Ayesha Malhotra
Part 1 – Silence After the Flare
The desert had always been quiet, but after the flare, silence was something else entirely. It pressed against the windows, settled on the roof tiles, thickened the air between words. Before, there had been the hum of ceiling fans, the tinny burst of radio jingles from the next-door grocer’s shop, the shriek of kids playing cricket on the dust-patched street. But the morning after the sky burned orange and green, none of that returned. The fans sat useless. The grocer closed his shutters. The cricket bat lay abandoned in the sand. It was as though someone had cut a thread that held the world together, and now everything dangled loose, swinging without rhythm.
Maya Kapoor sat cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, staring at the blank face of her phone. She had pressed the power button so many times the plastic was hot, but it remained dead, no bars, no network, no little spinning circles to reassure her that life was waiting somewhere out there. Her mother’s landline was worse—just a long, flat silence when she lifted the receiver, as if the world had stopped answering calls.
People in town whispered words like apocalypse and judgement, though in the Kapoors’ two-room house, her mother preferred quieter explanations. “It’s only a solar flare,” she kept saying, as though the word only could shrink the scale of disaster. She boiled tea over the gas stove, straightened clothes that no longer needed ironing, tried to keep her routines. But Maya noticed her mother’s hands trembled whenever she turned the pages of the newspaper—two days old, already irrelevant. The printing press had stopped since the satellites died. No new edition arrived.
On the third evening after the flare, Maya went to the roof. The desert horizon, usually jagged with radio towers and satellite dishes, now looked oddly skeletal. One of the taller towers, on a hill outside town, had collapsed in the night. Its steel bones angled down like a broken arm. She remembered her father taking her up there once, when she was ten. “Signals ride farther when the ground is high,” he’d said, grinning under the brim of his dusty hat. She hadn’t understood then. She only remembered the way his hand rested on the railing, strong and warm, the smell of engine grease always clinging to his shirt.
He was gone now—heart attack last winter, sudden as a fuse blowing—and the house felt emptier than even the silence could explain.
That night, restless and unable to sleep, Maya wandered to the garage. Her mother rarely went there anymore; it still smelled of her father—metal shavings, solder, oil. Dust sat thick over his old workbench, the lamp crooked at an angle, wires spilling like veins from a dismantled transistor. In the corner stood a trunk, padlocked. She had seen it before but never bothered. Now, something about the padlock glinting in her torchlight made her pause. She knelt, traced the ridges of the metal, and tried the key hooks that still hung by the door. The third key clicked.
Inside lay rows of notebooks, their covers stained with oil, and beneath them, wrapped in an old army blanket, a ring of brass keys unlike any she had seen. One was long, industrial, marked with faded red paint. Another had “TOWER” etched faintly on its bow.
Maya sat back on her heels. The tower on the hill.
She pulled one of the notebooks free. The first pages were filled with neat handwriting, technical sketches of circuits, wavelengths, antenna lengths. Later entries looked stranger—columns of numbers, rows of symbols that reminded her of puzzles, grids with certain squares blacked out. She flipped further and saw, scrawled in large shaky letters: Keep transmitting. Someone will always listen.
Her father had never shown these to her. She remembered him bent over the bench, soldering iron glowing, but she’d thought it was just tinkering, a hobby for nights when he couldn’t sleep. Now it felt heavier, purposeful.
She closed the notebook, heart racing in the silence. A thought rose, unwanted but insistent: what if the tower still worked?
The next afternoon, while her mother bartered for kerosene at the market, Maya packed a small bag: water bottle, notebook, torch. She slipped the brass keys into her pocket and walked out past the last row of houses, where the desert stretched wide, its sand baked white under the September sun. The hill rose like a dull shadow ahead, and the closer she came, the more her chest tightened.
The tower looked abandoned. Its steel frame was rust-streaked, wires dangling like dry vines. A padlocked door clung to a concrete base. She tried the first key—no click. The second key slid in, turned, and the door yawned open with a groan that echoed inside the chamber.
Dust swirled in the stale air. Old transmitters lined the walls, their switches dulled, their labels faded. Cobwebs trembled in the corners. Yet when she touched the main console, it felt solid, as though waiting.
She remembered her father’s voice again: Signals ride farther when the ground is high.
It was foolish. It was reckless. And yet, when the sun bled down behind the desert line and shadows stretched like bruises, Maya sat at the console, pressed one switch, then another. Lights flickered—dim, hesitant, but alive. A hum grew in the wires. She adjusted the dials, imitating half-forgotten motions she had watched as a child.
Finally, she picked up the microphone. Her hand shook so badly she almost dropped it. She pressed the button, the static roaring in her ears, and whispered:
“This is Maya Kapoor, from Rajasthan desert sector. If anyone can hear this… I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know if this works. But if you’re out there—”
Her throat closed. She released the button. The static hissed back, indifferent. She nearly shut it all down, embarrassed by her own foolishness.
Then—
A crackle, sharper than before. A burst of static, broken by something unmistakable: a voice.
“Hello? Who is this?”
Maya froze.
The microphone trembled in her hand.
Someone was listening.
Part 2 – The Tower on the Hill
For a moment Maya thought she had imagined it—the voice cracking through static like a mirage in the desert heat. She held her breath, ears straining. The microphone buzzed against her damp palm. The hiss grew louder, then softened, reshaped itself into syllables, shaky but human.
“Hello? Who is this?”
Her heart slammed against her ribs. She looked around the empty chamber, as if her father might suddenly appear to explain what she’d done. But the tower was silent except for the trembling fan above and the low whine of the transmitter. She swallowed. Her thumb found the switch again.
