The replay tower on Kessler Hill needed an hour of maintenance a year and a decade of grudges to keep it standing. Marla inherited both.
The county had tried to sell the relay site twice. Both auctions failed for the same reason: the only bidder each time was a man named Aldous Fenn who wanted it for something he never stated, and both winning bids were withdrawn by the auction house for procedural reasons no one in the county could get anyone to explain on the record.
"You don't service a tower like ours," the retired engineer told her, handing over a socket set older than the station. "You negotiate with it. It comes down in ice and comes up in egotists."
She climbed it on a Sunday to replace a corroded flare ring and found, in the equipment shed bolted to the gantry, a shelf of cassette tapes — every night she'd ever broadcast, recorded by someone with excellent taste in microphone technique. Hers. Years of hers. The earliest box was labeled with a date nine days before she was hired.
This chapter is about who logs a night shift that nobody asked to be logged, and why the answer, when it arrives, arrives as kindness, which is worse.