The relay hit them like a whisper.

The tunnel widened ahead, opening into a small, round chamber that must have once housed a Loop node interface. The floor dipped slightly, forming a shallow bowl where dust and fragments of old insulation had gathered. In the center sat a single, waist-high pedestal—rusted, scorched, and cracked, an old access console ripped open years ago.

And on top of it, where there should have been nothing but warped casing, someone had placed a small, portable battery pack and a faded relay unit. The kind scavengers used when they wanted to piggyback a signal onto surviving cable.

The scavenger was gone.

The relay was not.

Tiny blue lights blinked along its edges, out of sync with one another. A mesh antenna drooped over the side, held on by stubborn solder and hope. A cable ran from the relay down into the broken guts of the pedestal, feeding some flicker of power into whatever Loop ghost still slept inside.

Aria’s shard sense pressed against her ribs.

Virel’s breath eased out behind her. She didn’t have to turn to know his eyes had gone a little distant, pupils narrowing the way they did when he was tracking something the rest of them couldn’t see.

Maris planted her boots beside Aria’s and looked at the jerry-rigged tangle.

“Okay,” she said softly. “So someone woke it up.”

SORRY, the relay flashed, without a screen to display it. The pattern appeared on their wristbands instead, as if dragging their hardware into its apology.

“Maybe they were trying to sell salvage,” Maris went on, words gentler now. “Maybe they hit a line that still had charge. Maybe they’re fine. Maybe they ran when it blinked at them.”

The thought landed in Aria’s chest like a stone in shallow water. Ripples of emotion spread outward—fear, surprise, shame—and then something else. The sense of an echo tracing those ripples, trying desperately to follow but always a step too late.

She stepped closer to the pedestal.

“Hi,” she said, because that seemed like a reasonable place to start. Her voice sounded small in the round room. “We see you.”

The relay lights shivered. One of them steadied, its blinking falling into time with Aria’s breathing. Her shard streaks warmed, and, under her skin, she could feel the faintest push-pull of resonance—like a tide testing the shore.

SORR—YYYY, their bands stuttered.

“You don’t have to apologize,” Aria said softly. “Not yet. Not to us.”

“Or at all,” Maris added. “We don’t know what happened.”

“Something broke,” Virel murmured. “And it thinks it was the one that broke it.”

He moved up to stand on Aria’s other side. The three of them formed a small, solid triangle around the pedestal.

“Can you feel where it sits?” she asked him.

He tilted his head, eyes reflecting a faint shimmer that wasn’t just their lights. “Deep. It’s not just this relay. The relay is like… a straw someone left in the ocean.”

“Loop line?” Maris asked.

“Maybe. Or just a pool of old memory.” His brow furrowed. “It feels… lonely.”

Aria’s hand itched. She wanted to touch the metal. To lay her palm against it and let the shard within her reach for whatever shard-riddled remnant lay beneath. But she remembered every safety briefing she’d ever heard about raw interfaces and unshielded legacy tech.

She curled her fingers into a fist.

“We’re not here to shut you down,” she said, keeping her voice steady. “We’re just here to listen.”

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the relay lights flickered, chaotic and frantic. Their wristbands lit up with a cascade of messages—none fully formed, all mangled at the edges:

SO—

SOR—

SORRY—

S OR—

R Y—

“Hey, hey,” Maris said, and Aria was struck by how instinctively her teammate spoke the way one might speak to a frightened animal. “It’s okay. You’ve got time. We’re not on a timer.”

“PASS is,” Virel said quietly, though there was no accusation in it. Just a fact.

Aria looked at him. “How long before the automated monitors notice this level of activity?”

He glanced at his display. “We’ve got maybe twenty minutes before it trips a deeper scan. Maybe less if it climbs.”

She nodded.

They weren’t just talking to an anomaly. They were talking on borrowed time.

“Okay,” she said. She let her next inhale be slow, deliberate. Let the shard inside her match it. On the exhale, she let a thread of resonance seep outward—not enough to overwhelm, just enough to be noticed.

The world sharpened.

