Chapter 6 The Peak

Cathedral Peak was not a mountain. It was a shoulder of the coastal ridge, a bare granite dome three hundred and ten feet above the datum, crowned by a fire lookout tower that had not been staffed in twenty years. The tower's glass was gone from a decade of storms. Its catwalk was rusted thin as foil. But its frame was riveted steel, bolted into the granite, and its platform stood above every other fixed object on the tidewater horizon. They reached it at one in the morning, in the last of the moonless dark. Juna posted sentries—two of the row-house families, the ones who'd spent every summer of their lives on the water and knew that you watched the boundary, not the sea. She laid the children in the lookout's bare room on tarps, wrapped in the gym's emergency blankets. She rationed the water and the food and set the hand-cranked field phone on the rail, where the wire ran back through the black trees toward the school and the tower. Then she stood at the rail and listened to the night. The flood was visible as a lighter darkness below the ridge, a smear of reflected sky between the black of the land and the black of the open water. The drowned town was down there, ticking on under the harbor's new floor. She could not hear the machine from the peak—the relay was too far, the water too good a muffler. But she had logged its cadence all afternoon, and she heard it anyway, in memory, like a metronome someone had left running in an empty room. Three beats. Countdown. Three beats. Countdown. At 0140 the field phone rang. Omar's voice came through thin and scratchy, the way voices sound through water. "Reading at 0100 is 137. That's a drop of seventy-five in six hours. The curve has broken." "How much time?" "I'm running the fit against the tide table now. Conservative answer: not quite six hours. Aggressive answer: closer to four and a half. The acceleration is feeding on itself." Juna looked at her watch. "It's 0140. That puts arrival between six and sunrise." "Between six and seven-thirty. At rising tide." Omar paused, and when he spoke again his voice had changed, the way it always changed when he had finished one problem and opened a second. "There's something else, Juna. The relay put out a frame at 0142 that does not match the field guide." "Wrong shape?" "Different shape. The countdown still runs on schedule, but layered underneath it there's a second rhythm—slower, deeper. If the countdown is the relay telling us the rupture is approaching, this new signal is not the relay's voice at all. It's riding on the same cable, coming from the array itself. From deeper. From the trench." "What does the array say?" "I can't decode it. I don't have a frame format for it. But I can see it, and it is not noise—it has the same stubborn regularity as the countdown, and it has been getting stronger all night." His voice went quieter, as if he had turned away from the mouthpiece to look at the sea. "I think it started the moment we opened that vault. I think the array has been watching us since we touched its memory." The line hissed. Juna held the phone against her ear and stared out at the dark water. "Are you safe up there?" she asked. "The tower's higher than the first wave by a hundred feet. The only thing that worries me is what the second wave brings with it if the trench fails the way Ibarra's notes say it can. If the shelf breaks—not just the fault rupturing, but the shelf edge slumping into the trench—the runup could exceed the peak's height. There's no safe place in Tidefall for that kind of wave except the very top of the dome." "The dome's granite." "Granite sheds water. It doesn't stop it." He paused again. "I'm sending you the new numbers anyway. Twelve readings since midnight. Keep the peak moving if you hear the phone. And keep your knife on you, because if the cable goes down I can't warn you except through the woman who swims." "I'm not up here, Omar. That's what I called to tell you to expect." "Juna—" "I'm coming down. Aughrim has the peak. She's sailed through worse nights than this with less than thirty-one souls. The tower can't be defended, but it can be watched, and I'm the only one in this town who can swim out and back if the relay does something new." She coiled the phone cord with a practiced wrist. "You keep the radio. I'll keep the water. Between us there isn't a machine on this coast we can't out-wait." "You can't out-wait a wave." "No. But you can see it coming, and that's a head start nobody in Tidefall has ever had." She handed the phone to Aughrim, checked her fins, and started down the goat trail in the dark, following the wire back to the flood, back toward the machine that kept its clock under the flood. Behind her the children slept. Ahead of her the sea kept its second hand closed, and on the cable under Signal Rock the deeper voice talked on, patient and regular, waiting to be understood. She was halfway down the ridge when she realized what the second rhythm reminded her of, and stopped walking. It was the sound of a heartbeat measured out in a signal you could feel, not hear. A slow, huge pulse, coming up from the floor of the trench, growing louder as the night went on, as if something down there were waking, stretching a long body, and beginning, very deliberately, to move. She turned and looked at the sea, black against black, and for a moment she could have sworn the waterline had stepped closer to the shore while she watched. Then she kept walking, because there was nothing else in Tidefall that counted for anything tonight except her two feet and the machine that was counting them down.