CHAPTER 5 – BROADCAST IN THE DARK

It was past two in the morning, the city humming with distant engines and the soft buzz of rain on glass. He lay on his sofa, staring at the ceiling with a tangled blanket across his chest, feeling the weight of something he couldn’t name.

Restless, he reached for an old MP3 player he hadn’t touched in years—clunky, scratched, loaded with forgotten playlists. He scrolled through the static-blue screen, letting his thumb stop on a nameless audio file.

He hit play.

Silence.
Then static.
Then… something else.

A voice. Faint, distorted by age or distance.

“If you’re out there… I remember you.”

His breath caught. He hit replay. Nothing. Only static.

The Earth was broken.

Cities had collapsed under sand and ash. Oceans had receded, taking color with them. The sky was permanently grey, like a curtain pulled over the stars. Humanity had long since burrowed underground, trading sunlight for survival.

And yet, Xeth walked above it all.

He moved like a shadow across the wasteland—part soldier, part scavenger, part ghost. His coat was tattered, his boots worn thin. A leather-bound journal hung from his belt, pages filled with symbols and red tree sketches he didn’t understand.

He hadn’t spoken to another person in three months.

Then he heard it.

A transmission. Short-range. Weak.

“...If you’re out there… I remember you.”

She heard his reply two days later.

Liora sat beneath a flickering solar panel inside her bunker, tapping at a rusted console. Her bunker was crumbling. Plants were dying. The recycled air stank of iron and old plastic.

But the signal worked.

She replayed the voice.
It wasn’t much—just static, followed by a single word.

“Coming.”

Her fingers trembled. She pressed her recording button.

“I’m still here.”

They met at a ruined train station in the middle of a dust field.

No birds. No movement. Just a figure in a long coat stepping off the horizon.

He looked exhausted. She looked thin, like the air barely held her up.

Neither spoke. Not at first.

He took off his mask. She took off hers.

Their eyes met—and the world shifted slightly.

“I think I’ve been waiting for you,” she whispered.

“I think I’ve been looking for you,” he replied.

The days they shared after that felt like something stolen.

Together, they restored an old greenhouse attached to the bunker—rigging up water filters, hand-pollinating plants. Liora laughed once when he accidentally knocked over a can of preserved cherries. Xeth wrote about it in his journal like it was the most important thing that had ever happened.

They rarely talked about the past. They never mentioned the future.

But sometimes, when Liora fell asleep on his shoulder, Xeth would whisper to the air:

“If this is all we have… I’m glad it’s you.”

But the sickness came anyway.

Liora began forgetting things—how many days they’d been together, what the plants were called, what his name was.

Xeth stopped sleeping. He recorded his voice every night, just in case.

“Liora,
If you forget me again… I’ll find you.
If this life ends… I’ll wait for the next.
I always do.”

She died with his recording still playing beside her ear.

He placed a cassette beside her body and sealed the greenhouse door.

Outside, the wind howled. Inside, a single red flower bloomed in the corner—its stem reaching toward the dying sunlight like it remembered something the world had forgotten.

Lana stopped in front of the flower shop without knowing why.

It was raining again. She had no umbrella. The sky was grey, the air thick with that just-before-thunder stillness. But she didn’t care.

Her eyes landed on a small pot tucked in the window.

A red flower.

Not bright red—deep. Almost bruised. Like something born from fire.

She stepped inside, soaking wet, and pointed at the flower.

“How much?”

“That one? Fifteen ringgit,” the florist said.

She paid and left.

That night, she placed the pot by her window, next to her guitar.

And though she couldn’t explain it… she slept better than she had in weeks.

[END OF CHAPTER 5]