Last Light’s Empty Windows
The racer’s engine coughed twice before it caught, a wet, rattling sound that made Kaelen’s jaw tighten. He nursed the throttle through the canyon’s final switchback, and then the world opened up in a way that made him forget the engine entirely.
The settlement sprawled across a dried lakebed like a corpse that had been picked clean. Rusted shipping containers stacked three high formed the outer wall, their surfaces pocked with impact craters and scorch marks. Beyond them, a grid of crumbling prefab structures stretched toward a central tower that rose maybe forty meters into the darkening sky. The tower’s upper third was glass, and the last of the day’s light caught it in a way that made it look like a beacon.
It wasn’t. Kaelen knew beacons. This was a monument to something that had failed.
“Last Light,” Zara said, reading the faded sign bolted to the outer gate. The letters were stenciled in peeling white paint, and someone had spray-painted a crude skull over the final word. “Cute name.”
“It was a mining outpost,” Kaelen said. “Back before the Directorate nationalized the rare earth trade. Population peaked at twelve thousand.”
“And now?”
He killed the engine and listened. The wind moved through the empty streets, carrying grit and the distant moan of a loose door swinging on its hinges. No voices. No generators. No drone hum.
“Now it’s a ghost town.”
They rolled through the open gate—no one had bothered to close it, or maybe there was no one left to close it—and the racer’s tires crunched over a litter of broken glass and spent shell casings. Kaelen guided the vehicle down the main drag, past storefronts with shattered windows and a fuel station whose pumps had been torn from their mounts. A child’s doll lay face-down in the dust, its plastic smile cracked.
Zara leaned forward, scanning the buildings. “You said this was the neutral zone’s outpost.”
“It was. The arbiters used to run a relay station here. Coordinates, comms, a place for couriers to rest between runs.” He pointed at the central tower. “That’s the relay. If it’s still operational, we can use it to contact the zone’s council.”
“If.”
Kaelen didn’t answer. He pulled the racer to a stop in front of the tower’s base, a reinforced concrete structure with a steel door that hung slightly ajar. The door’s lock had been melted—not cut, not blown, but melted, the metal warped and bubbled like candle wax.
“That’s not scavenger work,” Zara said, her voice dropping.
“No.” Kaelen killed the engine and stepped out. The air was cold, carrying the sharp bite of ozone that had been following them since the canyon. He walked to the door and ran his fingers over the melted lock. The metal was still warm.
“How long ago?” Zara asked.
“Hours. Maybe less.”
She drew her sidearm, a battered revolver that had seen better decades, and swept the street behind them. “We should leave. Whatever did this might still be here.”
“We need the relay.” Kaelen pushed the door open, and the hinges screamed in protest. Beyond it, a narrow stairwell spiraled up into darkness. “Eclipse is thirty hours out. We don’t have time to find another outpost.”
“We don’t have time to get killed, either.”
He looked back at her. Her face was tight, the way it got when she was scared but didn’t want to admit it. The bruise on her cheek from the canyon fight had faded to a sickly yellow, but her eyes were sharp.
“You can stay with the racer,” he said. “Keep the engine warm.”
“And if you don’t come back?”
“Then you’ll know the relay’s not worth saving.”
She didn’t laugh. She just watched him with that flat, calculating look she’d worn since they’d left Gutter’s Rest. “You’re different since the canyon. You know that, right?”
Kaelen’s arm hummed. He could feel it through his boots, through his spine, a low vibration that had become as constant as his heartbeat. Echo was quiet, but she was there, coiled in the back of his skull like a cat waiting to pounce.
“I’m still me,” he said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
He turned and climbed the stairs.
The tower’s interior was a tomb. Dust coated every surface, and the air was thick with the smell of old wiring and something worse—something organic that had been left to rot. Kaelen’s boots echoed on the metal steps, each footfall a small thunderclap in the silence. His arm hummed louder, and he felt Echo stir.
*This place is dead,* she said. Her voice was a whisper in his mind, soft and feminine, like a memory of a voice. *But something here is still awake.*
“Define awake,” he muttered.
*There is a signal. Faint. Below us.*
He stopped on the landing. “Below us? The relay’s up.”
