Embers of Discontent

Liora’s POV

Night draped over the city like a velvet shroud as Liora slipped into her apartment. The note burned in her pocket, its words echoing in her mind: “You’ve been heard.” She moved with purpose—no hesitation—toward her worktable, where the recorder and her notebook waited.

She pressed play. The low-frequency hum emerged first, then the coded pulses, clear and deliberate. She tapped out the rhythm on her desk: dot-dot-dot, dash-dot, dash—over and over—until the pattern etched itself into her memory. It matched nothing she knew. It wasn’t Morse. It was older. A dialect of static.

Her comm device buzzed. A text from Seraphine: “Found him. Meet at dawn. Old docks.”

Liora’s breath caught. The boy. The “ghost” from Aldren’s file. If Seraphine had found him, it meant he was more real—and more dangerous—than anyone admitted. She grabbed her coat and the recorder, tucking the note and notebook into an inner pocket.

The streets were emptying as she moved—citizens retreating indoors before the curfew’s silent enforcement. Flickers of patrol drones glinted overhead, scanning. She hugged the shadows, slipping through side streets until the river’s dark ribbon appeared below her.

The old docks lay half in ruin, half in midnight. Rusted cranes loomed like skeletal sentinels. The only sound was the lapping water and her own footsteps.

Seraphine stood beneath a collapsed warehouse frame, her silhouette fragile against the hulking metal. Beside her, a young man—no older than twenty—leaned against a beam, eyes downcast. His hands were bound by a length of frayed rope.

Liora approached, every nerve alert. “Is he… okay?” she asked quietly.

Seraphine’s face was grave. “He’s alive. But they’ve taken his name.” She gestured to a smudge of white paint on his jacket—where an identification patch had been scraped away. “No record. No trace. Like he never existed.”

The boy lifted his head. His eyes were wide—fearful but fierce. He mouthed a single word, silent: “Help.”

Liora knelt before him. “What’s your name?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “They erased it.” His voice was hoarse, a tremor in every syllable. “But I remember.”

“Then tell me,” Liora urged. “Tell me now.”

He swallowed, glancing at Seraphine. The older woman nodded once. He took a breath and spoke:

“Call me… Echo.”

Liora’s heart jolted. Echo—the voice that carried truth through concrete. Echo—the code in her recorder’s hum. It all clicked.

She reached out, brushing a strand of hair from his forehead. “Echo,” she repeated. “You’re not erased.”

He managed a ghost of a smile. “Not yet.”

A distant drone whirred. Patrol lights swept across the docks in rhythmic arcs. Seraphine tensed. “We need to move.”

Liora stood, slipping the recorder into her bag. She looked at Echo, then at Seraphine. “We’ll keep you safe. But first, we expose this.”

Echo’s gaze hardened. “Then let them try to stop us.”

As they melted into the shadows, the tension coiled tighter than ever. The boy without a name now had one—and with it, the power to shatter the city’s silence.

Tomorrow, the revolution would speak. And Liora would make sure everyone heard.