Read Chapter 15: The Bug

The Land Cruiser’s engine idled in the gravel lot behind Hauk’s station, a low growl against the wind off the sea. Elias crouched beside its rear wheel, the borrowed keycard cold in his pocket, and pulled the handheld tracker from his jacket. The little screen glowed green. A blip pulsed northwest, steady as a heartbeat.

He’d left Oskar and Petur at the station’s loading dock, arguing with a supply clerk about welding rods and propeller shaft grease. They thought he was checking the radio. They didn’t ask why he had a tracker.

The bug he’d planted under the Land Cruiser’s chassis was still transmitting. And the signal it was following—the one Meridian Deep’s own vehicle had led him to—was strong. Close. Not a land base. Water.

He thumbed the magnification. The blip sat roughly eleven nautical miles off the coast, inside the shoals. A ship at anchor. Big by the way the signal echoed, but not broadcast-type hardware. Something with a hull full of electronics and secrets.

The chronometer in his jacket began to hum.

Elias stilled. The device had been silent since he’d left the Remora. He pulled it out, cradling the brass cylinder in his palm. The face was dark, but the body vibrated faintly against his skin, like a tuning fork struck deep underwater. The hum rose and fell in time with the tracker’s blip.

He looked from the device to the screen. Same pulse. Same rhythm.

“You know her, don’t you?” he muttered.

The chronometer didn’t answer. It just hummed, patient as a dog waiting at a door.

He pocketed both, crossed the gravel lot, and found Oskar loading the last of the crates onto the lifeboat. Petur was already aboard, nursing a cigarette and the kind of hollow fatigue that came from losing two shipmates in one night.

“That’s everything they’d spare,” Oskar said, slamming the transom. “Propeller shaft’s a gamble—welds might hold, might not. But it’s better than nothing.”

“It’ll hold,” Elias said.

Oskar squinted at him. “You’ve got that look.”

“What look?”

“The one where you’ve already decided you’re not coming back.”

Elias said nothing. He stepped into the lifeboat and took the tiller. The outboard coughed once, twice, then settled into a chugging rhythm as he pointed the bow west, away from the station.

“Remora’s east,” Petur said.

“We’re not going to the Remora.”

Oskar’s hand went to the gunwale. “Captain—“

“There’s a ship anchored off the shoals. Meridian supply ship. The Tempest.” Elias kept his eyes on the water. “Dr. Hart’s on board. And that ship’s been talking to Hauk’s station all night. They know we stopped here. They know we got parts. If we head straight back, we lead them right to Aiko and the Artemis.”

“So we do what? Sail up and knock?” Petur dropped his cigarette, ground it into the deck. “We’ve got two rifles and a flare gun.”

“We’re not boarding her. Not yet.” Elias reached into his jacket and pulled out the tracker, handed it to Oskar. “That signal’s been pinging since the Land Cruiser left the station. Someone high up in Meridian Deep is on that ship. We get close enough to see her layout, hear what we can, then we go back to the Remora and figure out how to use it.”

“And Hart?” Oskar asked.

“She’s alive. She’s scared. She told me to stay away from Subject 7.” Elias paused. “She didn’t tell me to stay away from her.”

The lifeboat cut through the chop, salt spray stinging their faces. The sky had gone the color of old pewter, the sun lost behind a bank of cloud that pressed down like a lid. Eleven miles took an hour in a boat this size. Elias used every minute.

He watched the chronometer. The hum grew more insistent as they closed the distance, until it was a constant thrum against his ribs, like a second heartbeat. The tracker screen showed them converging on the blip. Then the blip stopped moving.

“There,” Petur said, voice low.

The Tempest rose out of the haze like a cliff. She was a converted cargo carrier, broad in the beam, with a flat aft deck stacked with shipping containers and a superstructure that looked recent, bolted on, industrial. Lights blazed along her rail. A crane hung over the stern, its cable slack.

Elias killed the outboard. They drifted.

Oskar raised a pair of binoculars, adjusting the focus. “Two men on the bridge wing. One more on the aft deck, smoking. No patrol boat alongside. She’s running light.”

“Crew?”

“Hard to say. Four or five visible. Could be more below.”

Elias took the binoculars. The chronometer was humming so loudly now he half-expected the men on deck to hear it. He scanned the Tempest’s hull, looking for a weakness, a blind spot, an excuse to get closer.

Then he saw it. On the aft deck, between two stacks of containers, a figure in an orange Meridian jumpsuit standing alone, hands on the rail, staring out at the water. Head bowed. Thin shoulders.

Hart.

Elias’s jaw tightened. She was alive. Close enough to shout to, if the wind weren’t against them. Close enough to reach, if not for the armed men and the open water and the fact that his boat had no engine running.

“She’s there,” he said.

Oskar lowered the binoculars. “We can’t take her off that ship, Captain. Not with two rifles.”

“I know.” Elias watched Hart a moment longer. She didn’t move. A guard approached her, said something, pointed toward the superstructure. She nodded and walked inside without looking back.

The chronometer’s hum dropped to a whisper.

“She’s not being held on the main deck,” Elias said slowly. “They bring her out for air, supervised, at the same time every night. She knows the schedule. She was waiting.”

“Waiting for what?” Petur asked.

Elias looked down at the chronometer. The hum had changed—steadier now, almost melodic. It seemed to be pointing at something on the Tempest’s hull. Not the deck. Not the bridge. Below the waterline, near the stern, where a dim green light glowed from a submerged porthole.

“There,” he said. “That’s where they keep the work. The experiments. The logs.” He tucked the chronometer into his jacket, feeling its pulse against his chest. “I’m going back tonight.”

Oskar’s face went hard. “Alone?”

“I’ll take the tide. One man on a rope won’t register on their radar. And I’ve got something that gets me through locked doors.” He tapped his pocket—the keycard. Then he looked at the underwater light, still glowing green. “And I’ve got a feeling that chronometer doesn’t just track monsters.”

“What does it track?” Petur asked.

Elias didn’t answer. The hum in his jacket had gone quiet, as if settling in for the wait. He stared at that green light, and the water around the Tempest’s hull, which was darker than it should have been, churning slightly, even in the calm.

He’d seen that churn before. Off the Artemis, in the minutes before Subject 7 broke the surface.

“I think it tracks where the monsters are born,” he said. “And I think we just found the nursery.”

The lifeboat rocked. Somewhere beneath the hull, something large rolled in its sleep.

Elias gripped the tiller. “We go back. We fix the propeller. And tonight, I come alone.”