“Got you.” I snatched it up and bolted back down the hallway, lungs burning by the time I reached the control room again. My hands shook as I shoved the plug into the console.
The speakers hissed softly. “—repeat, is anyone receiving this transmission?”
I slammed the talk switch. “I’m here!” I gasped. “I’m here—do you copy?” Interference crackled between us. I leaned closer to the microphone, my voice suddenly small in the enormous quiet of the bunker.
“Hello?”
“Oh my god,” I sputtered. “You’re speaking English.”
“Solace?” A male voice cut through the line next; his voice hard and somehow familiar. “Solace, is that you?”
Jude Ransom.
No—
I yanked the headphones off and dropped them to the console as if they’d burned my skin. The muffled sound of his voice spilled from the headset as I sat there, hand covering my mouth.
“Solace, it’s Jude. Solace—do you copy? Come in. Solace—” His voice grew frantic with each repetition of my name.
With fumbling fingers I grabbed the headset again and shoved it back over my ears, leaning into the microphone. “It’s me,” I breathed. “Is it really you?”
“Baby—”
For the first time in years, I cried. I covered my mouth, pressing hard, as if I could keep the sound inside me. But the bunker was too quiet, and too bare—each unsteady breath brushed the walls and returned, relentless, like a reflection I couldn’t escape.
On the other end of the line, someone cleared their throat. “Lieutenant,” a woman said softly in the background. “Let’s give them a moment.” There was the sound of chairs shifting. Papers rustling. A door sliding shut somewhere far away.
It all fell away to silence.
“Sol?” The way he said it—tender and uncertain—nearly broke me all over again. “I thought you were dead.”
I laughed weakly, dragging the sleeve of my sweatshirt under my eyes. “Yeah,” I snivelled. “Well… funny story.”
He let out a shaky breath. “Jesus Christ.” For a moment neither of us spoke—eight years of distance hung between us as though a dust-riddled cobwebbed veil. “Are you really there?” he asked finally.
I gripped the microphone tighter, as it had now become my lifeline. “I’m really here.”
Mercy was not a gift I’d been given, not until this moment. Living through the end of the world was a sentence I couldn’t fathom my soul was deemed dishonorable enough to bear. Yet, now, hearing him call my name once more, I had to wonder if the dreams were ever just formless thoughts in my subconscious or if they’d held greater meaning. Grander purpose.
Another breath from him, deeper this time. “Solace,” he said again, like he needed to hear the name out loud to convince himself I was real.
“Hi, Jude.”
“Where are you?” The line beeped and I waited. For a moment neither of us spoke, the silence stretching long enough that it was clear we were both trying to fill it at the same time.
“I—”
“You—”
We both stopped.
“You first.”
I rubbed my sleeve across my face and leaned closer to the microphone. “I moved back home when things started getting scary,” I explained. “Bridget had recently divorced Luca, so we shared an apartment for a while. I started teaching music at the high school outside of town.” Another pause while the signal traveled through whatever miracle of machines was carrying our voices. “Bridget was seeing this guy named Paul,” I continued. “He has this house out on the peninsula. Miles outside of Port Angeles. It's a huge place—ridiculous, honestly.” I huffed out a weak laugh. “He’s a prepper. The kind you used to see in documentaries. Out behind the house there’s this huge concrete shaft that drops down into the bunker. He spent years outfitting it. He had food storages, generators, an air filtration system—the whole thing.” My fingers tightened around the microphone. “That’s where I’ve been.” Silence again. “Since the beginning.”
“Solace—” Another beat of static.
“What about you?” I asked.