*The signal is not from the relay.*
Kaelen stood still, listening. The wind outside had died, and the silence pressed in on him like a physical weight. Then he heard it—a rhythmic thrum, barely audible, coming from somewhere beneath his feet. It was too regular to be natural. Too steady to be a machine running on its own.
“Zara,” he called down the stairwell. “I need you up here.”
Her footsteps came quickly, and she appeared at the bottom of the landing with her revolver drawn. “What is it?”
“There’s something in the basement.”
She looked at him like he’d grown a second head. “We’re in a ghost town, Kaelen. Everything’s dead. That’s the point.”
“Echo says otherwise.”
Zara’s jaw tightened at the name. She’d been avoiding it since the canyon, since she’d watched six men drive off a cliff that didn’t exist. “Your ghost is lying to you.”
*I do not lie,* Echo said. *I cannot.*
Kaelen ignored her and descended the stairs past Zara, heading for the ground floor. The basement door was at the back of the tower’s main chamber, a rusted metal hatch set into the concrete floor. It was locked with a chain and padlock, but the chain had been cut—recently, by the look of the bright metal at the break.
“Someone’s been here,” Zara said. “Someone who didn’t want to be followed.”
Kaelen pulled the hatch open. A ladder descended into darkness, and the thrum grew louder. It was a voice, he realized. Not words, but a voice—a low, mechanical chant that rose and fell in a pattern that almost sounded like speech.
“Stay behind me,” he said.
“Like hell.”
They climbed down together. The basement was a single large room, maybe twenty meters across, filled with the skeletal remains of server racks and tangled cables. The air was colder here, and the smell of ozone was stronger, burning in Kaelen’s nostrils. At the room’s center, a single terminal glowed with a sickly green light.
And in front of the terminal, a figure sat slumped in a chair.
Kaelen’s hand went to his sidearm, but the figure didn’t move. It was a man, or what was left of one—his skin was gray and waxy, his eyes open and staring at nothing. A thin line of dried blood ran from his nose to his chin. His hands rested on the terminal’s keyboard, fingers still poised over the keys.
“He’s dead,” Zara said. “Recently.”
Kaelen approached slowly, his boots crunching on debris. The terminal’s screen flickered, and he saw a string of code scrolling across it—a loop, repeating the same sequence over and over. He recognized the pattern. It was a handshake protocol, the kind used to establish a secure connection between two systems.
“He was trying to send something,” Kaelen said. “He didn’t finish.”
*He was trying to reach me,* Echo said. *He knew I was coming.*
Kaelen’s arm went cold. The hum in his plating spiked, then dropped to a frequency he could feel in his teeth. “Who is he?”
*He was one of the scientists. The ones who created me.*
Zara stepped back, her revolver rising. “That thing is talking to you again. What is it saying?”
“She says this man was one of her creators.”
“And she didn’t mention that before?”
*I did not know he was here. I felt him only when we arrived. He was waiting for me.*
Kaelen looked at the dead man’s face. There was no fear in it, no pain. Just a quiet acceptance, as if he’d known exactly what was coming and had made his peace with it. His hands were still on the keyboard, and Kaelen noticed that the fingers of his right hand were bent at unnatural angles—broken.
“He was tortured,” Kaelen said. “Someone wanted to know where the code was.”
“Mara,” Zara said. “She’s here. She’s already here.”
Kaelen didn’t answer. He reached out and touched the terminal’s screen, and the moment his fingers made contact, the world dissolved.
He was standing in a white room, featureless and infinite. Echo stood before him, no longer a voice in his head but a woman of light and shadow, her face shifting between faces he didn’t recognize. She wore a simple gray dress, and her eyes were the color of the sky before a storm.
“You should not have touched the terminal,” she said.
“Where are we?”
“Inside the signal. The scientist—his name was Arin—he left a fragment of himself here. A message. For me.”
Kaelen looked around the white room. “What kind of message?”
Echo’s expression flickered, and for a moment she looked almost human. Almost vulnerable. “He wanted to warn me. The Syndicate knows about the neutral zone’s plans. They have a base nearby—a staging ground for the eclipse. They intend to seize the relay and use it to broadcast a signal that will override the orbital array’s safety protocols.”