“This is…” Her voice broke, too small, too raw. She cleared her throat, tried again. “This is Maya Kapoor. Who are you?”
The static swallowed the words, and for a long stretch she thought the line had gone dead. Then, faint but certain: “Kian. I’m—” The rest blurred into noise, like a sentence scribbled and smudged in rain. “You’re… in Rajasthan?”
Maya’s mouth went dry. Someone out there had heard her. Someone whose name she now knew. “Yes,” she whispered into the microphone, her breath fogging the metal grille. “Rajasthan desert sector. Small town. Who are you? Where are you?”
A pause. A crackle. Then: “Delhi outskirts. Everything’s… broken here. No phones. No net. People panicking. You?”
Maya’s eyes stung. She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “Quiet,” she said. “Too quiet.”
She hadn’t expected an answer, hadn’t expected her words to travel anywhere. Yet now, with the static carrying Kian’s voice back and forth, the silence of the last days cracked open. For the first time since the flare, she didn’t feel entirely stranded.
They spoke in fragments, the signal collapsing every few sentences. His voice was younger than she expected—steady but frayed at the edges. He asked about the desert heat, about the tower, about whether she had power. She asked about Delhi, but he faltered, his words cutting out before he could describe it. All she caught was “shops looted” and “sister missing.”
When the console lights dimmed and the hum softened, Maya knew the tower had strained enough for one night. She lowered the microphone, pulse still racing. The air felt different. Charged. She packed the notebook back into her bag, locked the door with the brass key, and descended the hill with trembling legs.
At home, her mother was kneading dough in the kitchen, sweat darkening her cotton sari. “Where were you?” she asked without looking up.
“Nowhere,” Maya said too quickly, dropping her bag by the door.
Her mother’s hands stilled, fingers buried in flour. “Nowhere is a dangerous place, these days. Don’t go wandering. Do you hear me?”
Maya nodded, throat tight. The lie clung bitter on her tongue. She almost wanted to confess—about the notebooks, the keys, the voice—but some instinct pressed her back. Not yet. Not until she understood what it meant.
That night, sleep refused her. Every time she closed her eyes, she heard the crackle again, heard her own shaky voice answering into the void. And then, like an echo, Kian’s: Everything’s broken here.
The next day stretched long and airless. Neighbors huddled outside under neem trees, trading rumors. Someone claimed the army had sealed the nearest city. Someone else swore more flares were coming, worse than the first. A boy she knew from school insisted planes were falling from the sky. Everyone had theories; no one had news.
Maya stayed quiet, fingering the edge of her father’s notebook hidden under her dupatta. The symbols seemed to swim whenever she stared at them too long—rows of circles, dashes, slashes. Were they codes? Maps? Warnings? She didn’t know. But she remembered Kian’s voice when he asked, almost urgently, “Do you have more of those notes?”
By evening she couldn’t hold back. She told her mother she was visiting a friend, slipped away before questions could follow, and made the climb again. The desert sun bled out behind her, the air cooling, the shadows lengthening. The tower loomed tall and brittle against the violet sky, like the skeleton of something that once breathed.
Inside, the dust smelled the same, old metal and rust. She flicked the switches, coaxing the hum awake, and leaned into the microphone.
“Kian? It’s Maya. Are you there?”
The silence stretched. She tapped the mic, nerves rising. Then, faint but alive: “You came back.”
Maya let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Of course I did.”
He laughed softly, crackling through static. “Thought maybe I imagined you.”
“No. I’m real,” she said, surprising herself with how fiercely she meant it.
They talked longer that night. The pauses between their words still filled with hissing static, but slowly, carefully, sentences formed. He described the chaos in Delhi—markets stripped bare, people fighting over petrol, soldiers patrolling without explanation. His parents had sent him and his sister to stay with relatives, but in the confusion she had vanished. He had been searching since, listening for anything.
Maya told him about the desert, about how the stillness scared her more than the noise. She didn’t mention her father at first, only that she had found old notebooks. When she read a few numbers aloud, she heard Kian inhale sharply.
“These look familiar,” he said. “Emergency sirens near the airport use sequences like that. They’ve been blaring at random since the flare.”
“Sirens?” Maya asked, frowning.
“Like warnings. Or… codes.”
Her father’s words rushed back to her: Keep transmitting. Someone will always listen.
When she finally stumbled home past midnight, her mother was waiting at the door, arms folded, face drawn tight.
“Where?” she demanded.
Maya froze. “Just… with friends.”
Her mother’s eyes searched hers, sharp and weary. Then, without a word, she turned and walked back inside. The silence between them was heavier than any scolding.
Maya lay awake until dawn, notebook open on her lap. The symbols seemed to flicker in the first light, like a language on the edge of recognition. She thought of Kian’s voice, thought of the sirens he’d described, thought of her father’s hands scribbling late into the night.
The tower was no longer just a skeleton of steel on the hill. It was a heartbeat, faint but insistent. And now that she’d heard it, she couldn’t unhear it.
Part 3 – A Voice in the Static
The third night at the tower, Maya felt less like an intruder and more like a trespasser into her own father’s unfinished story. The desert wind followed her up the hill, rattling the metal frame as though testing her resolve. By now the brass key turned easily in the padlock; the door groaned like an old guardian recognizing her return. Dust swirled in the beam of her torch as she climbed the narrow stairs to the console room.
Her fingers no longer fumbled with the switches. The machine came alive quicker, the hum steadier, as though grateful for use. She pressed the microphone to her lips, her voice a whisper that trembled but did not break.
“Kian? It’s Maya again. Are you there?”
The static hissed, stretched long. Then, as though someone had leaned close from a hundred miles away: “You came back.”
