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Now the warning sounded louder inside him than the wind.
The fence around the tower was new, composite, designed for autonomous security. The gate opened on its own. Words lit up on the inner panel:
WELCOME HOME, YERNAR.
“Nice,” Malika said. “Get me in the shot with it.”
“Stay outside the fence.”
“People need to know what’s happening.”
“The people are standing right behind me.”
She rolled her eyes but stepped back.
Yernar went in alone. Dry grass crackled beneath his boots. The closer he came to the base, the more the implant behind his ear itched. The system was trying to connect to a network that did not exist.
There were no signs of forced entry on the equipment cabinet. Power was on. The batteries were charged. The fiber-optic line to the node was intact. By every measurable parameter, the station should have been providing service for tens of kilometers.
But it wasn’t.
Yernar connected directly by cable.
The terminal came alive.
Diagnostic lines streamed across the black screen. Most were standard until an unnamed folder appeared. Created: 17 October 1942.
Impossible.
He opened it.
Inside was a single audio file: KOMANDA.wav.
“Find something?” Daniyar shouted from beyond the fence.
Yernar put on insulated headphones and played the recording.
Static. Wind. The lieutenant’s voice:
“Firing squad—ready!”
Rifle bolts clicking.
“Aim!”
Then the high-pitched tone.
Yernar tried to pull off the headphones, but his muscles would not obey. The note unfolded inside his head and became thousands of notification sounds. Each one promised important news, love, rescue, an explanation from his father. He understood that if he listened to the end, he would get an answer.
Just one answer.
A video feed appeared on-screen.
The steppe in black and white. A man with his hands tied stood with his back to the soldiers. The condemned man slowly turned—and looked straight at Yernar.
The face was unfamiliar, yet the line of the brows, the shape of the nose, even the habit of biting the inside of one cheek seemed strangely familiar.
“You came too late,” the man said.
“Who are you?”
“The man they didn’t shoot.”
“Where’s my father?”
The man nodded at something behind the camera.
Yernar turned.
A man stood on a crossbeam of the tower, twenty meters above the ground. No safety line. He wore an old jacket Yernar remembered from childhood.
“Dad?” he breathed.
The man stepped off the beam.
Chapter 6. Azheshka
Yernar lunged forward and threw up his arms as if he could catch a falling body.
No one fell.
Rust flakes drifted down. Sunlight slashed across his eyes. The beam was empty.
“What did you see?” Malika had already pushed her camera between the bars of the fence.
Yernar tore off the headphones. The world lurched. People stood beyond the fence, but for several seconds their faces looked like flat icons: alarm, curiosity, mockery. The emotion-recognition system in his lens tried to label each of them, though he had disabled it on the road.
MALIKA — ENGAGEMENT 91%.
DANIYAR — AGGRESSION 63%.
MURAT — FEAR 78%.
The label above a teenager in a red cap flickered:
USER NOT FOUND.
Yernar blinked, and everything disappeared.
“Nothing,” he said. “A visual-channel fault.”
“You called someone Dad,” Daniyar pointed out.
“An error.”
“Convenient word.”
Yernar disconnected the terminal from the station. The folder dated 1942 vanished. The audio file was gone even from the cache. Yet the unknown frequency kept pulsing through the diagnostic feed: three beats, a pause, three more.
He stepped outside the fence.
“The tower is fully operational. The problem isn’t the equipment.”
“Then what is it?” Murat, the teacher, asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
The crowd began to murmur. They wanted an answer, preferably one that was short and certain. Whether it was true did not matter. Yernar knew that hunger too well. Models like ZHYLTYR had been trained on it.
“How long?” someone shouted.
“An hour? A day?”
“Will the food deliveries get through?”
“My child is being treated remotely!”
Malika turned the camera on herself.
“We are standing at the epicenter of a digital collapse,” she began in her presenter’s voice. “A Nomad-Link expert is refusing to give us a timeline—”
Yernar covered the lens with his hand.
“Don’t stir up panic.”
“The panic is already here. I’m making content out of it.”
“No one will see it without the network.”
Malika smiled.
“We’ll see.”
On the walk back, Daniyar caught up with Yernar.
“You’ve got a signal, don’t you?”
“No.”
“A company channel.”
“No.”
“Then why did your phone show a notification outside the house?”
Yernar stopped.
“Were you looking at my screen?”
“Everyone was.”
“Don’t.”
“Scared we’ll see the truth?”
“I’m scared you’ll see something that isn’t there.”
Daniyar smirked, but the hunger remained in his eyes.
