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.”