Relief warmed her chest. “I said I would.”
A faint laugh threaded through the noise. “Good. Thought maybe the desert swallowed you.”
“Not yet,” she said.
They talked longer this time, no longer strangers but not yet friends, their words stitched together by fragile bursts of clarity. Kian’s voice was uneven, cut by interference, but behind it lay a steadiness she clung to. He described the city at dusk, the air heavy with smoke, soldiers blocking highways, rumors of rationing. The flare had not only silenced communication; it had cracked something fragile in people’s trust. “It’s like everyone’s waiting for the next collapse,” he said.
Maya told him about the desert’s stillness—the empty cricket field, the shuttered grocer’s shop, the sky that looked bruised at night. “Silence here feels like… a warning,” she admitted.
When she mentioned her father’s notebooks, Kian grew sharper, more alert. “Read one to me,” he urged.
She flipped to a page filled with columns of numbers. Clearing her throat, she read slowly: “Zero-one-eight-nine. Three-four-seven-two. Five-five-one-zero.”
The static buzzed. Then Kian’s voice, low: “Maya, those sound like the sequences from the emergency sirens here. They go off at odd hours—random, we thought. But maybe not.”
Her pulse quickened. “What do you mean?”
“Maybe they’re not warnings,” he said. “Maybe they’re signals.”
The thought lodged in her mind like a thorn. Her father had always been precise, his notebooks meticulous. If these were signals, who were they for? Who was meant to hear them?
Before she could ask more, the console lights dimmed. The hum faltered. The tower, exhausted, surrendered to silence.
The following day, Maya moved through her house like a ghost. Her mother hummed tunelessly while sweeping, but Maya caught the tension in her shoulders, the way she glanced toward the road every few minutes as if expecting someone. Maya nearly confessed then—about Kian, about the codes, about the possibility her father had left behind something larger than either of them. But her mother’s face, lined with new weariness, kept her quiet.
Instead, Maya carried the notebooks up to her room. She spread them across her bed, flipping through pages filled with cramped notes. Her father’s handwriting grew shakier toward the end, words trailing off mid-sentence, replaced by more of the strange symbols. Circles connected by arrows. Grids shaded like puzzles. Margins filled with dates that stretched backward years, long before she’d noticed his late nights in the garage.
At the bottom of one page, in jagged script: Don’t let them bury it.
Maya pressed her fingers against the words, as though they might still hold his warmth.
That evening she climbed the hill earlier, the horizon still lit with orange. She wanted more time, more answers. When she switched the console on, the hum rose like a heartbeat.
“Kian?” she called.
His reply came sooner, steadier. “You sound clearer tonight. Did you change something?”
“Maybe I’m learning,” she said with a small smile.
They spoke of ordinary things at first—her mother’s cooking, his memory of eating chaat with his sister on Delhi streets, the strange quiet that followed them both now. The conversation, fragile as glass, held a comfort neither wanted to break.
But the codes kept tugging. Maya read another sequence aloud. This time, Kian finished it with her.
“I’ve heard that one,” he said. “Near the old airport. It played just before soldiers sealed off the hangars.”
Her stomach knotted. “What if my father was sending those codes?”
“Then he was warning someone,” Kian said. “Or trying to.”
A long silence stretched between them, the static hissing like breath. Then Kian spoke, softer. “Maya… my sister disappeared the night of the flare. She went to buy candles. She never came back. Some people say the army took in civilians near the airport. If your codes match those sirens… maybe they’re connected.”
Maya gripped the microphone tighter. “Then we have to figure them out.”
Her own voice startled her—certain, determined. The tower no longer felt like a relic. It felt alive, urgent.
As she descended the hill that night, the desert wind sharp against her cheeks, she noticed something unusual. A car sat parked at the base of the hill, its windows dark, its engine off. She slowed, heart thudding. No one got out. No door opened. But she felt the weight of eyes, heavy and unblinking.
She quickened her pace, slipping down the side path until the car vanished from view. Her mind reeled. Had someone followed her? Was the tower already under watch?
By the time she reached home, sweat clung to her skin despite the cool night. Her mother glanced up from the cot, lips parting as if to question her, but Maya brushed past, muttering something about being tired.
Alone in her room, she pressed her forehead to the cool wall. The world had already ended once, when the flare took the skies. She couldn’t shake the fear it was unraveling again—only this time, she was tangled in its center.
But beneath the fear, a flicker of resolve burned. She had heard Kian’s voice in the static. She had glimpsed patterns in her father’s codes. And she knew, with a clarity that startled her, that she could not stop now.
The desert silence was no longer silence. It was a waiting space, a gap between transmissions. And somewhere beyond it, Kian was listening.
Part 4 – The Codes
The morning after she saw the car at the base of the hill, Maya couldn’t eat. Her mother slid a plate of parathas toward her, the smell of fried ghee rising warm and familiar, but Maya only tore small pieces, chewing without tasting. She kept glancing at the window, half expecting the glint of glass, the dark frame of a figure waiting.
Her mother finally snapped. “What are you looking for? Ghosts?”
Maya forced a smile. “Just light.” But inside, unease gnawed. If someone knew she’d been climbing the hill, what did they want? The tower was abandoned, useless to anyone but her. Unless… unless her father’s notebooks weren’t as secret as she thought.
When her mother stepped out to fetch water, Maya hurried back to her room. She pulled the journals onto her bed, flipping frantically. The symbols mocked her: loops and lines, slashes like scars. She spread them in a fan, searching for order. Her eyes caught a sequence circled in red:
7 – 2 – 4 – 9
The handwriting beneath was shaky, almost fevered. Airport—checkpoint.
