THE LAST ROAD TRIP

The engine coughed, sputtered, then roared back to life as Jax white-knuckled the steering wheel. The old Chevy had been his father’s—a relic from the Before Times, when gas was cheap and music wasn’t a death sentence. Beside him, Nova chewed her thumbnail raw, her knee bouncing like a live wire.

"You’re sure this is the place?" she asked for the third time.

Jax didn’t answer. The coordinates matched the smuggler’s map—a sun-bleached scrap of paper traded for two cans of fuel and his last pack of cigarettes. Outside, the desert stretched endless and pale under the bruised purple sky. Somewhere out there was the last functioning radio tower.

And in his glovebox, wrapped in oilcloth like a sacred text: the only copy of Resonate, the album he’d recorded the week the Silence Laws took effect. The one that got his band executed.

Nova had been twelve when they outlawed sound. Jax remembered the news vans, the screaming headlines: MUSIC LINKED TO SOCIAL UNREST. Overnight, guitars became contraband. Singing in public meant a bullet. By the time Nova turned sixteen, she’d forgotten what a symphony sounded like.

"You ever hear real music?" Jax asked suddenly. The question escaped like a prisoner.

Nova’s fingers stilled on the dashboard. "Just the propaganda jingles. And once, an old man humming in the ration line. They broke his teeth for it."

The steering wheel creaked in Jax’s grip. He’d seen the Silence Patrol’s work—bodies strung up with piano wire, record collections melted into grotesque sculptures in town squares.

"Tonight," he promised, "you’ll hear what it’s supposed to sound like."

The tower rose from the dust like a steel god. Rust had eaten half its legs, but the dish still pointed defiantly at the stars. Nova whooped, scrambling from the car before it fully stopped.

"Careful!" Jax barked, but she was already scaling the service ladder, her boots kicking loose flakes of corrosion. He followed more slowly, the vinyl clutched to his chest. His shoulder ached where the Patrol’s bullet had grazed him in Denver.

Inside the control room, Nova worked miracles. Her fingers flew across the corpse of a broadcasting console, splicing wires with the precision of a surgeon. "They sabotaged the main transmitter," she muttered, "but the backup’s intact. Give me twenty minutes."

Jax watched the horizon. Dawn painted the sky in streaks of blood orange. They’d be coming soon.

The needle hit vinyl with a hiss.

Then—

A guitar lick sliced through the static, sharp as broken glass. Jax’s own voice followed, rough with longing: "They can cut the wires, but they’ll never kill the light—"

Nova gasped. Actual tears cut tracks through the dirt on her face. "It’s… it’s alive."

For three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, the desert breathed.

Then the first black van crested the ridge.

Jax counted six vehicles before the gunfire started. Bullets pinged off the tower’s legs like angry hornets. Nova didn’t flinch, her hands steady as she rerouted power to boost the signal.

"They’re jamming us!" she shouted over the crescendo.

Jax pressed his palm against the studio glass. Somewhere out there, people were hearing this for the first time in a decade. Maybe a kid like Nova, hiding under their bed with a scavenged radio. Maybe an old man with broken teeth.

The console exploded in a shower of sparks. Nova went down hard, clutching her arm. Jax dragged her behind cover as the song stuttered, skipped—

And died.

Silence rushed back in like floodwater.

Through the smoke, Jax saw them coming. Black body armor. Sound-dampened rifles. The lead enforcer’s mask distorted his voice into something mechanical: "Surrender the recording."

Nova’s blood seeped between Jax’s fingers where he pressed against her wound. He thought of his bandmates lined up against the recording studio wall. Of the way Micah had kept singing until the firing squad silenced him.

Jax stood.

In his pocket, the smuggler’s detonator felt heavier than a sin.

"Funny thing about sound," he said, thumb hovering over the button. "Takes just one spark to start an echo."

The explosion tore the night open.

They found the Chevy three miles east, engine still warm. On the passenger seat: a single vinyl, unscathed. And carved into the dashboard with a switchblade—

KEEP THE BEAT GOING.

Across the wasteland, a hundred stolen radios crackled to life.