The railway crossing ahead had long since given up on keeping cars out; the bars were up and rust-welded into surrender. The signal lights were dead eyes. Beyond the tracks, scrub ran wild into a shallow depression where water collected in spring. Now it was just mud and old reeds and discarded things. Someone had rolled an office chair out there once and left it. It sat like a throne for a king who never came back.

They climbed the fence at a low point where the wire had sagged into a learnable shape. Callen offered a hand; Lira didn’t take it, and she didn’t know if that was for stubbornness or because touching him felt like a line she couldn’t cross. She landed in the weeds and the sound landed a second later, slightly off, as if the echo had gotten lost and arrived late.

They walked. The reeds brushed her thighs with a whisper. Insects ticked invisibly. Somewhere close and nowhere visible, a metallic scrape slid along the stone.

Lira stopped so fast that Callen almost went past her. “You heard that.”

“Yes,” Callen said.

“It feels like it wants us to know it’s there,” she said.

“It wants you to listen,” Callen said. “It always wants that.”

“And then?”

“It tells you the truth you can’t afford.”

She laughed once, brittle. “Great. Love that for us.”

The noise came again, longer, as if whatever made it had more room now. Pull-drag, pull-drag. It thinned to a whisper and folded into the reeds. The sun went behind a cloud so minor there shouldn’t have been a difference, but the cold stepped up anyway.

“Ryke!” Lira called, suddenly and loudly, just to break the geometry of the place. Her voice hit the fog and pushed a dent in it that smoothed itself out a second later. “Ryke, if you can hear me—”

“Lira!” The answer came sharp and close, from just ahead.

Her body moved before her brain did. She ran toward the voice, boots sucking at the soft ground, breath sawing. The reeds closed behind her, then opened again in a series of small curtseys. Callen’s footfalls kept pace behind her, steady and unhurried in a way that made her want to shove him.

“Ryke? Say something!”

“Here!” The voice came from the low dip where the office chair sat, singular and wrong, because it sounded like Ryke’s exact voice, but smoothed of breath, like a recording. “Lira, hurry!”

“I can’t see you!” she shouted.

“Lira!” Closer now. “Here!”

She skidded into the low ground and nearly went down. Mud grabbed at her soles. The office chair turned a few degrees as if some small animal had shoved it; nothing was there. Reeds leaned and then stood.

“Stop,” Callen said from behind her. “Listen.”

“I am listening,” she snapped.

“Not to the words,” Callen said. His breath didn’t fog. She stared at that fact even as she told herself not to. “Listen to the space around them.”

The voice came again—“Lira!”—and now that she was holding her breath to do it, she heard what Callen meant: there was no air in the sound. No distance. No tiny imperfections of teeth and tongue. It was Ryke’s pitch and timbre, perfectly pressed.

She swallowed. Her heart didn’t slow. “What does that mean?”

“It means it wants you to keep moving,” Callen said. “Because the moving wears you down.”

He stepped past her into the dip and crouched, gloved fingers lifting a reed where it had snapped cleanly, not crushed. He let it fall. “He was here,” he said, and she almost told him to shut up, because that was the worst thing he could have said. “Or he’s being… echoed at us from where he is.”

“You told me the mark is the invitation,” Lira said. “What happens if you accept?”

“You go where it’s easier,” Callen said. “And then you pay.”

“Pay what?”

“Whatever you’ve got.”

“So the history books are, what, moral fables now?”

Callen’s hood shadowed his mouth. Lira didn’t know if he smiled, and she didn’t want to know. “History’s just a list of who paid and who pretended they didn’t.”