Her pulse leapt. The same night Kian had said soldiers sealed the hangars. She grabbed another notebook, found 3 – 9 – 0 – 1 scrawled beside power lines collapse. The sequence matched one she had read aloud. The codes weren’t random. They were tied to events. Her father had tracked them like a map of disasters.
A memory rose—her father at the workbench, whispering into the mic long after midnight. She used to think he was talking to himself. Now she knew better.
That evening, when the desert sky bruised purple, she climbed the hill faster, her notebook clutched like a talisman. The tower welcomed her with its groan and hum. She pressed the mic, her voice urgent.
“Kian? I think I know what the codes mean.”
Static hissed, then his voice broke through: “Tell me.”
She read the sequences aloud, explained the notes beside them. He listened without interrupting. When she finished, silence stretched, thicker than static. Finally, he said, “Maya… if your father predicted these events, he wasn’t just recording. He was part of something.”
Her throat tightened. “Part of what?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve heard rumors here. People say the flare wasn’t natural. That it was… triggered.”
The word lodged like a stone. “Triggered? By who?”
“By those in charge,” he said softly. “Maybe military. Maybe bigger. They talk about controlling skies, satellites, communication. If that’s true…” He trailed off, the static filling the gap.
Maya gripped the desk. The flare that had silenced the world, that had stolen her father months before—it might not have been the sun’s accident. It might have been someone’s decision.
Her father’s final words in the notebook echoed: Don’t let them bury it.
They began decoding together. Each night, Maya read sequences, and Kian cross-checked them with sirens he’d heard in the city. Slowly, patterns surfaced. Codes repeated before blackouts. Numbers matched troop movements. It was as though her father had left a cipher for her to follow.
But the more they uncovered, the more Maya felt eyes on her. Once, while fetching water at dawn, she saw tire tracks near the hill that hadn’t been there before. Another time, she caught a stranger standing at the market edge, staring too long before turning away.
She didn’t tell her mother. She didn’t want to see that tremor in her hands worsen. Instead, she buried her fear in the tower’s static, in Kian’s voice.
One night, after hours of reading codes, Maya leaned back, exhausted. “Why us?” she whispered. “Why did my father leave this for me?”
The line crackled, then Kian’s voice, gentle: “Maybe because you were the only one he trusted.”
The words sank deep. For the first time, Maya felt the weight not only of discovery but of inheritance.
Her bond with Kian deepened in ways she hadn’t expected. Between codes and conspiracies, they shared fragments of themselves. He told her about sketching graffiti in Delhi alleys, about his sister’s laugh when she dared him to climb rooftops. She told him about chasing kites in the desert winds, about her father teaching her constellations by name.
Sometimes they fell silent, letting the static fill the space like a shared breath. Those moments felt more intimate than words.
But always, the codes pulled them back. They weren’t just puzzles; they were warnings written into the bones of the blackout. And the more Maya read, the clearer it became: another flare was coming.
One sequence repeated with eerie precision. It had been scribbled across three notebooks, underlined twice. 9 – 1 – 5 – 6. Beside it, in her father’s trembling hand: Second wave.
She pressed her forehead against the console, breath shallow. “Kian… if he was right once, he could be right again.”
Static hummed. Then his voice, low and steady: “Then we don’t have much time.”
When she left the tower that night, the desert air was sharp, the stars scattered like cold sparks. At the base of the hill, she stopped. The same car was there—engine silent, windows black. This time the driver’s door clicked open.
A figure stepped out, tall, shadowed. Maya’s body locked.
He didn’t move toward her. He only stood, as if marking her presence, then slid back into the car. The headlights flared once, blinding her, before the vehicle rolled away into the night.
Her legs trembled as she hurried home. Whoever they were, they weren’t guessing anymore. They knew.
That night, lying awake, Maya thought of her father hunched over the desk, of the words he’d scrawled like warnings to himself. Keep transmitting. Someone will always listen.
She had found someone. And together they had uncovered a truth too sharp to be ignored. But now others were listening too.
The tower was no longer just a secret. It was a beacon. And beacons didn’t only call friends. They called enemies too.
Part 5 – Shadows Around the Tower
The desert had grown different since the night the car followed her. It wasn’t just sand and silence anymore; it was eyes, hidden in the shimmer of heat. Even in daylight, walking to the well with her mother, Maya felt watched. Every footprint on the dirt road seemed fresh. Every motorcycle passing too slowly felt deliberate.
Her mother noticed her restlessness. “You’re jumpy,” she said one morning, tying her dupatta tight against the sun. “As if ghosts are chasing you.”
Maya nearly laughed. Ghosts would have been easier. Ghosts didn’t leave tire tracks. Ghosts didn’t sit in idling cars at the base of hills.
That afternoon, she slipped into the garage. Her father’s trunk lay open, journals scattered where she’d left them. She crouched, tracing the etchings on the brass keys with her thumb. “What were you involved in?” she whispered, as if the oil-stained air might answer.
A voice startled her. “Your father’s work kept the whole sector buzzing.”
Maya spun. Old Mr. Iqbal, her father’s former colleague, stood at the garage door, leaning on his cane. His eyes, pale and rheumy, still carried a sharpness that unsettled her.
“You knew?” she asked.
Iqbal chuckled, dry as sand. “Everyone knew he was more than a hobbyist. Only your mother preferred not to.”
Maya’s chest tightened. “What was he doing?”
Iqbal stepped inside, his cane tapping against concrete. “The tower was government once. Long before your father. They wanted radio lines strong enough to cut through any blackout. He built on it. Improved it. But when he began keeping his own records… well, that’s when men in uniforms started circling.”
Maya’s breath caught. “Uniforms?”
