The Numbers Stations

The Numbers Stations are not a person, so we list them as a department, the nearest the station has come to filing them properly. They are the strings of digits and intervals and single tones that run in the gaps when no living host is scheduled and sometimes under the ones who are. Agent Lee reads from them. He did not invent them. They were on the air before Lee was, and before the reopening, on a frequency the engineers swear is dark. Decoded patiently they resolve into library call numbers, gate times, weather for a county that is not in any atlas, and now and then a name, read once, that belongs to someone who was about to tune in. The station does not control them and stopped trying. They keep their own count alongside the Signal Keeper's, and the two numbers have never matched, and the Numbers always run a few souls higher.