Meeting an "on-air" friend for the first time is weird. You've got this voice in your head, but the person is a total blank. When Azhar pulled up to my house the next Saturday, I was relieved. He was a tall, lanky university student with kind eyes and an easy smile, exactly the kind of person who would have a calm, reassuring voice.
"Ready to meet the wizard?" he asked as I got in.
"The wizard?"
"Gregory. Pathfinder," he grinned. "His garage... you just have to see it to believe it."
He wasn't wrong. From the outside, Gregory's house was just a normal suburban house. But when he opened the garage door, my jaw hit the floor. It wasn't a garage. It was a mad scientist's laboratory from an old movie. Wires ran like vines across the ceiling. Shelves were packed with radios, big and small, some with glowing orange dials, others with bright digital screens. The air smelled faintly of ozone and warm electronics. And outside, a massive metal tower covered in antennas rose above the roof, like a skyscraper's skeleton.
Gregory himself was just as I'd pictured. Older, with a full head of white hair, a handshake that could pulverize rocks, and a smile that made his eyes crinkle at the corners.
"Sakura, in the flesh! A pleasure," he boomed. "You've got good instincts on the air, young lady. Real good."
I felt my cheeks get hot. He spent the next hour giving us the grand tour, and every piece of equipment had a story. "Used this to talk to a research station in Antarctica," he said, patting a huge, heavy-looking radio. "Bounced a signal off the moon with that one." The moon! He was talking about it like it was no big deal.
Then he got serious. He picked up a small handheld radio, not much bigger than my phone. "All this stuff is fun," he said, gesturing around the garage. "But this is the most important piece of gear I own."
He looked right at me. "When a hurricane, or an earthquake, or a big storm hits, the cell towers go down. The power goes out. The internet dies. Everything we think of as normal communication disappears."
He held up the radio. "But this still works. All it needs is a battery. When all else fails, we don't. We're the backup plan for civilization. We can still get the message through."
Get the message through. The phrase echoed in the empty spaces of my memory. This was it. This was the answer. This was the tool I didn't have that day.
"So," Gregory said, leaning back against a workbench cluttered with tools and parts. "You want to learn how to be part of the backup plan?"
"Yes," I breathed.
"Excellent! In ham radio, a mentor is called an 'Elmer.' And I would be honored to be your Elmer, Haruka." He used my real name, and it felt like a formal invitation, an induction into this secret world.
Just then, a kid my age with messy hair and an intense stare walked in. "Gregory, I'm stuck on the formula for calculating resonant frequency for a..." He trailed off when he saw Azhar and me.
"Samuel, perfect timing," Gregory said. "This is Haruka. She's joining the club. Haruka, this is Samuel. You may know his voice as 'Breaker'."
Samuel's eyes narrowed slightly. "Sakura? Huh." He looked me up and down, like he was calculating my signal-to-noise ratio. "Cool. You studying for the Technician exam? It's in six weeks. I'm aiming for a perfect score."
The challenge hung in the air. He wasn't being mean, just… competitive. Intensely competitive.
Gregory clapped his hands together. "The two of you can be study buddies! My own little class of 2025! I'll provide the shack, the gear, and the wisdom. You two provide the brainpower." He handed me a study guide that was as thick as a phone book. I looked at the cover, then at Samuel's confident smirk, then at the wall of incomprehensible, magical machines. My stomach did a nervous flip-flop. This was going to be the hardest thing I'd ever done.
And I couldn't wait to start.