Iqbal nodded. “He said they didn’t like questions. Didn’t like him storing codes outside official files. I told him to burn the notebooks. He said no. He said—” Iqbal’s eyes met hers. “He said one day his daughter might need them.”
The words struck her like a blow. She wanted to ask more, but Iqbal raised his hand, weary. “Careful, child. Towers call more than friends. They call hunters too.” Then he shuffled away, leaving her heart thundering.
That night, she nearly didn’t go. The thought of headlights at the hill’s base froze her legs. But when the desert wind rattled the shutters, she found herself packing the notebook anyway. If she stopped now, the silence would crush her.
The tower loomed, its steel ribs glinting faintly under starlight. She slipped inside, climbed the stairs, coaxed the console to life.
“Kian?” she whispered.
The reply came swift, crackling but firm. “Maya. I was waiting.”
Relief washed her raw. She told him about Iqbal, about the tower’s history, about the soldiers. His voice grew tight. “Then it’s worse than we thought. If your father kept codes hidden, someone wants them gone. And if they’re watching you…”
“I saw them,” she admitted. Her voice shook. “A car. They didn’t come close, just… watched.”
Static swelled. Then Kian’s words cut through: “Don’t stop coming. That’s what they want.”
She pressed the mic harder, as if her resolve could carry through metal. “I won’t.”
They dove back into the codes. She read sequences. He matched them to events. The patterns sharpened, a lattice of warnings stretching across states. And always, that number repeating—9-1-5-6—like a drumbeat counting down.
At one point, Kian’s voice softened. “Do you ever feel like we’re the last two left?”
Maya closed her eyes. “Sometimes. But when I hear you… it feels less lonely.”
Silence followed, but not empty—warm, like a hand held across distance.
Descending the hill later, she froze. Two men stood by the road. Not villagers. Their silhouettes were too still, too deliberate. One smoked, the ember glowing. The other tapped something metallic against his palm—keys, or perhaps a lighter.
Maya crouched low, heart pounding. If she ran, they’d see. If she waited, dawn might betray her. She slipped down a side path, stones cutting her hands, until the village lights appeared below.
She didn’t tell her mother. Couldn’t. But that night, lying awake, she understood: the tower wasn’t just her father’s legacy now. It was bait. And she was already on the hook.
Part 6 – The Bond Across Miles
The days blurred, thin as old paper, and Maya measured them not by sunlight but by transmissions. Morning meant silence and suspicion, evenings meant fear, and night meant Kian’s voice crackling through the dark—steady, impossible, hers.
She hid it from her mother with a precision that unnerved her. She pretended to nap when dusk fell, then slipped out through the garage while the older woman swept the yard. Her body learned the climb by instinct now—the rough stones under her palms, the lean of her weight against the wind as the hill rose. The tower’s groan as she unlocked its door felt almost like welcome.
The hum rose as she flipped the switches, as if the tower had been waiting too.
“Kian?”
“Here,” his voice answered at once, softer now, like something private.
The static hissed gently between their words, no longer an enemy but a lullaby.
They no longer spoke only of codes. Between numbers and symbols, fragments of themselves began slipping through.
Kian told her how his sister, Anya, used to paint the city’s concrete walls with vines and birds, bright against the grey. She would laugh at danger, he said, and laugh louder when it came closer. The night of the flare, she had walked out for candles, teasing him for panicking. The soldiers sealed the highway an hour later. He hadn’t seen her since.
Maya listened, fingers curled tight around the microphone. She thought of her father’s body slumping in the cold clinic hallway, the way silence had thundered louder than grief. “Sometimes it’s like they’re not gone,” she murmured. “Just… out of signal range.”
Kian was quiet a long time. “Maybe we just have to keep broadcasting,” he said finally. “Until they find their way back.”
The words settled deep in her bones.
Between codes, they traded pieces of their worlds.
She described the taste of dust storms, sharp as rust on the tongue. He described the smell of Delhi after rain—petrichor and old diesel. She told him about the kites she and her father had flown, paper diamonds clawing the wind. He told her how he once slept on the roof of a moving train, stars racing overhead.
Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes they didn’t speak at all, letting the static cradle them like a secret. The more the world outside frayed, the more solid the line between them became, thin but unbreakable.
But the danger never stayed far.
On the fifth night of this rhythm, Maya saw torchlight flicker at the hill’s base. Not her mother’s lantern. Too white, too sharp. She killed the console instantly, plunging the tower into black. Her breath stopped as footsteps crunched on gravel below.
She pressed herself against the wall, hardly daring to breathe. The steps paused, lingered, then receded. Minutes passed before she relit the console.
“Kian,” she whispered, voice shaking. “They were here. I heard them.”
Static roared. Then his voice: “Maya… you have to be careful. If they know you’re transmitting—”
“I won’t stop,” she said, more fiercely than she intended.
Silence. Then, soft: “I know.”
The codes kept coming, and now they worked like two halves of one mind. Maya read sequences, Kian mapped them. They pinned patterns between their words, sketching the shape of something too large to name. And always that repeating number—9-1-5-6—surfacing like a warning pulse.
One night, after hours of cracking sequences, her voice gave out. “My head’s spinning,” she muttered.
“Close your eyes,” Kian said gently.
“Then you’ll vanish.”
“I’ll be here when you open them.”
She laughed softly, though her chest ached. She closed her eyes, letting the static hum through her bones, and for the first time in months, she slept.
When she woke, dawn bruising the horizon, she knew something had changed. The fear hadn’t vanished. But it no longer felt like it owned her.
Something else did now—this strange fragile tether stretched across miles of broken world, this voice she had never seen but could no longer imagine being without.
