It started with a missing chair.
Yusuf's.
Still tucked beneath his workbench, untouched.
But his tools were gone.His bag, too.Not packed.Vanished.
His phone? Disconnected.
The coil prototype he'd been tuning the night before? Still humming.But slightly… off.
As if it knew.
—
They searched the town.
The tea vendor hadn't seen him.The baker said he came by yesterday, unusually quiet.Zeynep checked the archives. No messages.No last entries.Only a sketch: a half-finished redesign for a passive water filter, labeled:
"Maybe this one won't need protecting."
The workshop turned cold.
Not because of weather.
Because someone was missing—and no one knew why.
—
That night, Emir couldn't sleep.
He sat by the quiet prototype, the one Yusuf called "his humming child," notebook open, pen unmoving.
He didn't need to write.
He needed to understand.
And that's when the air shifted.
Cool.Still.
And then came the voice.
Atatürk.
Not poetic this time.Not distant.
Present.Sharp.
— "I lost men too," he said.
Emir didn't move.
Atatürk stood beside him—not in robes of Solara, not cloaked in metaphor.
But in the field uniform from the Western Front.Boots thick with Anatolian mud.
— "We crossed the Sakarya River in winter.We had no food for two days.No gunpowder that wasn't damp.And I asked men to move forward anyway."
He looked at Emir, eyes heavy.
— "And some of them walked into the snow,knowing they wouldn't come back.Not because they wanted to die.But because they believed the ones behind them would keep walking."
Emir blinked hard.
— "So what do I do now?"
Atatürk sat, cross-legged beside the coil.
— "You keep building.Not because they stayed.But because one of them left the design behind."
—
The next morning, Leyla returned from the outer district.
Her voice was tight.
— "One of our smaller Kara field centers was ransacked.Coils taken.Blueprints missing.But…"
She placed a folded note on the table.
Yusuf's handwriting.
It read:
"I didn't run.But someone had to leave first.To see where they were planning to step next."
And beneath it:
"Don't follow me.Finish what I started."
—
The Builders stood in silence.
Zeynep placed the note into her archive box without a word.
Çağla turned back to her screen, hands trembling but typing faster than ever.
Ece lit the coil.
No one spoke for a long time.
But Emir did write.
"He didn't disappear.He became the first whisperon the other side of the linethey don't know we've already crossed."
Somewhere deep in a quiet room,a pair of hands unfolded Yusuf's blueprint.
The coil at the center began to glow—but not in the familiar copper-red.
This time…it shimmered blue.
And whoever watched it…did not smile.