Echoes Beneath Iron
They had frozen the gears long ago, yet the air still murmured with a turbine’s ghost-hum, as if the machines resented the quiet. Banners clung like barnacles to the corroded walls: *Find Vojta*, *Have You Seen Vojta?* Their pale glow flickered, cycling on some long-forgotten timer, a heartbeat for a city that no longer breathes. The divers bent in ritual arcs, polishing lenses that led nowhere, as though clarity itself might lure him back.
Above them drifted a leviathan shape, its lantern eyes scanning the avenues like an unseen chaperone that whispers behind glass. Did it mark their progress, or feed on it? Every clang rang like scripture against the metal bones of the past, and still the single question swam between them: *Where is Vojta?* In these underwater canyons, even answers rust. We keep listening, because silence might be his most dangerous disguise.
