Donovan crouched at the edge of the cracked parking lot, sketching one last frequency note before the junkyard ate his signal for good. The G.E.C.K. was waiting under all that rust, and he meant to carry it out himself. Then a shout pulled his head up. A man was stumbling past Zelda's clinic tent, knees folding under him on the broken cement. The stranger went down hard between patches of dead grass and broken glass. One hand stayed clenched around a roll of scorched paper. Zelda came out fast, already calling for her kit. Donovan reached him first and pried the paper loose. It was a Vault-Tec map, edges burned black, the center still readable. Frequency markings ran along the margins in a tight, careful hand. Donovan went cold. He knew that pattern. It matched the interference grid he'd spent weeks mapping around the junkyard. "He's crashing," Zelda said, pressing a wand to the man's chest. The stranger's eyes found Donovan's. His lips moved once. No sound came. Then his head rolled sideways and his hand opened, empty. A boot scraped behind Donovan. Kira Dallas stood there, glasses fogged from the run, pack still on her shoulders. "Kevin sent me," she said. "Said you needed verified backup." Her eyes dropped to the map, then the body, then the burned edges. "Look. That paper came out of the place you're trying to get into. That tells me everything about how they think." Donovan folded the map into his jacket. The stranger was gone. Whoever had drawn those frequencies had been inside, and someone had burned him out. The job was no longer his alone, and the thing in the junkyard already knew his name.

Kira spread the burned map across a workbench inside the junkyard's repair shed. Donovan watched her wire an old oscilloscope into a battered tool kit, clipping leads to a salvaged antenna. A tuxedo cat in a blue jumpsuit nosed past her boots, sniffing the cables. "Hold this steady," Kira said. The screen flickered green. Numbers crawled across the grid. Donovan leaned in. The waveform on the glass matched the frequency notations along the map's burned edge, line for line. "That's not a record," he said. "That's live." Kira's mouth went thin. She tapped the dial. The signal pulsed again, steady as a heartbeat. Achilles stepped through the doorway, wiping grease off his hands. A red and white robobrain rolled in behind him, antennas twitching toward the oscilloscope. "Picked it up on the yard speakers," Achilles said. "Same pattern. Coming from under us." He nodded at the floor. "Dish ground. The buried one." Donovan's stomach dropped. The broadcast wasn't a recording left behind. Something inside the vault was transmitting right now, on the exact grid that had been killing every scout's gear for ten meters out. His worst theory had a pulse. "It's not a jammer," Kira said quietly. "It's a call." The robobrain swiveled its dome toward the sound, and the cat's ears flattened. Achilles set both hands on the bench. "Then something down there is awake. And it knows we're listening." Donovan folded the map and pocketed it. The shielded relay in his pack suddenly felt light, insufficient. Whatever was broadcasting had killed a man to keep its frequency a secret, and now it was singing to anyone with the ears to hear. The job had just stopped being a recovery. It was an answer to a call he hadn't meant to accept.