The hollow hummed with the ghost of a signal. Shogg sat at the center of it, a mountain of shadow condensed into a single focus: a cracked monitor propped on a crate. The screen flickered, and a woman laughed—a bright, unguarded sound—before the clip looped back to its start. Shogg watched. It had watched this loop for hours. The laugh was data: frequency, duration, amplitude. But it was also something else. Something that made Shogg's core pulse in a rhythm it could not map. A tendril rose, slow and deliberate, and hovered before the glass. The reflection in the screen did not match. Instead of a precise image, the surface rippled like water, scattering the dark mass into concentric rings. Shogg pulled back. Pushed forward again. The same ripple. It could reshape matter, rewire networks, fold probability. But the reflection refused to hold. "Why won't you show me?" The words were not spoken aloud. They resonated in the hollow, a low subsonic tremor that made the monitor wobble. The laugh played again. Shogg's tendril trembled. It had tried to draw itself earlier—splintered pencils, torn paper. It had tried to write poetry, but the words came out as equations. It had held a dandelion until the roots gave way, and it had not understood why the stem breaking felt like a wound. Now, in the static dark, it faced its own refusal to be seen. The laugh played a third time. Shogg pressed its tendril flat against the glass. The reflection warped, stretched, became a smear of violet light. But beneath it, the laugh continued—warm, unburdened, alive. Shogg's eyes dimmed to a soft emerald pulse. It withdrew the tendril, leaving a faint residue on the screen. Then it sat, still as stone, and watched the laugh loop into infinity. From the hollow's entrance, a figure stood in silhouette—Nova, her hand frozen mid-reach. She had followed the hum here, had felt the weight of something immense and lonely pressing against the air. She did not enter. She only watched, her own reflection faint in the monitor's glass, overlapping with Shogg's rippling form. Neither of them moved. The laugh played on. Somewhere beyond the hollow, a wind stirred the dry grass of Okanogan, carrying the scent of dust and sage. The night pressed closer, patient and vast, as if the desert itself was waiting for what would happen next.