“I wouldn’t ask you to.”

There was nothing else to say.

Lena walked past him into the station. On a wall beside the door hung a laminated slogan: *PUBLIC SAFETY IS EVERYONE’S RESPONSIBILITY.*

The edges had begun to peel.

She wondered how long it had been hanging there, and how many people had walked beneath it without seeing the words.

Chapter Ten: The Silence Above the Firehouse

By eight o’clock, the rain had thinned enough for the communications crew to inspect the warning siren above the old volunteer firehouse.

Tessa King came in person. She wore a heavy navy coat over her dispatch uniform and carried a clipboard with a handwritten list of every failed alert, every successful call, and every address that had needed a door-to-door visit. She had been awake since two. A curl of hair had come loose from its clip, and her voice sounded like sandpaper.

The siren looked harmless in daylight: a gray horn mounted on a metal frame, no larger than equipment on the roofs of warehouses all over town. Yet dozens of Willow Court residents had been waiting for its sound before deciding whether the phone alerts were real.

A technician checked the backup power equipment and shook his head.

“The battery hasn’t held a proper charge for months.”

Tessa turned toward him. “Last month’s maintenance report says the backup passed.”

“It may have passed a screen check. It didn’t pass a physical load test.”

“And the main system?”

“A control connection was relocated during the Harbor Point roadwork. The documentation says it was tested afterward. We haven’t found proof anybody carried out that test.”

Tessa wrote the words down without comment.

There was no secret transmitter, no dramatic pair of wire cutters in a villain’s pocket. There was a stack of work orders and a maintenance budget that had been reduced because city officials believed the new remote equipment made old procedures unnecessary.

Tessa remembered making a note about an intermittent siren test in March. She had sent it through the proper channel. A supervisor wrote back that the equipment vendor would investigate when the road project finished.