Zelda Verada's Arc

Chapter 13 of 13

The storage room door scraped open at first light. Logan went first with a lamp. Zelda followed, wrench in hand, Mary Long close behind with her folder. No rats. No fungus. Just shelves and silence. The room held what the vault had hidden for centuries. A full week of work waited inside. They cleared it one shelf at a time. By the fourth day the finds piled up. Mary read each crate aloud and marked her folder. "Surgical kits. Antirad. Suture packs." She pushed her glasses up. "This fills the ward. All twelve beds, not four." Zelda set a heavy medical crate on the table and pried the lid. Clean tools gleamed inside, hospital-grade, sealed against time. The towns on her supply routes would get what she had promised. But the shelves held more than medicine. Logan pulled a bound stack of files from a low cabinet and set it down hard. The cover read F.E.V. Clinical notes. Gene charts. DNA splicing records, page after page. Zelda knew the mark already from the samples she carried. This was the research behind them, the whole obsessive trail. "That's not the worst of it," Logan said. He lifted a thick folder of transcripts. "Broadcast logs. ADX band." He set them beside a dead console in the corner, a wall of dials and meters crusted with dust. "This thing talked to a tower. Denver Broadcast Tower, by the labels." Donovan arrived by midday, radio pack on his back, headphones around his neck. Zelda had called him down from the garage the moment Logan named the console. If anyone could read the files, Donovan could. He crouched at the station and flipped through the transcripts, fast. "Oh man." He tapped a page. "These coordinates aren't random. This vault was feeding broadcast data to Denver. Live, on a schedule." He looked up. "ADX. That's one of the towers we flagged for expansion. Denver and Sparks both." Zelda crossed her arms. "The network's capped at five nodes. Amy Gill set that." "You bet she did." Donovan held up the transcripts. "But these files are the key to the Denver tower. Frequencies, handshake codes, the works. Hell if I know how the vault had them. Doesn't matter. We hold these, we hold Denver." His tone warmed a second. "Your towns wouldn't just get supplies. They'd get a radio line to them." Zelda weighed it. The ward was stocked now. That part was done. But the files changed the shape of everything. "Take the transcripts to Donovan's tech," she told Mary. "Lock the F.E.V. dossier with the samples." She faced Donovan. "Then run these codes up the line. If they're real, we don't just build a hospital here. We put it on the network." Donovan slung the transcripts into his map case. "I'll have an answer by nightfall." The ward was full. The storeroom was empty. And the thing they had found there pointed past the vault, toward a tower fifty miles west of Denver.