Nadia replayed the call six times before sunrise.
The seventh time, the recording changed.
That was the part she did not tell herself immediately.
At first, she blamed the old system. The station computer still ran software that opened like it resented being alive. Files skipped. Time stamps drifted. Sometimes a commercial from 2014 appeared in the middle of a weather report and tried to sell tires to nobody.
But the caller's voice did not skip.
It waited.
On the first recording, he said her father's name.
On the seventh, after the line went dead, another sound appeared: three taps, a breath, and a woman's whisper.
"Under the console."
Nadia backed away from the desk.
The studio looked smaller in daylight. Less haunted. More embarrassing. Dust gathered on the foam panels. Coffee rings marked the script table. A motivational poster near the door said KEEP BROADCASTING, as if endurance were a business plan.
She crouched beneath the console anyway.
There was nothing there but cables, tape, and a dead mouse trap.
Then she saw the screw.
One panel under the broadcast desk had been opened recently. Not by engineers. Engineers left labels, complaints, and unpaid invoices. This panel had been removed with care.
Inside was a folded map wrapped in plastic.
Nadia knew the paper before she unfolded it.
Her father used to keep maps in the glove box and draw roads that did not appear on official routes. He said the desert was full of shortcuts invented by impatient men and remembered by widows.
This map showed the old western road.
Five red circles marked the route where the convoy supposedly burned.
But a sixth circle sat farther south, beyond the search area, beside a coordinate written in her mother's handwriting.
Nadia carried the map home before she could become sensible.
Her mother was awake.
Samira stood in the kitchen wearing a gray robe, one hand on the kettle, face already arranged into the calm she used when bad news approached.
Nadia placed the map on the table.
Her mother looked at it.
Then at Nadia.
No surprise.
That hurt more than denial would have.
"You knew about the sixth coordinate."
Samira turned off the kettle.
"Where did you get this?"
"The station."
Her mother's face changed.
Not fear.
Recognition.
"You need to resign today."
Nadia laughed once. "From a show nobody listens to?"
"From the room where your father made his last mistake."
The sentence settled between them like sand in a locked house.
Nadia looked at the map again.
"He worked at the station?"
Her mother did not answer.
The kitchen radio, unplugged on the shelf for years, clicked on by itself.
Static filled the room.
Nadia had seen her mother's handwriting angry, tired, and careful.
The coordinate on the map was all three.
Each number had been written twice, first in pencil and then in ink, as if Samira had wanted to give herself one chance to erase it and then decided punishment should be permanent.
Beside the sixth circle was a symbol Nadia recognized from the station wall: the old transmission tower, drawn as a narrow triangle with three broken signal lines.
Her father had died near the convoy, the family said.
The map suggested he had gone somewhere else afterward.
Then Nadia's father said, "Samira, tell her what you buried under the tower."