Tessa said hello to the apparatus in an ordinary voice.
The next fragment began before she finished. It rose through two tones, broke, and ended with a soft click from the reader assembly. A narrow strip of light moved along the exposed segment near its base.
Lale retained the whole exchange. She did not stop the recorder to isolate the part that sounded most like a reply. Tessa waited through another fragment, then used a different short call. The machine produced the same broken ending at the same place in its sequence.
Eli stood beside the medical bag. The words he thought he had heard outside dissolved as he listened more closely. One fragment might contain a name. Another might be the final syllables of an instruction. The gaps made them easy to complete and impossible to trust.
“Does anything change with her voice?” Sera asked.
“Not clearly,” Lale said. “Let it run without us for a moment.”
They fell silent. A pressure fluctuation passed through the wall with a faint tick. The strip of light brightened, and the apparatus released a cluster of overlapping sounds. Then it went quiet until the next small change.
The pattern was not a conversation.
