Donovan O'Niel's Arc

Chapter 7 of 11

The game ended. Traders drifted out into the wet dark, still arguing calls. Donovan stayed behind with Logan and Kira. The relay still fed the hut, clean and strong, and he meant to find where it came from before dawn. First he needed a direction. Donovan found the hut's owner stacking mugs behind the counter. He asked where the feed came from. The man wiped his hands and pulled a worn trader's map from under the counter. Red and green lines crossed it like veins. Timing notes crowded the margins, scrawled by many hands over many months. "Traders swap routes by when the game airs," the owner said. "Somebody tracked the tower that carries it." He tapped a far mark. A distant tower, ringed in ink, with a route sketched toward it. Donovan spread the map on the counter. The route was long. Too much guesswork between here and that tower. He needed verification, not rumor. Kira had that. She crossed the room and dropped a worn notebook beside the map. Pages bulged with careful columns. Channel names. Broadcast times. A list of shows that cycled through the signal. She'd been logging the feed for weeks without telling anyone it mattered. "Look," she said. "Sports talk at the same hour every day. Same gap between games. That tells me the tower runs on a fixed schedule, not a loop. A machine someone set and left." Her glasses caught the screen's last glow. "I don't call it confirmed until you're standing at the base of it. But the pattern holds." Donovan laid her notebook against the map. The owner's inked route and Kira's timing notes agreed. The same tower. The same distance. Two sources, one answer. His dead-zone weeks had taught him never to trust a single reading. Now he had two. Logan leaned over the map, tracing the route with his three good fingers. He read machines by what was missing from them, and he read this the same way. "Half that route's open ground," he said. "Ghouls on the trade roads lately. Walking it at night is how scouts stop reporting." He straightened. "Morning. We go in daylight, with the route marked and the gear packed. The tower's been broadcasting for two hundred years. It'll wait till sunrise." Donovan wanted to move now. His legs still ached from the hospital run. But Logan was right, and Kira's slow nod sealed it. "Agreed," Donovan said. "We leave at first light." He folded the trader's map around Kira's notebook and sealed both in his map case. Kira marked the tower on her own pad as the priority target. Logan named the gear he'd bring. For weeks Donovan had chased a backbone for his network and found only dead air. Now a real target sat in his case, with a route to reach it and a plan to survive the walk. The source had a location. At dawn, he'd go get it.