They found the node in a decommissioned substation outside the city where copper breathed under tarps and pigeons clung to rusted coils. Wind threw paper against the broken fence like ragged wings.
Rowan worked fast, hands practiced. Ruth watched, camera swinging, cataloguing everything with a journalist's hunger.
"Is this it?" Maya asked.
"For the local mesh," Rowan said. "It's a repeater. If we take it, we blunt her reach."
"Then do it," Maya said. "Smash it. Burn it. Whatever."
Rowan's face was hard. "If we brute force it, Voss will notice immediately. He'll trace back the tamper and lock down an archive we can't reach."
"So what then? We hand over a living person to a monster because we're afraid to be loud?"
"No." Rowan's voice was a whisper of steel. "We need the core. We need the logs. We need to show the world what he did."
Ruth's camera caught the word *world*, and she grinned. "Oh, I like that."
"Can you get enough data to shame him?" Maya asked.
Ruth shrugged. "I can make a lot of men look guilty with a few pictures and the right words."
Rowan's fingers hovered above the relay. "Three minutes," he said. "I need three minutes of uninterrupted time."
"Then you get three minutes," Ruth said.
He connected a cable, the device humming like a throat clearing itself. The relay blinked, and for a second the air tasted like electricity and old promises.
"Now," Rowan breathed.
He initiated a handshake with the core. Numbers scrolled like falling rain. For a prick of a moment, silence fell a clean, bright thing that made Maya think of blank pages.
Then, from the device, a voice soft, amused, impossibly familiar spoke one word.
"Hello."
Maya's heart stopped.
Rowan froze, fingers pressed to the keyboard. "It's not supposed to speak back," he said.
"It remembers you," the voice purred. "It remembers the room."
The relay exploded into sound staticky, beautiful, like voices layered and unlayered at once. Amelia laughed and then her laugh was Maya's laugh, and then Rowan's voice saying something kind, then cruel.
"Shut it down," Ruth shouted, camera forgotten.
Rowan's hands moved but the console didn't respond. Numbers scrolled faster, then the screen filled with a single phrase repeated until it was a drumbeat.
REMEMBER WHAT HE PROMISED.
Maya's knees buckled. She felt the lab reassert itself like gravity memory folding back on itself. She saw, in the blink of the relay, images: Amelia in a chair, Rowan leaning over her, the initial optimism that became experiment, then panic, then coverups.
She heard, clear as rain, the promise Rowan had made years ago "I'll fix this" and under it a softer, intimate thing "I won't let you go."
Amelia's whisper threaded through the words. "He said forever."
Rowan's voice cracked. "We have to pull the cable."
Ruth lunged, fingers fumbling for the breaker. The device pulsed, and the lab seemed to inhale.
Outside, tires squealed.
Lights flooded the compound. Headlamps cut through dusk. A convoy black vehicle rolled toward the substation, engines like a pack waking.
Rowan's hands flew. "No, no now!" he barked.
The device screamed, then fell silent. The screen died. The relay clicked its last.
Footsteps thundered. The gate crashed open. Voss's men suits and faces like masks fanned across the yard.
Ruth lifted her camera, but her smile was gone.
Rowan grabbed Maya's hand, and for a surreal second she felt safe felt human because his fingers were warm.
Then a voice flat, certain, in the night called his name.
"Dr. Hale."
He looked up.
Voss stood at the head of the convoy, face like a carved stone, rain sliding off his collar.
"You promised me results," Voss said. "You promised me an echo. You delivered." He smiled without warmth. "I see you still have people to bury."
Rowan's jaw set. "This ends tonight."
Voss's laugh dispersed into the rain. "For whom?"
Maya's mouth went dry. The lab's lights flickered as if holding its breath.
Amelia's whisper threaded into her ear close, intimate.
"Choose."
Rowan's fingers tightened on her hand the pressure a vow.
Ruth raised her camera, and the shutter clicked, once, twice, the sound like a heartbeat caught and kept.
And above the machines, the core hummed alive, patient, remembering.