The Signal Beneath the Wreckage

The seventh tide was three months away when Eira’s prosthetic began to ache.

Not ache, exactly. The mechanical fingers of her left hand clicked in sequence, each joint answering a vibration no instrument aboard Noah’s Halo had detected. She stood alone on the western observation deck, watching the broken moon drift above the atmosphere. Seven fragments circled Earth in a crooked silver crown. Between them, lightning crawled through the upper clouds like veins beneath skin.

Her prosthetic pulsed once.

Then twice.

Then seven times.

Eira pressed her metal palm against the deck rail. The frequency entered her arm as a cold, precise tremor. It was not the broad warning rhythm of a tide storm. It was patterned, deliberate—almost a transmission.

Behind her, the observation doors opened with a sigh.

“You’re either having a revelation,” Klain said, “or attempting to break into the city’s nervous system.”

Eira did not turn. “Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

The oracle joined her at the rail. He wore the dark blue sash of the ruling council, though it hung crookedly over a shirt stained with sleep and seawater. His eyes were rimmed red. Klain had predicted the last two tide storms three days before the instruments had registered them, but his accuracy had made him less popular, not more. People preferred their miracles tidy.

“What did you hear?” he asked.

“Something under the eastern gyre.”

“Under it is the ocean.”

“Under the ocean is the reason we’re still looking.”

Klain glanced at the moon fragments. “The New Land is supposed to rise after the seventh tide. Not send messages before it exists.”

Eira finally faced him. “You’ve dreamed of it.”

A muscle jumped in his cheek. “I dream of many things.”

“Cities that have no foundations. A black shoreline. Bells beneath the water.”

His silence answered more cleanly than words.

A klaxon sounded from the lower docks. On the deck below, a squat salvage vessel lurched free of its mooring clamps, trailing nets and patched cables. Its hull was painted the color of old bruises. At the prow, Captain Suda waved both arms toward the observation deck.

“Archaeologist!” he shouted. “Oracle! If you’re finished whispering at the dead, come aboard! I’ve found a piece of the moon that’s still warm!”

Klain looked at Eira. “That’s impossible.”

“Suda makes a living from impossible things.”

“He makes a living lying about them.”

“Then we’ll see which one this is.”

They reached the salvage vessel as the Halo’s docking bells began to ring. Suda hauled them aboard personally, grinning through a beard threaded with copper wire. His crew kept their distance from the cargo net suspended over the deck. Within it lay a slab of black stone, no larger than a coffin lid. It glistened as though freshly dredged, though no water dripped from its surface.

Eira’s prosthetic seized.

The stone answered with seven pulses.

Suda’s grin faded. “It started singing when we dragged it out of the gyre.”

Klain stepped closer. “What kind of song?”

Suda swallowed. “One that knew my name.”

The stone split down its center. Inside, where there should have been solid rock, a narrow band of pale light opened like an eye.

Across the ocean, beneath the cloudbank, something enormous struck the water once.

And from far below the vessel, a bell began to ring.