Part 5 — Where the Silence Leads
The next time Nash visited the hospital, Maya was sitting at the window with a small keyboard across her lap.
A real one, this time. Plastic keys, tinny sound, powered by double A batteries.
She didn’t notice him at first. She was focused, shoulders swaying slightly as she played a broken, careful tune. The notes were soft, sometimes wrong. But it was music.
“You’re improving,” Nash said quietly.
She glanced over, smiled faintly. “I used to dream I could still play. In the dark, it was the only thing that didn’t scare me.”
Nash nodded. “You’re remembering.”
“I’m trying.”
She looked better.
Not healed. That wasn’t the right word.
But grounded.
Like someone who’d started to believe the world aboveground was real.
She reached down and scratched Ember behind the ears.
“She doesn’t like when I play too loud,” Maya said. “I think she’s had too much noise in her life.”
Nash felt the weight of those words.
So had Maya.
He pulled a chair beside the bed, his notebook already in hand.
“I need to ask about your father,” he said.
Maya’s fingers froze on the keyboard. “I thought he was dead.”
“So did a lot of people. But the name Micah… it’s connected to you. And to the church.”
She didn’t respond at first. Then: “He used to say God spoke to him. Said the world was too loud and dirty for a girl like me.”
“He took you to protect you?”
“That’s what he believed.”
Nash let the silence stretch, let her fill it.
“I was five when we ran,” Maya said. “Mom and me. We stayed in shelters. Then with Aunt Rae. I thought he was gone.”
“What do you remember about him?”
She looked at her hands, thin and pale against the black-and-white keys.
“He never hit me. Not once. But he talked like every word came from thunder. Like if you didn’t listen, the ground would split.”
Nash scribbled notes.
“He had a ring,” she added suddenly. “Big and heavy. Like a man’s college ring, but no school name. Just a symbol.”
“What kind of symbol?”
“A cross… inside a triangle.”
That stopped him.
He’d seen that symbol before. Not in the files. In real life.
A burned-out compound off Route 31. A fire in ‘09. They called themselves the Sons of Solace. Fringe cult. Preached purification and rebirth through silence. Most members died in the blaze.
But the founder was never found.
Micah Garrison.
Nash didn’t go back to the station that night.
He drove.
Past the edge of town, past the hills that divided memory from rumor. He parked where the gravel met ash. The old compound was still marked off by rusted “No Trespassing” signs and a sagging wire fence.
He walked the perimeter, flashlight low, gun holstered but ready.
What was left of the main house was a skeletal frame, blackened timbers reaching like ribs to the stars. Nature had taken over, ivy threading through the rot, animals burrowing beneath the stone foundation.
He found a cracked stone step buried under moss.
And there—barely visible in the beam of his light—was a carved symbol.
A triangle. Inside it, a cross.
Micah had been here.
Maybe he’d started here.
But something told Nash he hadn’t stayed.
The next day, Nash returned to the hospital.
He brought an old photo with him—an archival shot from the Sons of Solace file. It showed three men and a woman standing outside the compound. Faces blurry. One man wore a heavy ring on his right hand.
He showed it to Maya.
She stared at it for a long time.
Then, slowly, she tapped her finger on the face of the man on the left.
“That’s him.”
Micah Garrison. Not a ghost. Not a myth.
A man who once believed silence could save a child.
And maybe still believed it.
Later that evening, Nash stood outside on the hospital lawn while Maya slept.
Ember sniffed the grass, then trotted back and sat at his feet.
He looked at her.
“You knew,” he said. “Didn’t you?”
The pup blinked.
“Jasper would’ve liked you.”
He reached down, scratched behind her ears, and for the first time, she licked his wrist.
Not just thanks.
Something else.
Like understanding.
Like memory.
The wind picked up. Cold and full of promise.
And somewhere beyond the hills, in a cabin or cave or crypt, Micah Garrison might still be listening.
But so was Cal Nash.
And this time, he wasn’t listening alone.
