Chapter 1
The sprawling Sterling Manor was the crown jewel of a quiet, opulent Las Vegas suburb. To the outside world, the Sterlings were a modern dynasty: 23 members under one impossibly large roof, their wealth as much a local legend as the neon glow of the Strip in the distant valley. Their fortune, it was whispered, was as old as the city itself.
But the family knew a quieter truth. The mansion held echoes of a time when there were 25. Three years ago, the family's bedrock—their great-great-great-grandparents, Arthur and Eleanor Sterling—had passed within weeks of each other, leaving a silence that the remaining 23 could never quite fill.
The heart of that silence was the third-floor attic, a place thick with dust and memory. It was there that Liz, the youngest at sixteen, felt most drawn. One afternoon, driven by a boredom that felt like longing, she pushed open the creaking door.
The air was stale, smelling of aged cedar and forgotten lives. Sunlight cut through a single grimy window, illuminating motes of dust dancing like lost spirits. Beneath a yellowed wedding gown, she found it: a cathedral-style radio, its dark wood scarred but elegant. It was heavy, a solid artifact from another century.
Dragging it to her room was a labor of love. After carefully cleaning it and finding a working power cord in the garage, she held her breath and plugged it in. A soft, orange glow warmed the vacuum tubes behind the fabric grille. It worked. But instead of music, a low, rhythmic static filled the room—a sound like a slow, steady heartbeat.
Liz twisted the tuning knob. The stations she found were a ghostly parade of big band music and crackling news reports from the 1940s. Then, as her fingers brushed the fine-tuning dial, the static cleared. A voice, faint and ethereal, as if traveling across a vast distance, broke through.
It wasn't a song or a broadcast. It was a single phrase, whispered on a loop, clear and chilling.
"Find Joshua..."
Liz froze, her blood running cold. Joshua was her older brother. But the voice wasn't just saying his name; it was layered with a desperate urgency.
She spun the dial, but the voice was gone, replaced once more by the empty hiss of dead air. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She was about to unplug the radio, to dismiss it as a trick of her mind, when the voice returned, clearer this time, more insistent. It was the gentle, papery voice of her great-great-great-grandmother, Eleanor—a voice she hadn't heard in three years.
"Find Joshua. Before he joins us."
The radio crackled and fell silent. Down the hall, Liz could hear her brother Josh laughing at something on his phone, alive and well. But the message from the attic, from a world beyond theirs, promised that might not be true for long.
