Kaelen sat in the silent studio, running his fingers over the dead keys of his console. It was a gesture of mourning. Suddenly, a spark. A flicker of light. A single, corrupted audio file, shielded deep within the console's protected memory, activated.
It was Jax's voice, a final recording from his comms unit during the reactor overload, buried under layers of interference. It was fragmented, mostly static, but one phrase was clear, repeated like a mantra: "...alive... find me... the under-city... the old roots..."
Kaelen couldn't hear it, but he saw the waveform on the dead screen. He saw the pattern. The message.
He stumbled out, finding Anya, and pointed frantically at the screen, his eyes wide with a desperate, silent hope.
Anya read the words. Her breath caught. She looked from Kaelen's desperate face to the ruined skyline. Jax was alive. Their heart was still beating. The pack was not yet whole.
The hunt was not over. It was just beginning again, in the deafening silence.