Part 6 — The Sound Beneath the Silence
Maya didn’t sleep well.
The nurses said she woke up twice screaming, once thrashing so hard they had to sedate her.
When Nash arrived the next morning, she was curled up in the hospital bed, eyes open, staring at the ceiling like she didn’t trust the walls.
Ember sat protectively on the bed beside her, head resting on Maya’s hip.
“She’s been like this since 4 a.m.,” the nurse whispered. “Won’t talk to anyone but you.”
Nash nodded.
He stepped inside and pulled the chair close.
“Hey, kid,” he said softly.
Maya didn’t look at him. But her hand reached out and rested lightly on Ember’s back.
“He sang last night,” she whispered. “In my dream. I heard him in the vents again.”
Nash leaned forward, elbows on knees. “What did he sing?”
“A hymn. One he made me learn. ‘Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.’ He said it was about holiness. About not interrupting God with noise.”
Her voice quivered.
“I wasn’t even allowed to cry. If I cried, he’d say I was polluting the silence.”
Nash clenched his fists. Let the storm inside settle before he spoke.
“Maya,” he said gently. “You don’t have to go back there. Not in your mind. Not ever again.”
“But I am back there,” she said. “Every time I close my eyes.”
Then she turned toward him, for the first time that morning.
“But maybe if I go there on purpose,” she said, “I can remember things I need to forget.”
Nash didn’t quite know how to answer that.
But he nodded.
Because she was right.
That afternoon, they met with Dr. Albright, the trauma specialist assigned to Maya’s care.
She was older, with soft eyes and a firm, quiet voice. The kind of woman who could hold a silence without fearing it.
“She’s a fighter,” Albright said, once Maya had returned to her room. “But she’s layered her memories in protection. Like scar tissue. Peeling it back will hurt.”
“She wants to try,” Nash said.
“She’ll need you.”
“I’m not her father.”
“You’re something,” Albright said. “You were the first face she saw in the light.”
Back in the cabin that night, Nash poured a drink and laid out the maps.
Micah Garrison had vanished once before.
He wouldn’t be careless now.
The Sons of Solace had owned property across three counties before they collapsed. One deed stood out—a parcel of land never properly reclaimed after the fire. Twenty acres bordering an abandoned mine.
No electricity. No address. No obvious use.
Just a gravel road and a long history of being overlooked.
The next morning, Nash stood at the nurses’ station with two black-and-white photographs. One of the land parcel. One of the church basement where Maya had been found.
He slid them across the counter to her.
“You don’t have to look,” he said.
But she did.
She stared at them for nearly a minute before pointing to the one with the property line.
“That one feels wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
“I don’t know. Like something sharp is underneath it.”
Nash understood what she meant.
Memory, buried too deep, doesn’t rot.
It waits.
He secured a warrant by noon.
Drove out alone, Ember in the passenger seat—her first real ride since the night she stumbled into his headlights.
The sky was heavy with clouds. The kind of gray that made the land feel stripped of time.
He parked where the road gave up. Hiked the last quarter mile through underbrush and silence.
Until he saw it.
A shack.
Half-collapsed. No windows. Door chained.
He moved slow. Hand near his weapon. Listening.
Then—under the rustle of leaves, a sound.
A voice.
Faint. Male. Off-key.
Singing.
“Let all mortal flesh keep silence…”
Nash drew his gun.
Stepped forward.
The song grew louder, but not clearer.
Each note warbled, uncertain, like the singer no longer knew if he was alone.
Then silence.
Complete.
Nash reached the door.
“Micah Garrison,” he called out. “This is Detective Calvin Nash. Come out with your hands where I can see them.”
Nothing.
Then—a creak.
Slow and deliberate.
The chain slid back.
And the door opened.
Inside stood a man with hollow cheeks and wild eyes, beard down to his collarbone, ring glinting on his right hand.
But what froze Nash wasn’t the face.
It was the collar in his hand.
A second red leather band.
Identical to Maya’s.
Only this one read: “Grace.”