In the yard, his grandmother crouched beside a garden bed, pulling out dry stalks, as though there were no tower, no voice of his father, and no crowd.
“Let’s go inside,” Yernar said.
“Wash your hands first.”
“Azhe, I saw Dad.”
Her fingers stopped in the soil.
“Where?”
“On the tower.”
Kulzhan-apa slowly straightened. There was no surprise on her face. Only the weariness of someone who had spent too long waiting for an inevitable question.
“He saw it too,” she said.
“When?”
“The night he disappeared.”
Something cold and precise clicked into place inside Yernar.
“You knew.”
“I knew he went there.”
“And you told me he abandoned us.”
“I told you he left.”
“You let me hate him for twenty-eight years.”
“The hate kept you away from the tower.”
“It didn’t.”
His grandmother looked at the iron structure above the rooftops.
“Then its call was stronger.”
“What is it?”
Kulzhan-apa wiped her hands on her apron.
“Not ‘what.’ It has no body. There is only a place where people have waited too long for something.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
She went into the house and returned with a tin box. Inside lay an old audio cassette, a faded photograph, and a folded sheet of paper. In the photograph, a young Kulzhan-apa held the infant Serik in her arms. Beside her stood the condemned man from the recording, only much older.
On the back, in his grandmother’s handwriting, were the words: “Tulegen-ata, my grandfather. 1978. Do not listen after sunset.”
“Your grandfather?”
“My grandfather. Your great-great-grandfather. I kept silent because the tower has always called to our blood more strongly than to anyone else’s.”
Yernar wanted to ask what “more strongly” meant, but she went on before he could.
“He lived almost forty more years after that day,” Kulzhan-apa said. “But every evening he heard the order that was never given.”
The radio inside the house answered with another burst of static.
Then Serik’s voice said:
“Mom, open the door this time.”
Chapter 7. Three Bars
Kulzhan-apa went pale but did not move toward the door.
The radio sat on the table. Its dial glowed a dull green, though the batteries had leaked out years ago. Serik’s voice came through the static again:
“Mom… I’m cold.”
Yernar stepped toward the set.
His grandmother slapped his hand away so quickly that he recoiled.
“Don’t answer.”
“It’s a recording.”
“A recording doesn’t know I’m in the house.”
“I can trace the source.”
“Your father wanted to trace it too.”
The voice drew closer.
“Yernar, balam. Are you all grown up?”
Yernar’s breath caught. He had last heard his father at seven—not the voice itself, but a memory of a voice, long since worn away and replaced by family videos. Yet every inflection was real now: the soft r, the short breath before a question.
“Turn it off,” his grandmother whispered.
Yernar covered the radio with a metal cooking pot. The static did not stop. He wrapped the set in a blanket, carried it outside and placed it in the old stove. Only then did the voice cut out.
In the kitchen, Kulzhan-apa poured tea. Her hands shook, and the spoon rang against the glass.
“Tell me everything,” Yernar said.
“Not everything fits into words.”
“Start with my father.”
For a long time, she watched the steam.
Serik had worked as a technician at the tower. In the late 2000s, the equipment was being replaced and the first digital line installed. He found an old cable in the concrete base, running down into the ground. It appeared on no diagram. When they cut it, the power went out across the aul for several minutes, and dozens of people heard phones ringing that did not exist.
After that, Serik began seeing a man in military uniform near the tower.
“The lieutenant?” Yernar asked.
“Sometimes the lieutenant. Sometimes his own father. Sometimes you, grown up.”
“Me?”
“He said you were calling him from the future.”
A group of children ran past the window. They held phones in front of them and swiped across the dead screens in perfect unison.
“The night he disappeared, Serik came home and said he had found a way to shut down the signal,” his grandmother continued. “He wanted to reach the soldiers in 1942 and convince them not to give the order. He recorded everything he knew on a cassette, left it with me, and went to the tower. He was never seen again.”
“Why didn’t the police—”
“The police were looking for a man. They should have been searching for the waiting itself.”
Yernar pressed his fingers to his temples.
“Azhe, this sounds like superstition.”
“Superstition is the name people give someone else’s experience when it makes them uncomfortable.”
The phone in his pocket vibrated once.
He took it out. The signal indicator showed three bars.
Not one. Not a weak emergency channel. Full signal.
“You have a connection,” his grandmother said.
“There shouldn’t be one.”
Yernar quickly enabled secure mode. Data packets flowed without latency. There was no satellite fix; the device believed it was connected to a base station called KARASU-0, the same one with the all-zero identifier.
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