Sage Holloway

# The Frequency of Silence The morning light filtered through the cabin's frosted windows as Sage Holloway adjusted the sensitivity dial on their electromagnetic frequency detector. The device emitted a soft chirp—normal baseline radiation, the kind that hummed beneath every living thing. They set it aside and picked up their camera instead, a weathered Canon that had documented three years of Silverpine's manufactured perfection. Snow-laden pines. Untouched meadows. Smiling tourists in luxury resort wear, photoshopped into nature's embrace. But something had changed in the frequencies last week. Something that made Sage's skin crawl. "You're doing that thing again," Jordan said, entering without knocking—a privilege of seven years of friendship. Jordan Pierce had the kind of easy confidence Sage envied, the ability to walk into rooms without calculating the social cost. Whereas Sage calculated everything, measured twice, spoke once. "What thing?" Sage asked, knowing exactly. "The thing where you're worried but won't say it out loud." Jordan collapsed onto the worn couch, boots still muddy from their hike. "So you just stare at your equipment like it owes you money." Despite everything, Sage smiled. "There's electromagnetic interference patterns I'm not recognizing. It's been accelerating for six days." "Could it be aurora activity?" "That was my first thought." Sage pulled up their frequency log on the laptop, a graph that looked like a seismic reading. "But look at the consistency. Aurora borealis is chaotic, beautiful, random. This is... organized. Degrading, but organized." Jordan leaned closer, studying the screen with the kind of attention Sage appreciated—no rush to offer solutions or dismissal. Just witness. Just presence. "What does your gut say?" Sage's gut had been screaming since Tuesday. "That we need to go deeper into the national forest. There's a corridor about four miles northeast where the interference is strongest. I've been mapping it." "Okay," Jordan said simply. "When?" "Today. Before the snow gets worse." They left within the hour, Sage loading the truck with camera equipment, the electromagnetic detector, sample collection kits, and a portable spectrometer that had cost them six months of freelance work. Jordan navigated while Sage drove, their hands tight on the wheel as they left the town proper and entered the forest access roads. The luxury resort buildings receded behind them—all glass and modern minimalism, designed to frame views of pristine nature without acknowledging that pristine nature was Silverpine's entire economic model. The town's website boasted "untouched wilderness" and "Earth's last sanctuary." Sage had photographed the marketing materials themselves. Beautiful lies, carefully composed. They parked at the trailhead around noon, the winter air biting at exposed skin. Sage's detector began its warning chirp immediately, rising in pitch as they hiked deeper into the forest. The frequencies weren't just elevated—they were becoming unstable, fluctuating in ways that suggested source degradation rather than normal environmental variance. "It's getting louder," Jordan observed, though they couldn't hear what Sage heard. The detector's digital readout climbed steadily: 8.3 Hz, 8.9 Hz, 9.4 Hz. They found the first vent an hour in. It was marked by dead trees, a perfect circle of biological collapse spreading outward from a crack in the earth where steam rose in faint wisps. The ground around it was bare rock, stripped of lichen and moss, the soil itself leached of life. Sage's detector screamed. "Oh my god," Jordan whispered. Sage raised their camera and began photographing. The technical work centered them—composition, exposure, focus. Every photograph a sentence in a language no one had yet agreed to hear. They captured the radius of death, the living trees just beyond it, the geological scar in the earth. The electromagnetic patterns here were catastrophic. The detector's readings were nearly double what they'd recorded in town. "Someone's been using these," Jordan said, examining equipment partially buried in snow near the vent's edge. "Look, here. This is geothermal harvesting infrastructure." Sage's hand trembled slightly as they photographed the equipment. A small installation, deliberately camouflaged. Pipes leading downslope, toward town. This was evidence. This was the frequency made visible. They found seven more vents over the next three hours, each one showing increasing signs of extraction and declining geological stability. The final one, the deepest in the forest, was partially collapsed. The ground around it was subsiding, creating a depression that would become a sinkhole if it destabilized further. One of Sage's photographs caught the perfect angle—the town visible through the trees in the distant background, completely unaware of the ground beneath it literally sinking. The hike back was silent. Sage's mind was already composing the report, framing the photographs, structuring the evidence in a way that couldn't be dismissed or ignored. Not a confrontation—Sage wasn't built for confrontation. But evidence. Facts. A visual argument so clear that words became almost unnecessary. The next morning, Sage arranged the prints on the cabin's table. Forty-three photographs, each one documenting the progression from the furthest healthy vents to the collapsed structure. They created a timeline of degradation, a narrative of extraction and consequence that couldn't be misread. Jordan helped organize them into a presentation deck, and Sage wrote a technical report—careful, precise, unemotional. The kind of document that relied on accuracy rather than persuasion. By afternoon, Sage had assembled three copies of a binder containing the photographs, the report, frequency data printouts, and recommendations from the USGS about geothermal