Below the Signal

Copyright © [2025] by Cindy Angelique Fagegaltier. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations used in reviews, scholarly articles, or critical commentary, which must properly acknowledge the source.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is purely coincidental.

Preface

They left Axiom without ceremony. Hope wore borrowed clothes that day— threadbare, practical, never quite warm enough.

The past clung to them anyway, restless beneath the skin, refusing to stay buried.

It hummed in Mireya’s silence, pressed against her ribs like an old bruise.

She carried fire she no longer trusted herself to use— yet she was the spine they stood on, the force that bent but did not break.

Someone had to hold the line. Without her, nothing held for long.

Vaelen walked beside her, a man who read systems the way others read scripture— open, flawed, begging to be rewritten.

To him, the sky was never a ceiling. It was a question waiting for a better answer.

Zara flickered between them— sharp as truth, twice as loud, a spark in a world that had forgotten how to kindle its own light.

She met new places with mischief, as if she’d already heard the world’s secrets and wasn’t afraid to laugh at them.

But Zaiya— Zaiya was stillness before sound. A quiet presence in a world addicted to forgetting, a girl who listened with her whole body as if every echo mattered.

She wasn’t chosen. She wasn’t marked.

She simply noticed— and stayed.

And in a world built to erase, that was the first rebellion.

They did not know what waited for them on Rhavka.

Only that they were stepping into a new life one breath at a time, carrying everything they could not leave behind.

Sometimes, that is how revolutions begin.