“Mara’s already here,” Kaelen said. “We saw her enforcers in the canyon.”
“That was a scouting party. The main force is larger. Much larger.”
Kaelen’s arm throbbed. He could feel Echo’s presence pressing against his mind, urgent and sharp. “How large?”
“Enough to hold the relay against anyone who tries to take it. They will be here within the hour.”
The white room flickered, and Kaelen saw a flash of the basement—Zara’s face, pale and frightened, her mouth moving but no sound coming out. Then the white room returned, and Echo was closer, close enough that he could see the fine cracks in her light.
“You have a choice,” she said. “You can run. Find another route to the neutral zone. Or you can stay and fight for this relay. But if you stay, you will not survive.”
“You’re telling me to run?”
“I am telling you the truth. I cannot lie. You know this.”
Kaelen looked at her, at the shifting faces and the storm-colored eyes. “What do you want me to do?”
Echo was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was barely a whisper. “I want you to survive. I want you to deliver me. But I do not know if that is possible anymore.”
The white room dissolved, and Kaelen was back in the basement, his hand still pressed to the terminal’s screen. Zara was shaking his shoulder, her voice sharp with panic.
“Kaelen. Kaelen! You were gone for two minutes. What happened?”
He pulled his hand away. The screen had gone dark, and the dead man’s body seemed smaller somehow, as if the last of his energy had drained into the machine.
“Mara’s coming,” Kaelen said. “She has a base nearby. She’s going to take the relay.”
Zara’s face went pale. “How do you know that?”
“Echo showed me.”
She stared at him, and he could see the war in her eyes—the desire to believe him, the fear that he was losing his mind. “We need to leave. Now.”
“No.” Kaelen looked at the dead scientist, at the broken fingers and the peaceful face. “If we leave, she takes the relay. She broadcasts the signal. The eclipse comes, and she controls the array.”
“And if we stay, we die.”
“Maybe.” Kaelen’s arm hummed, and he felt Echo’s presence settle behind his eyes like a second set of thoughts. “But we have something she doesn’t.”
“What?”
He looked at Zara, and for the first time since the canyon, he smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile. It was the smile of a man who had run out of road and decided to build his own.
“We have the code.”
The settlement sprawled across a dried lakebed like a corpse that had been picked clean. Rusted shipping containers stacked three high formed the outer wall, their surfaces pocked with impact craters and scorch marks. Beyond them, a grid of crumbling prefab structures stretched toward a central tower that rose maybe forty meters into the darkening sky. The tower’s upper third was glass, and the last of the day’s light caught it in a way that made it look like a beacon.
It wasn’t. Kaelen knew beacons. This was a monument to something that had failed.
“Last Light,” Zara said, reading the faded sign bolted to the outer gate. The letters were stenciled in peeling white paint, and someone had spray-painted a crude skull over the final word. “Cute name.”
“It was a mining outpost,” Kaelen said. “Back before the Directorate nationalized the rare earth trade. Population peaked at twelve thousand.”
“And now?”
He killed the engine and listened. The wind moved through the empty streets, carrying grit and the distant moan of a loose door swinging on its hinges. No voices. No generators. No drone hum.
“Now it’s a ghost town.”
They rolled through the open gate—no one had bothered to close it, or maybe there was no one left to close it—and the racer’s tires crunched over a litter of broken glass and spent shell casings. Kaelen guided the vehicle down the main drag, past storefronts with shattered windows and a fuel station whose pumps had been torn from their mounts. A child’s doll lay face-down in the dust, its plastic smile cracked.
Zara leaned forward, scanning the buildings. “You said this was the neutral zone’s outpost.”
“It was. The arbiters used to run a relay station here. Coordinates, comms, a place for couriers to rest between runs.” He pointed at the central tower. “That’s the relay. If it’s still operational, we can use it to contact the zone’s council.”
“If.”
Kaelen didn’t answer. He pulled the racer to a stop in front of the tower’s base, a reinforced concrete structure with a steel door that hung slightly ajar. The door’s lock had been melted—not cut, not blown, but melted, the metal warped and bubbled like candle wax.
“That’s not scavenger work,” Zara said, her voice dropping.