She climbed down the hill lightheaded, clutching her father’s journal close. If the world was ending, she realized, she was glad she wasn’t facing it alone anymore.
Part 7 – The First Warning
The flare’s silence had reshaped the world into shadows, and now those shadows were stirring.
Maya sensed it in the way the neighbors spoke—lower, clipped—as if afraid their words might travel too far. She sensed it in her mother’s new habit of double-latching the door, though crime had never touched their dusty town. And she sensed it most at the tower, where the static seemed to carry not just voices but pressure, as though the air itself was bracing for something.
The codes had been growing louder.
For days, she and Kian mapped them obsessively, layering sequences across his hand-drawn city grid and her desert map. The same four digits kept surfacing—9-1-5-6—threading through different events: a blackout in Ajmer, a supply train vanishing near Gurgaon, sirens screaming outside Kian’s block with no explanation. Each time those numbers echoed, something broke.
Tonight, she read them again, her voice a whisper in the metal room. “Nine… one… five… six.”
Kian was silent for a beat too long. Then: “Maya, listen to this.”
He read back a set of coordinates he’d matched to that sequence. They pinpointed a government satellite relay station just beyond his city. “The sirens blared there last night,” he said. “And people said they saw green light in the sky.”
Her fingers went cold. “Like the first flare.”
“Exactly.”
The word hung between them like frost.
They spoke fast after that, urgency cutting through the static. Kian explained what he’d overheard in the streets: whispers that the blackout had been engineered, that the flare was part of a covert attempt to reset global communications under military control. The theory had sounded like madness before. Now, paired with her father’s codes, it felt like clarity.
Maya flipped through her father’s journals, pages trembling in her hands. And then she saw it—one entry almost torn into the paper, his pen strokes jagged, frantic:
9-1-5-6 → SECOND WAVE.
Her breath caught.
“Kian,” she whispered, “he knew. He knew there would be another.”
Static hissed. Then his voice, low: “Then we have to warn people.”
The words should have sounded heroic. Instead they felt like a cliff edge. She saw her mother’s tired face, the hollow-eyed neighbors, the two men in shadows by the road. Warning the world might mean lighting herself on fire.
Still, she said, “Yes.”
That night they planned. Kian would try to reach the relay station on his end. Maya would comb every remaining journal for a full broadcast script. If they could piece together her father’s hidden message, maybe they could send it before the second flare came.
But as they spoke, the console lights dimmed, then pulsed sharply—once, twice, like a heartbeat skipping.
“Did you see that?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Kian said, voice taut. “Power fluctuations here too. The city’s going dark block by block.”
The hum faltered. The signal shivered.
“Maya,” he said quickly, “if the tower cuts out—if I can’t reach you—keep going. Promise me.”
She gripped the microphone. “Only if you do the same.”
A pause, softer than silence. “Deal.”
Then the console went black.
The desert night yawned open around her. No hum, no lights—just the hollow echo of her own heartbeat. She sat in the dark until the cold crept through her clothes, then gathered the notebooks and locked the tower.
At the base of the hill, a single object gleamed on the ground.
A spent cigarette. Fresh.
She froze, scanning the shadows. Nothing moved. But her pulse roared in her ears. Someone had stood here while she was inside, listening.
She crushed the cigarette under her shoe and ran.
Back home, her mother dozed on the cot, her hair slipping loose from its braid. Maya stood in the doorway a long moment, guilt pressing against her ribs. If the second flare struck, it wouldn’t just take the skies. It would take people like her mother—people who didn’t know how to fight invisible storms.
She slipped into her room and laid the notebooks across the floor. They looked like fragments of a dead language. She thought of her father bent over them, of how lonely he must have been, carrying this knowledge with no one to share it with.
Now it was hers.
And she wasn’t alone anymore.
Part 8 – Break-In
The world had started to feel like glass—transparent, fragile, and full of eyes.
Maya woke that morning to a hollow stillness. Even the crows had gone silent. The journals lay open on her floor like strange wings, their symbols fluttering in the faint breeze from the cracked window. She had spent most of the night tracing them, half-convinced that if she looked long enough, they would rearrange into words. Instead, they only carved deeper into her skull.
Downstairs, her mother stirred tea, the spoon clinking slow and dull. “You’ve been pale,” she said without turning. “Too much studying?”
Maya nodded mutely. If only it were studying.
She tucked the smallest notebook into her dupatta and slipped into the garage. Dust motes spun through the weak sunlight like silent sparks. The trunk stood ajar, her father’s shadow still clinging to its corners. She hesitated only a moment before reaching for another journal, heavier and frayed at the edges.
That was when she heard it.
A soft scrape behind her.
She spun.
The side door hung open. It had been locked the night before. A sliver of sun cut through the crack—and in it, the print of a shoe.
Her skin went cold.
Before she could move, the main door banged. Two men stepped in, silhouettes blotting the light, their faces shadowed beneath caps. One carried a clipboard, the other something metallic glinting by his thigh.
Maya’s body locked.
“Property inspection,” the taller one said, too casually. His eyes swept the room, lingering on the notebooks, on the wires still curled on the workbench. “Your father’s place?”
She forced her voice steady. “Yes. It’s… private.”
The shorter man moved closer, scanning the shelves, as if measuring them. “Lot of old equipment. Any of it still working?”
“No,” she lied.
His gaze flicked to the trunk.
Maya’s heart slammed. She stepped in front of it, masking the movement as a casual shift. “All junk.”
They didn’t believe her. She saw it in the faint curl of their mouths, in the way their eyes sharpened.
Finally the tall one said, “Be careful. Old tech can be dangerous.” His tone made dangerous sound like forbidden.