system failure patterns. They left the first copy at the town council office after hours, sliding it under the door of Mayor Helena Voss's administrative assistant. The second went to the editor of the Silverpine Gazette. The third, Sage kept, in case they needed to present it directly. For four days, nothing happened. Then everything happened at once. The mayor called a town meeting, but not to discuss the evidence. To address what she called "false environmental alarmism" and "dangerous speculation that threatens our community's economic stability." Someone—Sage never learned who—had already prepared a counter-narrative. The vents were natural. The extraction equipment was decades old, licensed, and safe. The photographs were "misleading interpretations of normal geological processes." Sage sat in the back of the meeting hall, Jordan beside them, and felt the weight of a hundred eyes that didn't quite look directly at them. The townspeople of Silverpine had built their identity on untouched nature and luxurious comfort. Acknowledging the threat meant acknowledging complicity. It meant changing. It was easier to shoot the messenger. "There's talk of requesting your professional credentials be reviewed," Jordan whispered. "Someone said your work is 'biased environmental advocacy masquerading as journalism.'" Sage's chest tightened. This was why they'd chosen indirect communication in the first place. This exact pressure. This exact choice: stay quiet and safe, or speak up and be destroyed. After the meeting, standing in the parking lot while snow began to fall again, Sage made a decision they'd been avoiding. "I need to go public," they said quietly. "Not just the town. The state environmental agency. The media. All of it." Jordan's expression shifted—surprise, then understanding, then something that looked like pride. "Okay." "It's going to get ugly. They're already questioning my credibility." "I know." "It might—" Sage's voice cracked slightly. "It might change things between me and people I've known for years." "I know that too," Jordan said, stepping closer. "But Sage, the frequencies are screaming. You're the only one who can hear them. So you have to be the one who translates." The press release went out three days later, accompanied by all forty-three photographs and the complete technical report. Sage included the detector readings, the extraction equipment documentation, and a timeline of geothermal system degradation that stretched back nearly twenty years. They didn't make accusations—they presented facts and let the facts speak. The response was swift and divided. The state environmental agency opened an investigation. Independent geologists reviewed the data and called for immediate system decommissioning. But within Silverpine itself, the divisions hardened into something uglier. Some people—the ones most invested in the town's image—turned away from Sage completely. One business owner publicly called them a "saboteur." Someone else started a social media campaign questioning their mental health. Sage read very little of it. Instead, they did what they'd always done best: they documented. They photographed the town's response—the denial, the anger, the cognitive dissonance etched into every face. And when the investigation deepened, when structural engineers confirmed that the subsidence risk was real and imminent, Sage photographed that too. The corrective measures. The infrastructure being dismantled. The slow, painful acknowledgment of truth. Two months after the initial presentation, the state ordered Silverpine to decommission the geothermal system entirely. Three months after that, a preliminary engineering assessment confirmed that without immediate geological stabilization, the entire resort district risked collapse within eighteen months. The town had to choose: acknowledge the damage and invest in repairs, or face catastrophic failure and potential loss of life. They chose acknowledgment. Slowly, painfully, defensively—but they chose it. Sage's relationship with most of Silverpine remained fractured. They received hateful messages from people who felt their reputation was threatened. Some friendships ended. But the town survived the truth, which was more than Sage had dared hope. One evening, as winter turned toward spring and the snow began its retreat, Sage and Jordan sat on the cabin's porch, watching the mountains emerge from their white cover. The electromagnetic detector sat dark on the railing beside them, its screaming finally silent. The frequencies had normalized. "How are you feeling?" Jordan asked. Sage took a long time answering. "Like I compromised something essential about myself." "Did you?" "I don't know yet." Sage pulled their jacket tighter. "I told myself I'd never be the person who confronts. That my voice wasn't strong enough. That indirect methods were my only strength." "And?" "And maybe I was wrong about what strength is." Sage looked at their friend. "Maybe strength isn't about being comfortable. Maybe it's just about speaking truth even when speaking truth terrifies you." Jordan smiled. "That's very philosophical for someone who claims to be bad at words." "I had a lot of help," Sage said quietly. The mountains stood silent around them, no longer screaming through electromagnetic frequencies that only Sage could hear. The town below had survived its reckoning. And Sage had survived something too—the discovery that sometimes, the most introverted voice could reach the furthest, as long as they were willing to let it be heard. The silence that fell between them now was different from before. It was the silence of resolution. Of hard-earned peace. Of truth finally spoken, finally believed, finally acted upon. Beneath the serene quiet of the mountains, no more electromagnetic screams. Just the ordinary hum of a world slowly learning to listen.