Chapter 7 The Second Voice

She made it back to the lighthouse point at 0312, drenched from the waist down, the phone wire scratching at her heels all the way down the ridge. Omar was on the gallery with the radio wired directly into the clamp antenna, a pencil in his hand, and the page before him was full of marks. "You're still breathing," he said, which was the closest he came to a greeting. "The sea's still there. What's the count?" "Fourteen since you left. The last three are below the fault's near-segment distance. The array is effectively reading zero clearance now." He turned the page so she could see the trailing column: 84, 61, 43, 28, 17, 9, 4. "This is not a wave that is coming. This is a wave that has already started to come, and we are watching the last three frames of its countdown." "Then why is it still quiet out there?" "Because the water takes hours to move the way the signal does." Omar put the pencil down. "The rupture has reached the bay floor. The water column above it hasn't had time to feel it yet. It will." He picked up the radio, turned the volume up until the speaker crackled with the hiss of the whole wet world. "And there's the other thing, the deep voice. I've been transcribing it in parallel." "The second signal." "It stopped matching any format the notebook describes about an hour ago. I've got the last clear frame here." He showed her the sheet: a pattern of marks, longer and slower than the relay's frames, in a repeating unit of seven—seven long dashes, gap, seven long dashes, gap, then a tail of shorter marks that climbed in length like a staircase. "Seven," Juna said. "Seven nodes on the array line. I think it's a roll call. The relay asks after the seven instruments on the trench, exactly the way a watchdog checks a fence at night. It's been doing it since we opened the vault—the vault trip must have switched the array into active mode." He drew a circle around the staircase. "But this tail is new. Ibarra's field guide doesn't cover it. And if I read it as plain Morse—the way any ship's radio officer would—it says three letters. S-O-S. And then, on a second repetition it said something else. Not a letter group. A decimal number. Forty-eight point nine." "Feet? Meters?" "I don't know yet." Omar's voice was very even. "But here's what worries me. The relay sits at the mouth of the bay, four feet below datum. It sends the countdown by the radio, and it sends its data by the cable. It has no way to measure the height of a wave. The trench array does. I think the deep voice isn't a roll call. I think it's a report, and I think forty-eight point nine is standing wave height in meters, off the trench lip, right now, measured from the instruments." Juna did the conversion in her head and felt the bottom fall out of her stomach. "One hundred and sixty feet." "One hundred and sixty feet at the source," Omar said. "It will lose a third to the slope at the shelf edge, and it will gain some back when it hits the shallows. By the time it reaches Signal Rock, it will be taller than the first wave by a margin the town has never planned for and the ridge was never capped for." He reached for the field phone and cranked it twice. The line answered with a weak, scratchy ring from the peak. "Aughrim," Juna said into the mouthpiece, "this is Reyes. Collapse the camp to the absolute summit. Do not keep anything below the high point of the dome. Move the children onto the lookout platform itself if you have to—climb the catwalk and tie off, but do not stay low. When the water comes, it may come as high as the dome's shoulder." The scratchy voice came back. "How high is high, Reyes?" "Higher than the ridge road. Higher than we planned. Higher than the school was ever counted." Juna swallowed. "Be on the rocks, not off them. Everything you tie down, tie to granite. And if you hear the water before you see it, that's the wave arriving ahead of its own noise—run toward the top, not away." "Understood. God bless you both." "Stand fast, Aughrim." Juna handed the phone to Omar, and together they sat down on the cold iron of the gallery, watching the sea. The countdown frames kept coming. At 0407, the relay broadcast the number 0 — not a final reading, but the frame itself was a zero, silence, a full minute of dead air where a number should have been—and then nothing. The machine under Signal Rock stopped transmitting. The hiss came back clean. For a long time neither of them spoke. Then, very faintly, through the granite under their feet, Juna felt a vibration she could not have heard—a low, ceaseless hum, the touch of something enormous moving far away. "Omar," she said. "I feel it." He stood up slowly, like a man rising on the deck of a ship that has just begun to roll. "The water column is settling out. We're feeling the wave start, through the rock, hours ahead of its front." He looked out at the horizon and went very still. "Or we're feeling the beginning of something the relay was never built to measure." Because between them and the open sea, on the flat black water where the drowned town lay, the dark was no longer uniform. Out past the broken marina, in the channel above the blasted rock, a line of white had appeared—not foam, not light, but a faint, moving disturbance, like the breath of a giant passing over the water's surface. The radio spoke. It was not the relay's voice. It was not the deep voice of the array. It was a third signal, on a frequency they had been watching all night, coming from a point directly beneath the tower where the drowned town's reach began. It was sharp and short and urgent, keyed in a rhythm that matched nothing in Ibarra's notebook and everything in Juna's own hands—three beats, three beats, three beats, calling into the dark. Somebody, or something, was sending a fresh SOS from under the waterline of Tidefall. The white line on the channel was growing.