The Last Frequency

The radio hadn't made a sound in four hundred and ninety-three days.

Mara kept it anyway. It sat on the shelf above her workbench — a military surplus unit, olive drab, with a cracked case she'd repaired with electrical tape and a hand-crank generator that worked when the batteries didn't. She wound it every morning the way her father had wound his watch, a ritual that had nothing to do with expectation and everything to do with not becoming the kind of person who stopped.

The settlement at Harper's Crossing had forty-one people, two working vehicles, and enough stored grain to last until the second harvest if the creek didn't flood again. They had built systems — water rotation, watch schedules, medical triage — the kind of small dignities that separated living from surviving. Mara had helped build most of them. She was not a leader, which was useful, because leaders in Harper's Crossing had a poor survival record and she intended to see her daughter turn seven.

Cass was five now, with her father's dark eyes and the particular pragmatism of children who had never known electricity to be reliable. She understood that the generator ran for two hours in the evenings if they had fuel, that the water pump required priming before use, that certain berries were safe and others were not and the distinction was worth your life. She was not afraid of the dark. She was afraid of the coughing sickness, which was reasonable.

Mara was at the workbench cleaning the water filter when the radio spoke.

Not static. Not interference. A voice.

She knocked the filter housing off the shelf and caught it without looking, because seventeen months of vigilance don't stop just because something impossible is happening. She set the housing down and crossed to the shelf in three steps and turned the volume dial with hands that were, she noticed with some distant professional interest, completely steady.

"— repeat, this is Station Ardent. If you are receiving this transmission, you are within range of the Ardent recovery network. We are broadcasting on the hour from coordinates forty-one degrees north, eighty-nine degrees west. We have medical personnel, food stores, and power generation. We are not a military installation. We are not government. We are — "

Static. Then the voice again, cleaner.

"— counting survivors. Please respond on this frequency. We will listen on the hour, every hour, until we hear you. If you cannot transmit, mark your location with a green signal — "

Static. Silence.

Then nothing.

Mara stood at the shelf with her hand still on the volume dial. The radio was quiet again, the same dead quiet it had been for four hundred and ninety-three days, but it was a different kind of quiet now — the quiet of something that had spoken once and might speak again.

She looked at her daughter in the doorway, who had been woken by the noise and was watching Mara with the careful attention of a child who understood that her mother's face was a reliable weather system.

"Was that a person?" Cass asked.

"Yes," Mara said.

"Far away?"

She did the math. Forty-one degrees north, eighty-nine west. Illinois, maybe, or Iowa. Two hundred miles. Maybe two-fifty.

"Far," she said. "But not impossible."

She could feel the rest of the settlement already stirring — thin walls, everyone awake at 3 a.m. for different reasons, the particular alertness of people who had learned to trust the sounds that woke them. By dawn everyone would know. And by dawn she would need to have thought through what she was going to say, because she already understood something that would take the others longer to reach:

Two hundred miles was a journey. And someone needed to make it.

She wound the radio again. Then she got out her maps.