catch the first barge heading toward the city in the morning.”

She knelt at the edge of the dock and dipped her fingers into the water. It was cooler than the air, tinged with that subtle electric feel she had come to associate with shard presence.

“Hello,” she whispered. “We’re listening.”

The river answered with a small, bright swirl of teal around her hand—nothing dramatic, just a gentle acknowledgment.

Behind her, the watches back at the ridge likely glowed in response. The world felt wide, but it did not feel empty.

The path from home to the riverline was only the first part of the journey, but as Aria stood to help Virel pitch their small tent beneath the trees, she knew this much for certain:

Wherever the shard’s song was leading, they were finally moving to meet it halfway.