Ice on the Wires
The ladder rungs bite through your gloves as you haul yourself onto the comms platform. Wind shrieks across the dish, and your headlamp paints the rime in surgical white. The antenna is a frozen sculpture — but the coaxial line dangles loose, its copper throat gleaming where a blade has bitten clean through.
Not weather. Not wear. A cut.
You crouch on the catwalk, breath fogging your visor, and listen to a silence that is not silence. Somewhere below, the ice creaks like something turning in sleep.
A severed line can be mended — but mending invites whatever did the cutting to answer back.
Start Over