Chapter 2: Seven Words

Then I sat back in my chair, which was a salvaged office chair with one wheel missing and a foam cushion held together with electrical tape, and I thought about what I knew.

What I knew: The Quiet had happened on March 14th, thirty years ago. I'd been four years old, which meant I didn't remember the before — not the way people who were older remembered it. What I remembered was the after. The silence where the machines had been. The way adults spoke about it in hushed tones that children understand as sacred, the tone people use when they're talking about something that broke them. My father had been a telecommunications engineer. After The Quiet, there was nothing for a telecommunications engineer to do. He'd spent three years trying to rebuild something — anything — before he accepted that the infrastructure was gone and the knowledge to rebuild it was dying with the people who'd held it, and the materials to rebuild it were being consumed by the scavenger economy faster than anyone could stop. He'd died of pneumonia when I was nine. My mother had died the year before, of something the sector medic called a cascade infection. I'd grown up in the collective housing block on the west side of Haven Falls, raised by a rotating cast of neighbors who each had too little to give but gave it anyway.

I'd joined the militia at seventeen because it was the only organization in the sector that offered something resembling a future. I'd discovered I had a talent for electronics, or rather, for understanding electronics the way my father had tried to teach me before he died. The militia had sent me to a training program run by an ex-military signals officer named Brennan, and Brennan had taught me Morse code and radio theory and the principles of antenna design, and I had learned all of it in a month and a half and Brennan had looked at me one afternoon and said: Your father would have been useful to us.

It was meant as a compliment. I'd never been sure how to take it.

What I also knew: In the militia, before I left, I'd heard rumors. Not facts. Rumors. The kind of thing passed between men on night watch when the shift was long and the cold made you want to talk about something that mattered. That The Quiet hadn't been an accident. That the cascade had been too clean, too complete, too perfectly destructive of electronic infrastructure and not destructive of anything else. No fires. No radiation beyond the immediate EM pulse. People hadn't died from The Quiet directly. They'd died from what came after — the collapse of food distribution, medical systems, water treatment, heat in winter. The cascade itself had been almost surgical. Hit the infrastructure. Leave the people.

Leave the people, was the phrase one of the night-watch men had used. He'd said it with a particular inflection, the inflection of someone who thought that wasn't an accident either. I'd dismissed it at the time. I'd been twenty-two and I hadn't had much patience for conspiracy theories. I had patience for things I could take apart and understand.

Now I was thirty-four, and I had a piece of paper in front of me with seven words on it.

THE QUIET WAS ENGINEERED. THEY'RE STILL WATCHING.

I looked at the receiver. The needle on the signal strength indicator — an analog gauge I'd calibrated myself, salvaged from a pressure sensor — was resting at zero. The frequency was dead again. Just static. Just the endless background noise of a world that had forgotten how to talk to itself.

I turned the transmitter side on. Low power, 5 watts, the most I could reliably generate from the battery bank I kept charged with a bicycle generator in the room below. I keyed in a short probe: a standard military acknowledgment code, the kind Brennan had drilled into me fifteen years ago. Short-short-long. Long. Short-long-short.

I waited.

Nothing.

I keyed it again.

Nothing.

The frequency stayed dead for two hours. I sat there for all of it, which told me something about my own state of mind that I chose not to examine too closely. When the cold made my fingers too stiff to comfortably manage the key, I wrapped my hands around a tin cup of water I'd warmed on the small alcohol stove in the corner, and I thought about the phrase they're still watching and what it meant if it was true.

Watching required observers. Observers required presence, communication, organization. Organization required resources and infrastructure. In the thirty years since The Quiet, no one had demonstrated the capacity for any of that beyond the local level. The council controlled Haven Falls. The warlords controlled the outer sectors. Beyond that, as far as anyone knew, it was independent settlements and bare survival and the slow work of trying to reconstruct something from nothing.

If someone had the capacity to watch — to monitor, to maintain surveillance, to coordinate — on any meaningful scale, that meant one of two things. Either they'd never lost that capacity, which meant they'd been sheltered from The Quiet. Or they'd rebuilt it, which meant they had resources and knowledge that made them categorically different from everyone else in this broken world.

Either option was dangerous. Either option made the question of who had sent this signal not merely interesting but urgent.

I closed the notebook. Tucked it into the inside pocket of my jacket, which was military surplus canvas lined with salvaged insulation. Turned the receiver's power down to minimum to conserve the battery. Sat for another minute listening to the static.

Then I thought about Elena.

Elena Vasquez had been my superior officer in the militia before I left. She'd left two years before I had, under circumstances neither of us discussed. She now ran a messaging service out of the old library building on the north edge of the commercial district — a courier network that connected six of the seven sectors, the most sophisticated communications infrastructure in Haven Falls outside the council's own telegraph. She had contacts everywhere. She knew things. More than that, she had a gift for analysis that I'd always respected: the ability to take fragments of information and see the shape of the whole from the pieces, the way you might reconstruct a shattered object by the geometry of its edges.

If anyone would know what to make of seven words on a military frequency, it was Elena.

I thought about going to her. I thought about the walk across three sectors in the dark, which was inadvisable. I thought about waiting until morning, which seemed reasonable, which made me distrust the instinct because reasonable often meant comfortable and comfortable often meant slow.

I looked at the piece of paper again.

THEY'RE STILL WATCHING.

I left the receiver on minimum power and went downstairs to sleep, or to try to. The paper stayed in my jacket pocket. I could feel it there, the way you feel something that doesn't belong.

In the morning, I would go to Elena.

In the morning, I would find out if she'd heard anything.

That much I could hold.

I lay on the cot in the dark and listened to the rain that had started sometime after midnight, drumming on the concrete block walls I'd built myself, and I thought about my father standing in the rubble of a world he'd helped connect, trying to understand how someone had managed to pull it all down in a single afternoon.

I thought about that for a long time.

The rain didn't stop until dawn.