he flats at night hummed like a throat clearing to speak.
Silas made camp under a fallen transmitter where the steel lattice leaned at a sorrowful angle, ribs open to the stars. He hadn't lit a fire in years. Out here, flame was a way of saying come find me to anything that wandered hungry. But tonight he struck the match anyway and held it a second longer than sense allowed, watching the sulfur bloom to gold. The brush caught slow, then steady. Heat found his palms and stayed.
"Change the frame," he murmured, remembering the trader's voice. "See what answers."
He moved through his camp on purpose, rearranging the small laws he lived by. Bedroll east to west instead of north to south. Canteen on the left, not right. Boots on their sides, not standing. He set the deck of cards where his head would rest—never done that before—and felt a childish defiance in the act, like carving his name somewhere he shouldn't. Each change clicked into place with a quiet he understood in his bones, as if habit were a lock and will the key it had been waiting on.
The wind came off the flats, carrying the salt sting of an old ocean that had forgotten its water. The transmitter bones answered with a low vowel, metal remembering the language of pressure. Silas fed the fire a thumb-thick stick and listened. Somewhere far out, a tower gave a single blink—there, then gone, like a giant winking to prove it had been awake the whole time.
He sat, knees drawn, and unrolled his supper—jerky, a last heel of bread that had gone to stone, a strip of dried fruit that tasted like the memory of sweet. He ate without ceremony, eyes moving between the fire and the dark. Shapes formed at the edge of sight, the kind the mind sketches when it has more fear than facts. He named them into smaller things. Fencepost. Tumbleweed. A bird sleeping on a wire that no longer caught signal.
His coat creaked when he shifted. The tin square in the inner pocket warmed against his ribs, not enough to burn, enough to insist. He pinched it through the fabric and felt the faintest rhythm there, not heartbeat, but the steady pulse of a thought trying the door. He let his hand fall away.
"Not now," he said to no one he'd admit to. "We'll talk when I'm ready."
The sky deepened. Stars arrived in stubborn clusters, as if they'd been waiting beyond the horizon for permission. The fire settled into a body, its shoulders of coals shrugging now and then to send a feather of sparks into the air. He laid back with his hat over his eyes and practiced not thinking. It never took. Thoughts came like riders you didn't invite—quiet where the ground was soft, loud where it was stone.
He turned his head and watched the tower's shadow lean across the sand like the hand of a clock that had run out of numbers. The trader's words returned in pieces.
People bring me what happened. I give them a story they can stand to live with.
He tried to catch where his own story began. A day he decided to forget? Or a day forgetting decided him? The answer refused to sit still. He wondered if the square knew, if it held a clean line back to whatever name he'd worn when the sun rose the right way.
The deck of cards under his head made a soft grit-sound when he breathed. He slid it out and shuffled once, twice, slow and clumsy lying down. The backs flashed dull in the firelight. He cut the deck with his thumb and turned over the top card: the Seven of Spades, night-lean and narrow. A nothing omen, or every omen, depending who you asked. He put it back, squared the deck, and set it by his shoulder.
The transmitter spoke again.
Not noise this time. A tone so low he felt it in his teeth before he heard it. The fire pinched thin as if the sound had pressed its flame to the earth. He sat up. The tone faded. The coals breathed out. The night resumed its insect work.
Silas stood and put both hands to the tower's crossbeam. Cold. Dust-soft. He leaned in, ear to steel like a man listening at a door he'd once owned. The metal smelled faintly of rain that never fell here. He closed his eyes and waited for the nothing most nights gave.
The tone returned, a half-second long. Then nothing. Another half-second, a little higher. Nothing.
He smiled, small and dangerous. "I hear you," he whispered. "Say it plain."
The pattern repeated—low, silence, higher, silence—until even the silence had shape. He didn't know the code, but he understood the intention: a question knocking on itself. He pressed his forehead to the beam and let the cold fix his thoughts in place.
"Maybe nothing changed out here," he said softly, "except what I'm standing inside of."
He stepped back and did a thing he hadn't done since before the towers died. He cleared his throat and spoke as if the air could carry words farther than his own skin.
"Name's Silas Kade," he said. "If you've got business with me, take a clean breath and start again."
The wind made no promises. The stars held their council. But the tin square in his pocket aligned with the tower's slow pulse—two metronomes finding the same time. Heat spread from the metal and settled into his chest the way certainty does: not as a comfort, but as a weight correctly placed.
He went back to the fire and sat cross-legged like the trader had, surprised at his body's memory of the posture. He took out the square and rested it on his palm. It didn't glow. Its surface reflected the fire in a broken band; his face cut through the reflection, older than the man he used to meet in mirrors he couldn't place.
He spoke to the dark beyond the flames, because speaking to the square felt like praying and he wasn't ready to be seen in that posture.
"You can tune to me without taking the reins," he said. "We do this on my terms. I'm not running your story tonight. I'm listening."
The words tasted strange—like he'd stolen them from a better man—but they held. The square didn't answer, didn't need to. The tower gave its small rise-and-fall again, and he heard it not as a threat or a summons this time, but as the world clearing space for consequence.
He smothered the fire to coals and pulled his bedroll up close to the steel for the first time in years, unafraid of being found. The ground was a map under his spine. He could feel where men had crossed it long before him—heaviness here, a rut there, a place where something had once rested and left its shape behind.
The silence that came wasn't empty. It was the kind you earn.
He closed his eyes and let the day empty out of him without argument. When sleep arrived, it didn't sneak. It walked up, set a hand on his shoulder, and said his name the way old friends do when they aren't asking for anything.
Somewhere just before he went under, a filament in the tower glowed hair-thin, the color of a held breath. Far out across the flats, another tower answered, once, then went quiet, as if to say: We hear you. Keep going.
The last thing he felt was the square's warmth cooling in his hand to match his own, two temperatures choosing a middle. He dreamed of footsteps that belonged to him, and for once they were headed forward.