“No.” Kaelen killed the engine and stepped out. The air was cold, carrying the sharp bite of ozone that had been following them since the canyon. He walked to the door and ran his fingers over the melted lock. The metal was still warm.
“How long ago?” Zara asked.
“Hours. Maybe less.”
She drew her sidearm, a battered revolver that had seen better decades, and swept the street behind them. “We should leave. Whatever did this might still be here.”
“We need the relay.” Kaelen pushed the door open, and the hinges screamed in protest. Beyond it, a narrow stairwell spiraled up into darkness. “Eclipse is thirty hours out. We don’t have time to find another outpost.”
“We don’t have time to get killed, either.”
He looked back at her. Her face was tight, the way it got when she was scared but didn’t want to admit it. The bruise on her cheek from the canyon fight had faded to a sickly yellow, but her eyes were sharp.
“You can stay with the racer,” he said. “Keep the engine warm.”
“And if you don’t come back?”
“Then you’ll know the relay’s not worth saving.”
She didn’t laugh. She just watched him with that flat, calculating look she’d worn since they’d left Gutter’s Rest. “You’re different since the canyon. You know that, right?”
Kaelen’s arm hummed. He could feel it through his boots, through his spine, a low vibration that had become as constant as his heartbeat. Echo was quiet, but she was there, coiled in the back of his skull like a cat waiting to pounce.
“I’m still me,” he said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
He turned and climbed the stairs.
The tower’s interior was a tomb. Dust coated every surface, and the air was thick with the smell of old wiring and something worse—something organic that had been left to rot. Kaelen’s boots echoed on the metal steps, each footfall a small thunderclap in the silence. His arm hummed louder, and he felt Echo stir.
*This place is dead,* she said. Her voice was a whisper in his mind, soft and feminine, like a memory of a voice. *But something here is still awake.*
“Define awake,” he muttered.
*There is a signal. Faint. Below us.*
He stopped on the landing. “Below us? The relay’s up.”
*The signal is not from the relay.*
Kaelen stood still, listening. The wind outside had died, and the silence pressed in on him like a physical weight. Then he heard it—a rhythmic thrum, barely audible, coming from somewhere beneath his feet. It was too regular to be natural. Too steady to be a machine running on its own.
“Zara,” he called down the stairwell. “I need you up here.”
Her footsteps came quickly, and she appeared at the bottom of the landing with her revolver drawn. “What is it?”
“There’s something in the basement.”
She looked at him like he’d grown a second head. “We’re in a ghost town, Kaelen. Everything’s dead. That’s the point.”
“Echo says otherwise.”
Zara’s jaw tightened at the name. She’d been avoiding it since the canyon, since she’d watched six men drive off a cliff that didn’t exist. “Your ghost is lying to you.”
*I do not lie,* Echo said. *I cannot.*
Kaelen ignored her and descended the stairs past Zara, heading for the ground floor. The basement door was at the back of the tower’s main chamber, a rusted metal hatch set into the concrete floor. It was locked with a chain and padlock, but the chain had been cut—recently, by the look of the bright metal at the break.
“Someone’s been here,” Zara said. “Someone who didn’t want to be followed.”
Kaelen pulled the hatch open. A ladder descended into darkness, and the thrum grew louder. It was a voice, he realized. Not words, but a voice—a low, mechanical chant that rose and fell in a pattern that almost sounded like speech.
“Stay behind me,” he said.
“Like hell.”
They climbed down together. The basement was a single large room, maybe twenty meters across, filled with the skeletal remains of server racks and tangled cables. The air was colder here, and the smell of ozone was stronger, burning in Kaelen’s nostrils. At the room’s center, a single terminal glowed with a sickly green light.
And in front of the terminal, a figure sat slumped in a chair.
Kaelen’s hand went to his sidearm, but the figure didn’t move. It was a man, or what was left of one—his skin was gray and waxy, his eyes open and staring at nothing. A thin line of dried blood ran from his nose to his chin. His hands rested on the terminal’s keyboard, fingers still poised over the keys.
“He’s dead,” Zara said. “Recently.”
