The Waterline

The figures did not move with the waves.

Mara stood at the edge of the cliff and watched them gather in the darkness below. There were seven of them, perhaps more, arranged in a loose line across the black water. The moon caught their shoulders and the pale ovals of their faces. They stood where the ocean should have swallowed them, motionless from the waist down.

Beside her, Lena made a small, strangled sound.

“That isn’t the lighthouse,” Jonah said.

The lighthouse stood farther out, on a tooth of rock beyond the figures. Its lantern was dark, but every few seconds a weak pulse glimmered behind the glass, as if something inside were breathing.

Shaw stared down at the water. Her composure had finally cracked. “We have to leave.”

“You said the island was the only place it could operate,” Jonah said. “Now you’re afraid of a lighthouse.”

“I said nothing about a lighthouse.”

The emergency radio clipped to Mara’s belt clicked on.

There was no battery in it. She had removed the battery herself at the motel, after the voice had spoken through the dead television. Still, static poured from the speaker.

Then Mara heard herself say, “You came all this way to ask the wrong question.”

Her own voice was calm. Almost affectionate.

Jonah reached for the radio, but Mara caught his wrist. “Don’t answer it.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“You always answer,” the voice said through the radio. “That’s why you’re useful.”

One of the figures below raised an arm.

A second later, another radio crackled from the darkness behind them.

Caleb Voss stepped out between the pines with a pistol in one hand and a small metal case in the other. His government SUV had stopped crookedly on the service road, its headlights washing the trees in white. He looked at the group, then at the water, and for the first time since Mara had met him, he appeared genuinely frightened.

“Get away from the cliff,” he said.

Jonah laughed once. “You followed us here to give safety advice?”

“I followed you because Shaw lied about the route.” Caleb’s eyes remained fixed on the figures. “And because the road was never meant to reach the coast.”

Shaw’s face hardened. “You knew there was a secondary access.”

“I knew there was an observation route.”