[7] Outer Array Perimeter – 90 Meters from Spire Core

Timestamp: Field-Warped | Cold Sync
Author ID: ~S

It’s been a few days since I had the strength to write.

Staying awake for days on end. Watching over my shoulder. I crashed. Hard. I don’t know for how long I had passed out. Sleep wasn’t restful. One eye open. One ear on receiving. At all times…

I started hearing her steps before I registered them.

Not loud. Not careless. But timed and deliberately unsynced from the standard patrol echo. No pattern. No rhythm the dampeners could parse. Only someone who’s trained in signal evasion would walk like that.

Didn’t look. Didn’t react. Not yet. Too soon.

Recognition and reaction too early means loss of ground. Losing the advantage. Control the encounter. Observe first. Filter later.

Last I remember, I made it to the antenna array last night. Maybe it was days ago. Don’t know. But, I’m here. Wake up. Check in. Move. Carefully. There’s another player in the arena, and it doesn’t reconcile.

Power grid was weaker than expected. Signal taps half-corroded but still intact beneath the dust sheath. The old brass grounding pins were warped—heat damage, maybe from the Burn Zone’s last discharge.

It felt like waking a corpse. But this one still had a heartbeat.

Looped a half-pulse through one of the analog bypass lines—pure, low-tech, no trace. Not a broadcast. A breadcrumb. Just enough to test for receivers still tuned to unlicensed frequencies. Still listening. Still awake.

I didn’t expect a response.

But the static shifted.

Something changed.

I hate feeling out of control.

---

She left something at my camp.

Didn’t see her do it. No tracks. No signal ping. Just a small, rust-stained tin, tucked under the broken rail-tie I use for a seat.

I don’t like the sudden onset of vulnerability. Maybe I had both eyes closed. Both ears turned off. I’m getting careless. Or too exhausted. Can’t happen again.

Inside the can, she left

• A soldered USB stick.

• A field-scanned map fragment.

• A single line handwritten on fiberpaper:

“Not all ghosts drift. Some anchor.”

I didn’t flinch. Not because it didn’t rattle me, but because I couldn’t afford to show it. She’s close by, and if she can get close enough to drop a can into my camp, she’s definitely watching me.

Not good.

This is new territory.

Someone playing by my rules.
Or worse—rewriting them.

---

She didn’t sign it. But the fingerprints, purely behavioral, not physical, are unmistakable.

Same efficient shorthand I saw when she restored that sat-com board. Same kind of movement I read in her posture: purposeful, not performative. She doesn’t leave breadcrumbs for glory. She leaves them because she expects someone will know what to do with them.

She knows I’m the Signal.

And she’s not chasing it.

She’s tuning it.

---

I haven’t uploaded the Vault file yet.
Not because I can’t.

Because now I wonder who else is listening.

If she has an uplink node… if she’s running interference outside Dust Node 4…
Then the signal might not be mine alone anymore.
It might not need to be.

That’s dangerous.

But maybe necessary.

---

Years ago, when things were only almost lost—there were moments like this.
When you’d find a stranger in a dark bar with nothing but a glare and a scar, and suddenly the world would feel slightly less fatal.

Not safer.

Just less final.

Like maybe there was one other person awake enough to remember what it felt like to be human.

Not perfect.
Not righteous.
Just still trying.

---

I don’t know what she wants.

But if she’s anchoring, then she’s expecting resonance.

A return ping.
A sign she’s not drifting alone.

Tomorrow, I’ll respond.

Not with words.
With a signal.
Low-range. Dirty. Undetectable by surface nodes. Something analog. Something old.

The kind of language you can only read if you’ve lived long enough outside the grid to remember how machines used to whisper.

Let’s see if she answers.

---

Next stop: Relay Shack Delta-13.
Abandoned after the first consolidation wave. It still has a buried coaxial node. If it lights up, even for a second, then I’ll know the truth:

She’s not following me.

She’s traveling parallel—same direction, different beat.

And that means we’re either converging…

Or heading for a collision.

~S