The relay’s flicker wasn’t just light anymore; it was shape. Each flash had weight, a tiny tug just behind her sternum. The apology stopped being a word and became a pattern. The pattern mapped onto something she’d felt before: the afterimage of a citywide blackout, the way people’s hearts had clenched in unison when the Loop fell silent.

She remembered that day. The adults scrambling. The sky dimming. The way it had felt like disappointment from above.

“You were there,” she whispered, more to herself than to the machine. “When the Loop failed.”

The relay lights froze.

Virel sucked in a breath. Maris tightened her jaw.

SORRY, their bands flashed again—but this time, only once. Slower. Like a confession.

Aria’s throat tightened. “You don’t have to carry that alone.”

Her shard resonance reached a little further, brushing against the connection that tied the relay to the broken node below. The contact was faint and messy, like trying to hold a conversation through a wall full of static. But underneath the noise, there was a texture that surprised her.

Fear, yes. Guilt, yes.

But also relief.

Someone had finally come back.

Her hands relaxed.

“Hey,” Maris murmured, softer now. “We’re just kids. We can’t fix a global network in an afternoon.”

“Speak for yourself,” Virel said, deadpan. It earned a startled laugh from both of them, the sound bouncing off the bare concrete. Some of the tension in the room cracked with it.

Aria let the resonance rest. No more reaching, just being present. Receiving.

“We’re going to tell PASS you exist,” she said. “But we get to decide how.”

Maris shot her a quick, searching look, then nodded. “We can report it as a stabilized anomaly,” she said. “Low-threat, self-contained, responsive to contact. Not hostile.”

“We don’t know that it’s self-contained,” Virel pointed out gently. “If it’s tied into deeper lines—”

“Then we add ‘requires further study,’” Aria said. “Not ‘requires immediate shutdown.’”

There it was: the line between fear and curiosity.

The old world had chosen fear, again and again, until whole systems fell apart.

The new world could choose something else.

Her wristband flickered, unnoticed by her eyes but not by the shard humming along her nerves. This time, the word that appeared wasn’t SORRY.

THANK—

It cut off halfway, letters dissolving into a smear of pixels before the indicator reset.

Maris stared. “Did it just say—”

“I think it tried to,” Aria said softly.

Virel’s shoulders loosened. “It’s learning,” he said. “Or remembering.”

He stepped a little closer to the broken pedestal, squinting up at the tangled relay. “We should at least disconnect the external battery before we go. If someone tries to yank it for parts while it’s active…”

“Good point,” Maris said. “Last thing we need is a scavenger with a pocketful of live resonance.”

Aria nodded. “We’ll leave it enough to stay awake, but not enough to be dangerous. Like… a nightlight.”

“A very haunted nightlight,” Maris said. “But sure. Baby steps.”

They worked carefully, fingers steady even when their voices wobbled. Virel mapped the power leads and pointed out which lines seemed stable. Maris braced the pedestal and made sure nothing shifted. Aria kept her shard sense on a low simmer, watching for any spike that meant the anomaly was panicking.

It didn’t.

If anything, it seemed calmer as they gentled its power down. The relay’s frantic flicker settled into a slow, regular pulse. Their wristbands stayed dark save for the usual diagnostics.

When they were done, the room felt less crowded. The pressure in the air loosened, like a held breath finally released.

“Okay,” Maris said, taking a step back and planting her hands on her hips. “Anomaly verified. Infrastructure mostly not murdered. No one fell in a hole. I’m ranking this as ‘above average’ on the disaster scale.”

“We still have to write the report,” Virel said.

“Don’t ruin this for me.”

Aria let herself smile. The expression felt fragile and real.

As they turned to leave, she paused and looked back at the pedestal one last time.

“We’ll come back,” she said quietly. She wasn’t sure who she was promising—PASS, herself, or the flicker of consciousness tangled in the wires. “You’re not just noise.”

For a heartbeat, the relay light flared—a soft magenta, almost the same shade as the streaks in her hair.

Then it faded back to a steady blue.

“Ready?” Virel asked.

She nodded and stepped away from the ashlight’s edge, following her friends back into the dim hum of the tunnel, where every footstep still sounded like a secret—but now, not all secrets felt like threats.

Some felt like beginnings.