Signal Fire

She has been the voice of the end of the world for three years. She has never once said her own name. Sol Quintero broadcasts from a water tower every night: weather, water levels, and the names of the dead. It is the last signal in the northern basin. At 3 a.m. a man four hundred miles south answers, transmitting from a hospital generator he keeps alive with a bicycle and sheer stubbornness. He calls himself Ten. They talk for six months about everything except themselves. Then a wildfire pushes Sol off her tower, and Ten's generator dies the same week. Both of them decide to walk — toward a voice neither of them has ever seen. They cross a burned state in parallel, missing each other by hours at every cache, every bridge, every church. When they finally meet on a highway overpass in the smoke, the only question left is the hardest one: what do two people who built their whole lives around a signal do when the signal has a face? A post-apocalyptic romance about distance, static, and saying your name out loud.