Survivor pulls rusted cans from a collapsed shelf, checking each one by weight. Most are empty. Some leak brown powder that might have been food once. He sets the light ones aside and pockets two that still slosh. The store has been picked through before, but not carefully. He shifts a panel of sheet metal and finds a box underneath, its corners soft with rust. Inside are more cans and something else. A radio, wedged between tins of vegetables that split open long ago. He lifts it out. The casing is cracked along one side, the color faded to nothing recognizable. The antenna is bent but still attached. He turns it over in his hands, checking for batteries that might be useful elsewhere. A guitar chord cuts through the silence. He drops the radio. It hits the ground and the music gets louder, a full band now, drums and bass and a voice singing words he can't make out. The sound is thin and broken by static, but it's there. He picks the radio back up. His thumb finds a dial and turns it. The station doesn't change. He tries the other knob. Nothing. The music keeps playing, the same song, like it's been playing the whole time he's been alive and longer. He sits against the wreckage and listens. Hope used to hum something like this while they walked. Not this song, but something with the same rhythm. She'd tap it out on a wooden flute she carried, her fingers moving even when she was too tired to make sound. Survivor holds the radio in both hands and doesn't move. The song ends. Another one starts. He realizes he's forgotten what he came here for. Then he remembers the monuments, Mover's site half a day's walk from here, and the carving he hasn't started. He stands and clips the radio to his belt. It keeps playing.

The music cuts out mid-song. Survivor stops walking and looks down at the radio clipped to his belt. Static fills the silence for three seconds. Then a voice comes through, young and clear. A girl. She laughs once, sharp and bright, then starts talking about the weather like it's funny. "Forecast for the dead world," she says. "Sand with a chance of more sand. Shocking development." She does an impression of a news anchor, formal and serious, then breaks it with another laugh. Survivor stands completely still. His hand moves to the pendant in his pocket, the twisted metal Builder used to wear. Builder made jokes like that, sarcastic and light even when things got worse. The voice keeps going, telling bad puns about skeletons and tumbleweeds. Survivor tries to speak. His mouth opens but nothing comes out. He hasn't used his voice in so long that the shape of words feels wrong. The girl can't hear him anyway. She's somewhere else, talking into her own radio, and he's just listening. She does an impression of a robot counting down to nothing, her voice flat and mechanical. Survivor sits down in the sand and holds the pendant tight. The voice isn't Builder. It isn't Hope or Mover. But it's someone, and that breaks something in him he thought was already broken. He listens until she signs off with a click, and the music starts again. When he stands, he knows he'll keep the radio on. He knows he'll listen every day. And he knows the monuments will take longer now, because he'll stop whenever she comes back on.