CHAPTER XII - Frequency Rain

The rain did not fall as water.

It came as a whisper.

Soon after dawn, as the surviving units of Line ELE–480 departed the ruins of the hydroelectric complex, the atmosphere changed its nature. The world around them no longer felt entirely dead. The dry sterility that had defined the wastelands since the fall of NEX began to soften beneath something almost imperceptible, a density within the air itself, as though the planet had started remembering how to breathe after centuries of silence.

Mist drifted low across the fractured plains.

The remains of ancient transport grids stretched beneath layers of dust and crystallized ash, their metallic veins still faintly visible beneath the earth like fossilized nervous systems buried inside the skin of the world. Broken relay pylons leaned at impossible angles across the horizon while collapsed signal towers disappeared into fog so dense that distance itself seemed uncertain.