第8章 The Water Comes Back

The third signal was not machine code. It was a beacon, and once Juna heard it clearly she understood what it was, and the understanding sat in her chest like cold water. It was coming from beneath the flooded waterfront, from a point roughly level with the old fire hall on Front Street, whose roof now sat four feet under the surface. It keyed the same harmonic as a marine emergency locator, but it was wired into the town's own alarm loop. The harbor district had installed, years ago, a flood-response beacon system: pressure switches on the lowest floors, designed to activate the sirens the moment water crossed a threshold. Nobody had ever thought the sirens would need to speak to divers. But the designers had backed the system with a second channel—a locator tone that ran through the same underground conduit, meant to guide flood crews to the emergency shelter on the fire hall's upper floor. The fire hall's upper floor. A room on the second story, above the truck bay, lined with bunks and a water tank, built to serve as the harbor crew's safe house in exactly this kind of event. If the beacon was still sending, the safe house still had power. If the safe house still had power, the flood switches had fired, and the beacon had been calling since the first surge submerged the threshold. Which meant the room above the truck bay was still sealed and still dry, and beacons did not power themselves without a reason. Somebody was in the fire hall. "I can hear it," Omar said, holding the radio tight against the speaker grille. "It's not a phantom. It's not our relay, it's not the array. There's a second locator under the waterline, and it's been sending since 0649. We never heard it because the relay drowned it out until a minute ago." "There's someone in the safe house," Juna said. "There could be. Or there could be a battery charged by a generator room that was never touched, sending an automated drill call into an empty building. You don't know." "I know the fire hall's safe house holds forty bunks and a week of water. I know at least four of the harbor crew who got swallowed in the first surge had families who would have made it to the shelter stairs." She took a breath. "And I know the relay's countdown is zero and the white line is growing, and that beacon is the only other voice in this water that has something to say about who lives and who doesn't." "The wave is coming, Juna." "Then I need to be fast." She checked her fins, the mask, the lead belt, the knife. The ebb was done. The water had gone preternaturally still—the way it does in the last seconds before a surge, when the entire bay is holding its breath. "Signal Rock is at the harbor mouth. The fire hall is a thousand yards inside it. If I go now, on the surface, I can cover the distance before the front reaches the old breakwater. I go down through the truck bay roof, I get whoever's in the safe house, and I come up under the mercantile and ride whatever's left." "Whatever's left." Omar took a step toward her and stopped, because there was no argument on this water that had not already been made. "The peak is the survivable ground. That's where you should be." "The peak has thirty-one people and Aughrim. This building is empty but for us and the clockwork." Juna pulled the mask down around her neck and looked him in the face. "If I bring people out of the fire hall, we go for the peak together. If I don't come back, you take the tower stairs up, you pull the antenna down so nothing points at the sky, and you wait for the second surge to pass over you like it passes over everyone else in this drowned town. And when help comes—and help will come, because people always come for the coast—you tell them there was a rescue swimmer in Tidefall and she went down after a beacon." Omar reached into his pocket and held out the recovered page from Ibarra's notebook. "Take it. If the safe house has a radio that still pulls on the harbor battery network, the page will tell them what you already know. And if it doesn't—" He let the sentence go. There was no frame format for that, and they both knew it. Juna took the page, tucked it dry against her chest, and turned to the water. The white line on the channel had widened. It was not foam now. It was a band of disturbed water, low and broad as a tide, moving inland at the pace of a walking man—slow enough to watch, too fast to outpaddle. Behind it, the flat sea had begun to pile itself into a long, dark swell, a shoulder of water climbing without breaking, the leading edge of the second surge taking its shape in the last of the night. She went down the ledge, struck water, and set out toward the drowned fire hall with the beacon singing triplets in the radio clipped to her shoulder. Behind her, Omar climbed. Halfway up he stopped on the stair, turned, and watched the swell through the open doorway. It had grown. The white band had dimmed and thickened, and under it the black water had begun to lift—not a wave yet, but a rise, patient and oceanic, the whole bay standing up to meet its own floor. The pressure hum under the granite had become a sound you could almost name. Above him, on the gallery, the field phone rang once. He ran the last of the stairs and snatched it up. "Omar," Aughrim's voice came down the line, thin and terrible. "I'm looking at the water from the catwalk. It's gone out. Twenty feet of seabed, exposed in the harbor mouth, in the last ten minutes. I've never—when they pull back like that there's only one thing—" "I know." Omar gripped the rail hard enough to feel the rivets. "Listen. There's a beacon under the waterfront, in the fire hall safe house. Juna's gone down for it. If the surge catches her on the way back, the tower is the only lit building in the county. You'll see the water, you'll see the light, and you'll know she had to choose. Whatever happens, hold the peak." "Hold the peak," Aughrim repeated, and the line filled with static and died. Omar hung the handset on its cradle, and because there was nothing else to do, he climbed to the highest point of the gallery, sat down against the lantern mount, and watched the sea do what the sea had been doing since before there were people to watch it. The swell rose. The exposed seabed at the harbor mouth went dark as the water moved back over it. The white band came on, and behind the white band the horizon had changed shape—a long, smooth wall, taller than the drowned town, taller than the mercantile's roof, taller than anything he had ever seen the ocean stand up and do, and under it all, through the granite, the deep voice of the trench was singing its last report. Below the water, on the drowned corner of Front Street, Juna swam. She reached the fire hall's truck bay roof and went down through the skylight, mask flooding and clearing, the beacon drumming against her chest through the radio. The bay was full of black water and a single, upright ladder leading to a steel door bolted shut above the sill. She surfaced in a pocket of air under the ceiling, hammered the door with her fist, and heard, on the other side, the sound of a voice. A voice. Alive. The radio on her shoulder stopped sending triplets. The beacon had been answered, and somewhere behind her, out in the channel, the water over Signal Rock had begun to press upward as the trench gave over its full, unhurried weight—the next wave, arriving on schedule, with the light of the fire hall bunks burning on the far side of a steel door, and a hundred feet of drowning town between her and the open sky.