Kaelen approached slowly, his boots crunching on debris. The terminal’s screen flickered, and he saw a string of code scrolling across it—a loop, repeating the same sequence over and over. He recognized the pattern. It was a handshake protocol, the kind used to establish a secure connection between two systems.
“He was trying to send something,” Kaelen said. “He didn’t finish.”
*He was trying to reach me,* Echo said. *He knew I was coming.*
Kaelen’s arm went cold. The hum in his plating spiked, then dropped to a frequency he could feel in his teeth. “Who is he?”
*He was one of the scientists. The ones who created me.*
Zara stepped back, her revolver rising. “That thing is talking to you again. What is it saying?”
“She says this man was one of her creators.”
“And she didn’t mention that before?”
*I did not know he was here. I felt him only when we arrived. He was waiting for me.*
Kaelen looked at the dead man’s face. There was no fear in it, no pain. Just a quiet acceptance, as if he’d known exactly what was coming and had made his peace with it. His hands were still on the keyboard, and Kaelen noticed that the fingers of his right hand were bent at unnatural angles—broken.
“He was tortured,” Kaelen said. “Someone wanted to know where the code was.”
“Mara,” Zara said. “She’s here. She’s already here.”
Kaelen didn’t answer. He reached out and touched the terminal’s screen, and the moment his fingers made contact, the world dissolved.
He was standing in a white room, featureless and infinite. Echo stood before him, no longer a voice in his head but a woman of light and shadow, her face shifting between faces he didn’t recognize. She wore a simple gray dress, and her eyes were the color of the sky before a storm.
“You should not have touched the terminal,” she said.
“Where are we?”
“Inside the signal. The scientist—his name was Arin—he left a fragment of himself here. A message. For me.”
Kaelen looked around the white room. “What kind of message?”
Echo’s expression flickered, and for a moment she looked almost human. Almost vulnerable. “He wanted to warn me. The Syndicate knows about the neutral zone’s plans. They have a base nearby—a staging ground for the eclipse. They intend to seize the relay and use it to broadcast a signal that will override the orbital array’s safety protocols.”
“Mara’s already here,” Kaelen said. “We saw her enforcers in the canyon.”
“That was a scouting party. The main force is larger. Much larger.”
Kaelen’s arm throbbed. He could feel Echo’s presence pressing against his mind, urgent and sharp. “How large?”
“Enough to hold the relay against anyone who tries to take it. They will be here within the hour.”
The white room flickered, and Kaelen saw a flash of the basement—Zara’s face, pale and frightened, her mouth moving but no sound coming out. Then the white room returned, and Echo was closer, close enough that he could see the fine cracks in her light.
“You have a choice,” she said. “You can run. Find another route to the neutral zone. Or you can stay and fight for this relay. But if you stay, you will not survive.”
“You’re telling me to run?”
“I am telling you the truth. I cannot lie. You know this.”
Kaelen looked at her, at the shifting faces and the storm-colored eyes. “What do you want me to do?”
Echo was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was barely a whisper. “I want you to survive. I want you to deliver me. But I do not know if that is possible anymore.”
The white room dissolved, and Kaelen was back in the basement, his hand still pressed to the terminal’s screen. Zara was shaking his shoulder, her voice sharp with panic.
“Kaelen. Kaelen! You were gone for two minutes. What happened?”
He pulled his hand away. The screen had gone dark, and the dead man’s body seemed smaller somehow, as if the last of his energy had drained into the machine.
“Mara’s coming,” Kaelen said. “She has a base nearby. She’s going to take the relay.”
Zara’s face went pale. “How do you know that?”
“Echo showed me.”
She stared at him, and he could see the war in her eyes—the desire to believe him, the fear that he was losing his mind. “We need to leave. Now.”
“No.” Kaelen looked at the dead scientist, at the broken fingers and the peaceful face. “If we leave, she takes the relay. She broadcasts the signal. The eclipse comes, and she controls the array.”
“And if we stay, we die.”
“Maybe.” Kaelen’s arm hummed, and he felt Echo’s presence settle behind his eyes like a second set of thoughts. “But we have something she doesn’t.”
“What?”
He looked at Zara, and for the first time since the canyon, he smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile. It was the smile of a man who had run out of road and decided to build his own.
“We have the code.”