Mara no longer trusted the silence.
It used to be comforting — a soft hush that blanketed her days like snow. But lately, it had a rhythm. A pulse. Something unnatural stitched between the gaps in the static.
Sometimes, when she recorded late at night, she'd pause and listen, convinced someone was breathing behind the signal.
At first, she blamed it on loneliness.
Then the voice came back.
Not Theo's.
It was a fractured sound, like speech through broken glass. Male, maybe. Mechanical. It didn't speak in full sentences — just fragments, broadcast faintly on the edge of her frequency.
"…watching her…
…pattern stable…
…no deviation yet…"
She tried to trace the origin. Her equipment was limited — analog, improvised — but she knew enough to triangulate signal bounce. The whisper wasn't coming from Theo's side of the world.
It was closer.
Somewhere in the valley.
The next day, Mara descended into the abandoned town for the first time in weeks. She wore her hood low, snow crunching beneath her as she walked past the rusting gas pumps and shattered storefronts.
The post office stood in eerie quiet. She had used to work there in the early days of the collapse — coordinating last-mile drop-offs for families who still believed the world would right itself. Eventually, the letters stopped coming. The last one she ever sorted was addressed to a man named Callum Ellison.
Her husband.
She pushed through the post office door. Dust bloomed in golden shafts of light through the cracked roof. Inside, it was almost untouched — as though time had pressed pause just before the final breath.
She wasn't looking for memories.
She was looking for a radio.
If someone was transmitting from here — someone who knew her name — they had to have a relay. A dish. Something.
She made her way into the back room, where Cal used to nap between supply runs. The old sorting table stood covered in boxes. Beneath it, buried under a tarp and a crate of sealed envelopes, she found it.
A signal booster.
Battery-powered. Running.
Still warm.
That night, she didn't sleep. She rewired her own receiver, connected it to the post office booster, and scanned the signal again — slowly, carefully.
At 2:13 a.m., the whisper returned.
Clearer this time.
"Subject remains in Zone 3B.
Emotional threshold rising.
Communication tether holds.
She believes in him."
And then something different.
A voice. Not cold. Not fractured.
Soft. Female.
It sounded… like her.
"Mara," the voice said. "He doesn't exist."
Mara reeled back from the receiver, knocking over her mug. The tea spilled across her desk and ran like blood across the wood.
She stared at the speaker.
It crackled once more.
Then silence.
Theo was on the move again.
He had traveled 19 kilometers in five days, avoiding open plains and using a scavenged solar drone to charge his locator gear during brief Arctic sun bursts. His messages to Mara were now encoded in Morse and layered beneath old NOAA ice reports.
Still, he was being followed.
He didn't see anyone. But he felt it. A wrongness in the trees. A warmth that never came from the sun. Once, he found footprints in the snow that mirrored his exactly — each print laid just beside his, mimicking the stride, the depth.
He changed direction.
Started walking in zigzags.
That's when the dreams began.
In them, he was back in the compound, but the walls were flesh, pulsing and veined. Mara stood on the other side of a glass wall, reaching toward him, but every time he got close, her face changed.
Not into someone else.
Into him.
Like he was watching himself watch her.
He stopped sending voice messages after that.
He only wrote.
Mara didn't tell anyone about the voice.
Not yet.
She needed proof. And more than that, she needed to talk to Theo.
She sent a coded burst that night, beneath an old maritime weather report. No words — just sound pulses arranged in a simple call-and-response pattern they'd devised weeks ago.
Tap. Tap-tap. Pause. Tap.
"Are you there?"
Nothing came for twelve hours.
Then finally, the console blinked.
A reply.
Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap.
"Yes."
But that was all.
Mara leaned over the desk, adrenaline freezing her limbs.
Then came a final pulse — not from Theo's line.
From another source entirely.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
A perfect rhythm.
A human heartbeat.
That night, Mara left the shed and went back to the post office.
She descended into the basement, where the walls were thickest. She disconnected the booster and followed the wire.
It led to a box in the floor.
And inside the box — a data capsule. Government-made. Black, smooth, unmarked.
She opened it.
Inside were recordings.
Her messages.
All of them.
Not just the ones she sent to Theo.
The ones she never sent.
Meanwhile, in the Arctic...
Theo stopped walking when he saw the cabin.
It looked like it had been dropped from the sky — not a single footprint around it, not even his own. It was too clean. Too perfect. Fresh wood. A red door. Light coming from the window.
He stepped closer.
No smoke from the chimney. No sound.
He drew the revolver, heart hammering against his ribs.
Then, from inside, came a voice.
"Theo."
Mara's voice.
Soft. Broken. Calling.
He lowered the gun.
Walked to the door.
Knocked once.
The door opened.
But no one was there.
Just a chair.
And on it — a recorder.
Playing her voice on loop.
"Come back.
Come back.
Come back."
He backed away slowly.
Then he saw it: a second recorder, tucked into the snow behind the cabin.
Playing his voice.
"I'm alive. I had to leave. I heard something—someone."
The cabin wasn't real.
It was a trap.
Back in the town, Mara took the capsule home and laid out its contents across the kitchen table. The files were time stamped — recordings of her singing to herself, whispering while reading, even crying in her sleep.
She had never transmitted any of these.
She hadn't even spoken some aloud.
Then one file opened without her touch.
A male voice.
Familiar.
"Project Ellison log, Entry 57.
Subject shows continued emotional response to curated broadcasts. Belief in external 'Theo' construct remains stable.
Signal fidelity at 94%.
We proceed with Phase 2.
Termination window estimated in five days."
She staggered back.
Theo... Wasn't real?
But that couldn't be right. He responded. He changed. He described the auroras. The dreams.
Unless the voice in the signal... had been inside her from the start.
Unless she was part of something else.
The next time she turned on the radio, she said nothing.
She waited.
After five minutes, the receiver clicked.
Then a voice answered — broken, human, afraid.
"Mara… I don't know what's real anymore."
It was him.
Or it wasn't.
And she had five days to find out.
End of Chapter 6