They left without another word. The door clicked. Silence returned, heavier.
Maya stood frozen until her legs gave out. She sank to the floor, shaking.
They had known where to come.
That night, she didn’t wait for dusk. She left as soon as the sky bled orange, clutching the new journal to her chest. The hill felt steeper than ever, the air electric with dread.
Inside the tower, her hands shook so violently she fumbled the switches twice. When the hum finally rose, it felt thin, strained.
“Kian,” she gasped into the mic. “They came. Two men. At the garage. They saw the notebooks.”
Static roared, then his voice sliced through: “Are you safe? Are you sure they’re gone?”
“Yes—but they knew. They knew what to look for.”
A beat of silence. Then: “Maya… you have to hide them. All of them. If they think you have the codes—”
“I do have the codes.” Her voice cracked. “And if we’re right, there’s no time to hide.”
He was quiet a long time. Then, steady: “Then we move faster.”
They plunged into the new journal. The handwriting was different—rushed, almost desperate. Whole pages were filled with strings of numbers, but here and there words surfaced like bones from sand:
Sequence complete.
Pulse transmission.
They will shut it down.
Maya’s throat tightened. “He knew they were coming for him.”
“Did he leave a full message?” Kian asked.
She flipped until her fingers cramped. Then, near the back, she found it: a long paragraph in clear script, bracketed by red ink. Her father had titled it Final Broadcast. It wasn’t numbers. It was words—raw, urgent.
She read it aloud. It warned of a controlled solar event, of another coming wave stronger than the first, of the need to shut down power grids in advance to prevent a continent-wide burn. At the bottom he had scrawled: If you are hearing this, the second wave is already rising.
Maya’s vision blurred. “Kian… this is it. This is what he wanted sent.”
Static crackled sharp. “Then we send it. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes,” he said. “If those men were at your house, they’ll move on the tower soon. We beat them to it.”
Her heart hammered. “We’ll need both towers—yours and mine. A split relay.”
“Then we split the risk,” he said.
As they planned, the tower’s hum faltered again. Lights dimmed, flickered. Somewhere outside, a sound echoed—metal on stone, faint, deliberate.
Maya froze.
“Kian,” she whispered, “someone’s here.”
The static hissed back.
She killed the console and plunged the room into black. The silence outside sharpened. She crept to the door and peered through the crack.
A flashlight beam swept the hillside below. Slow. Searching.
Her breath stopped.
The beam passed, and footsteps crunched away.
She waited ten whole minutes before moving. When she slipped out, the air was ice against her sweat.
At the hill’s base, a deep groove carved the sand where tires had sat.
Back in her room, she hid the new journal under the floorboard her father had once pried loose to fix the wiring. The wood clicked softly back into place, as if sealing a pact.
Her mother stirred in her sleep, unaware.
Maya curled on the floor beside the bed, her body still trembling. Tomorrow, they would try to send her father’s message to the world. Tomorrow, the hunt might finally close around her.
But tomorrow, the truth would go out.
Even if she had to burn the tower to get it there.
Part 9 – The Choice
The dawn felt sharper, the sky too pale, as though the sun itself knew what Maya had decided. She rose before her mother, heart still pounding from a restless night. The house was heavy with quiet, the kind that made every floorboard sound like a gunshot.
She packed carefully: the final journal wrapped in cloth, a bottle of water, her father’s brass keys. When she paused at the door, she saw her mother sleeping on the cot, hair loose around her face, one arm flung over her brow. For a moment Maya nearly woke her. Tell her everything. Let her carry this too.
But the thought of her mother’s fear held her still. This was hers to finish.
The hill was silver in the early light, the tower a thin skeleton against the sky. The air smelled metallic, as if the storm had already begun.
Inside, she unlocked the console, wiped the dust from its panels with the edge of her dupatta, and laid the journal open. The words on the page glared up at her, impatient.
“Kian,” she called.
For a moment there was only static. Then: “You’re early.”
Her throat tightened with relief. “I have the message ready.”
“Good,” he said. “I’m patched in here. When you start, I’ll boost the relay from this end. You’ll have maybe fifteen minutes before they trace you.”
“Fifteen?”
“Maybe less.”
She exhaled slowly. “Then we make them count.”
They ran through the plan again—simple, brutal. She would broadcast her father’s message on every open frequency, jamming any competing signals. Kian would mirror it through the relay station he had tapped into. If all went well, the message would spread across multiple states before either tower was shut down.
If all went wrong, they would both go silent.
Before they began, Kian’s voice softened. “Maya… I have to say this now. In case we don’t get another chance.”
Her breath caught.
“You turned a dead tower into a lifeline,” he said quietly. “You made the world feel less empty. Whatever happens next—you should know that.”
Her throat ached. “Kian…”
Static swelled, carrying the space between them.
“I’ll be here,” he said finally.
She pressed the transmit button.
“This is Maya Kapoor,” she began, her voice trembling but clear. “If you can hear this, you need to know what’s coming.”
She read the message line by line, her father’s words spilling into the air like a tide. She spoke of the flare, of the evidence that it had been triggered, of the second wave rising. She warned them to shut down grids, to prepare, to resist.
Somewhere outside, a car door slammed.
Her heart stuttered.
She kept reading.
Through the crack in the tower door, she saw shapes moving—two, three, maybe more. Their voices were sharp, commanding.
“Maya,” Kian said, his voice urgent now, “they’re coming up my side too. Keep going.”
She read faster, her breath tearing. The hum of the console deepened as Kian boosted the relay. The lights flickered, straining under the surge.
The first blow hit the tower door.
Metal rang.
