Substation 9

The substation had been a switching room once, in the years before the grid migrated and the building below the building became the building above the building, depending which decade you asked. Now it held a desk, three monitors, and a woman who had not slept properly in eleven days.

Maya watched the city the way Victor had taught her to watch it — through the surveillance feeds, through the encrypted traffic logs, through the patterns that appeared if you held the data still long enough for the static to settle. Most of the patterns were familiar. The corporate networks pulsed at their usual rates. The civic infrastructure moved through its scheduled rhythms. Even the underground, the part she lived in, hummed with the predictable irregularities of people who had learned to be irregular on a schedule.

The new pattern had appeared on the seventh day.

It was small. A single signal, repeating, encrypted in a protocol Maya recognized the way you recognize a stranger's handwriting on an envelope addressed to you. AetherComm base architecture. Modified. The modifications were exactly the ones she would have made.

She had not made them.

For four days she watched the signal. It did not move. It did not call her. It sat at a node three kilometers north and pulsed once every nine minutes and seventeen seconds and waited.

On the eleventh sleepless day, Maya did the thing the substation had been waiting for her to do. She opened a channel. She did not send a message. She sent the same protocol back, the same nine-minute-seventeen-second cadence, the same modifications, a mirror.

Then she waited.

The signal stopped.

For two minutes the substation held its breath. The screens showed nothing. The encrypted traffic resumed its civilian patterns.

Then, on the third minute, a single packet arrived. The packet contained a phrase, plain text, in a language Maya had not heard spoken in nine years.

It read: I thought you were dead.