The Eighth Beacon

By dawn, Noah’s Halo had become a second moon.

The ring-city hung above the storm line, its underside lit by work lamps and emergency flares. Usually its seven beacon towers burned in a measured sequence, one for each lunar fragment. Now an eighth light stood among them, pale and vertical, rising from a section of the city that had been empty for two hundred years.

Suda’s vessel limped toward the Halo through fields of ice and metal. One engine coughed blue fire. The salvage crane had folded itself around the mast like a dead insect. Every few minutes, something struck the hull from below, though the sea beneath them was calm.

“Debris,” Suda said whenever it happened.

“There’s no debris on the scope,” Eira replied.

“Then it’s very polite debris.”

Klain sat beneath the instrument canopy, wrapped in a thermal blanket, staring at the eighth beacon. He had not slept since the doorway closed. His face seemed sharpened by exhaustion, his eyes fixed and bright.

“It isn’t a beacon,” he said.

Eira turned from the forward glass. “What is it?”

“A wound.”

Suda made a sign against bad luck. “Could you name it something with a less expensive repair bill?”

Eira ignored him. Her prosthetic arm had begun to vibrate as soon as the Halo came into view. The sensation was not like the tide frequencies she knew. It came in pairs: a low pulse through the metal fingers, then a high tremor in the joint beneath her shoulder. Between them, the arm whispered fragments of data across her internal display.

EIGHT.

RETURN.

NOT HER.

She flexed the fingers. The final phrase vanished.

“What did it say?” Klain asked.

“Nothing useful.”

“That is not the same as nothing.”

The speaking fragment lay in a containment cradle behind them. Suda had wrapped it in three layers of foil and a fishing net, as if either might restrain a piece of the moon. Since escaping the gyre, it had remained dark. At the approach of Noah’s Halo, however, a thin band of light appeared inside it.

The fragment spoke in Eira’s voice.

“Not yet.”

Suda dropped a wrench.

The light shifted, and the voice changed to Klain’s. “Not for him.”

Klain flinched but did not look away from the beacon. “It means the warning was never about the doorway.”

“Then what was it about?” Eira asked.

The fragment answered before he could.

“Not for him.”

The eighth beacon flared.

For one instant, the Halo disappeared. Eira saw a different city occupying its place: towers bent inward around a black central well, streets flooded with silver water, and thousands of figures standing shoulder to shoulder beneath the storm clouds. None had faces. All wore coats.

One of them lifted a hand.

Eira’s hand lifted with it.

The vision broke. Her prosthetic slammed against the console hard enough to dent it. Klain was on his feet, breathing through his teeth.

“You saw them,” he said.

“I saw a city.”

“You saw the witnesses.”

“How would you know?”

“Because they were in my dream.” His voice dropped. “But there were seven of them before. Now there are eight.”

The vessel shuddered. Suda gripped the helm as the Halo’s outer traffic gates opened without authorization. No warning lights appeared. No harbor voice instructed them where to dock. Instead, every screen aboard the ship displayed the same image: a child’s hand pressed against glass.

Beneath it, numbers counted backward from seven.

“Turn us around,” Eira said.

Suda stared at her. “That suggestion would have been more useful three minutes ago.”

“Turn us around.”

“If I can, I will. If I cannot, I’ll pretend it was bravery.”

The engines howled. The ship slewed sideways, but the sea had changed. A current caught them—not water, exactly, but a broad moving pressure that pushed against the hull and carried them toward the Halo.

Klain approached Eira. “The voice beneath the spiral knew you.”

“It knew a version of me.”

“The memory showed you sealing the child.”

“It showed someone wearing my coat.”

“Then perhaps the coat was the important part.”

She looked at him sharply.

Klain’s expression had gone distant. “My mother called me Kalen when I was a child. No one has used that name in thirty years. The voice did.”

“And the fragment said not for him.”

“Yes.”

“Meaning the thing below wanted you there—or feared you there.”

“Perhaps both.”

The countdown reached three.

Eira’s prosthetic unlocked at the elbow. She had not commanded it. Its fingers spread toward the eighth beacon, and a narrow beam of blue light emerged from the palm. On the forward glass, a symbol appeared: a circle divided by seven lines, with an eighth line being drawn from the outside.

The child’s hand on the screens curled into a fist.

At zero, every light on Noah’s Halo went out except the eighth beacon.

Then the harbor voice spoke through the dead speakers, using Eira’s own voice once more.

“Welcome back, keeper.”

Behind the beacon, something enormous opened its eye.