Mrs. Tate shook her head.
“Truth doesn’t unbury the dead.”
“No,” Wendell said. “But it can stop the living from being buried with them.”
That afternoon, Wendell Hayes did something he had not done in twenty years.
He sat at a kitchen table without trying to own the room.
Mrs. Tate’s name was Lorna. She allowed him inside only because Jaylen insisted on showing him the rest of the power box design, and because Wendell promised not to touch anything without permission.
The kitchen smelled of beans warming on the stove. A small fan turned slowly on the counter, clicking once every rotation. Jaylen spread his drawings across the table.
He explained everything.
Not like a child showing a project, but like an inventor defending a living thing.
The unit was designed to gather energy from unreliable sources. It could accept small solar input, alternator charge, bicycle generation, and low-grade battery discharge. Its controllers used tiny voltage changes as signals. No internet. No expensive chips. If one storage cell overheated or failed, the others adjusted automatically.