She gripped the mic tighter, shouting the final lines into the static: “The second wave is imminent. Do not let them silence this message. Do not—”
The door burst inward.
Two men stormed inside, their flashlights searing her eyes. One lunged for the console. Maya slammed the switch that routed the signal to its highest frequency. Sparks spat from the panel.
“Step back!” one man barked.
“No,” she said, and her voice didn’t shake this time.
The taller man grabbed the mic from her hand, but she had already locked the transmission open. The message was still spilling through the air, riding every line.
“Cut it!” someone shouted.
The console hissed, then screamed, then went dark.
The silence was deafening.
The men didn’t speak at first. They simply stared at the dead machine, then at Maya, as though measuring whether to drag her out or leave her there. Finally the taller one said, “You just made yourself very visible.”
Then they were gone.
Maya collapsed against the wall, lungs burning. Slowly, through the ringing in her ears, she heard it: the faint echo of Kian’s voice through the half-dead speaker.
“Maya—” Static—“they got me off—” Static—“but the signal carried. I saw it bounce. People heard you.”
She smiled through the tears on her face. “Then it was worth it.”
When she descended the hill near dawn, the horizon was glowing green. Not sunrise—something higher, stranger, burning through the clouds.
The second flare was coming.
And now the world knew.
Part 10 – The Last Broadcast
The desert was too still.
Not quiet, not calm—just still, as if even the wind was holding its breath.
By the time Maya reached the edge of town, her legs felt hollow. Her mind replayed the night again and again—the banging door, the sparks, the men’s eyes like cold knives. Yet louder than all of it was Kian’s voice breaking through the static: I saw it bounce. People heard you.
She clung to that.
But fear trailed her like a second shadow. The world might have heard her. So had the men who came to silence her.
Her mother was waiting when she slipped in through the garage. Not sitting—standing, rigid, a cup clutched so tight her knuckles were white.
“You were gone all night.”
Maya’s voice snagged in her throat. “I—”
“Don’t.” Her mother’s tone was flat, brittle. “I don’t want excuses. I want you safe.”
Maya saw her hands trembling. Something inside her cracked. “Ma,” she whispered. “If I don’t do this… none of us will be safe.”
Her mother blinked. Confusion flickered, then fear. “Do what?”
But Maya couldn’t explain—not the flare, not the codes, not the men on the hill. It would sound like madness until the sky burned again.
“I’ll be careful,” she said instead. “I promise.”
Her mother’s jaw tightened. Then she turned away, shoulders caving inward as though folding around a wound.
All day, the air tasted metallic. Radios stayed dead. Phones stayed blank. But something in the air felt charged, waiting—like the pause between lightning and thunder.
She waited until nightfall to climb.
The tower stood scarred from the forced entry—the door bent inward, panels scorched where sparks had spat. Inside, the console sat gutted, wires torn.
But one bulb still glowed dimly, stubborn as a heartbeat.
Maya knelt on the cold floor and began rebuilding.
Hours passed. She stripped wire with her teeth, patched melted circuits, rewound the cracked transmitter coil. Her father’s notes guided her hands even when her eyes blurred. By dawn, the hum returned—faint, shaky, but alive.
She sagged against the wall and pressed the mic.
“Kian…?”
Static hissed.
Her stomach knotted.
Then—crackling, thin: “You’re there.”
Relief washed her hollow bones. “So are you.”
He had escaped the raid at his end, he said. Soldiers swept the relay station but too late; the message had gone out. Small towns had powered down grids, some cities had cut network lines. In Delhi, people lit candles in protest as sirens blared. “They’re scared,” Kian said, “but they’re listening.”
Maya closed her eyes, exhaustion and wonder tangling inside her. “Then it worked.”
“Not fully. Not yet,” he said. “We need one last push. One more broadcast—live this time. No codes. Just tell them. Make them believe.”
Her chest tightened. “They’ll find me.”
“They already have,” he said gently. “But if the flare hits unprepared, none of this will matter.”
She thought of her mother asleep in their cracked-walled house, of the market women, the boys on the abandoned cricket field. People who didn’t even know what was about to tear through their world.
She thought of her father’s shaky script: Don’t let them bury it.
Maya drew a long, slow breath. “Okay,” she said. “One last broadcast.”
The sky was turning an eerie shade of green as she prepared. Static prickled like electricity on her skin. She cranked the transmitter to its highest frequency, overloading circuits until smoke curled faintly from the vents.
Then she pressed the mic, and spoke.
“This is Maya Kapoor. This is real. The flare wasn’t an accident. There’s another coming. Shut down your grids. Pull your power lines. Save what you can. Don’t wait for permission—do it now. If you can hear me, tell someone else. Tell everyone. Please.”
Her voice cracked but she kept going, words tearing from her chest like sparks.
Outside, the wind howled suddenly, violent, hot. The tower shuddered.
She kept speaking.
“Whoever you are—if you survive this—remember us. Remember that someone tried to warn you.”
The lights on the console flared red. Circuits screamed.
Kian’s voice came through, ragged: “They’re cutting my side. Keep going.”
Maya clutched the mic, eyes burning. “You won’t be alone,” she whispered, and slammed the override.
The tower roared.
A blinding surge of static drowned her words—and carried them farther than she could ever follow.
Silence.
Smoke curled from the console. The hum died. The tower sagged in the rising wind, hollow now, spent.
Maya sank to her knees, body shaking.
Through the shattered window she saw the horizon ignite—green fire lashing across the sky, beautiful and terrible.
The second flare had come.
And somewhere beyond the static, in cities and villages and darkened homes, sirens wailed. Lights snapped off. Power grids dropped.
The world was going dark—by choice this time.
Because they had heard her.
Because someone had listened.
END
