Read Chapter 8: Echoes

The service hatch dumped me into a junction I didn’t recognize, a tangle of rusted conduits and dead junction boxes that smelled of salt and burnt insulation. I moved by feel more than sight, my emergency LEDs throwing weak cones against walls that swallowed light like they were hungry for it.

The comm room was two decks down. I knew that much from the station schematics Snake had shown me months ago—back when we were drinking cheap beer in a port bar in Reykjavik, trading lies about what we’d seen on the bottom. Back when he was still Snake, not whatever he’d become.

I found the ladder and climbed. My suit creaked with every movement. The extinguisher hit had cost him, but it had cost me too. My shoulder screamed where he’d grabbed me, and I could feel the bruise spreading under the neoprene like a dark flower.

The comm room door was sealed, which was wrong. Station protocol kept it open at all times except during emergency depressurization. I pried the manual release and swung it inward.

The room was a wreck.

Console screens were cracked, cables ripped from their mounts and coiled on the floor like dead snakes. The transmitter rack stood gutted, its panels hanging open. But the antenna feed line—that thick coaxial cable that ran up through the station spine to the buoy on the surface—was intact. It terminated at a black box I’d never seen before, bolted to the deck with fresh welds.

A jammer.

Not a military unit, nothing that sophisticated. This was a patchwork thing, cobbled together from scavenged parts. A transceiver chassis, a signal generator, a mess of hand-soldered joints. Someone had built it to flood every frequency with white noise, to turn the station into a dead zone.

I knelt beside it. The power light glowed green.

Disabling it was simple. I didn’t have tools, but I had a knife and the kind of stubbornness that comes from years of fixing things that shouldn’t be fixed. I cut the power leads, then ripped the antenna connector free. The jammer’s light died with a sad little click.

Silence. Blessed, humming silence.

I dragged myself to the main console, found the handset still clipped to its cradle. I keyed the transmit button. Static hissed back at me, but it was thin, atmospheric—not the grinding wall of noise the jammer had been pouring out.

"ADRS, this is Mercer. Repair diver Jack Mercer, call sign Sandpiper. Emergency traffic. Repeat, emergency traffic. Anyone on the surface, please respond."

Static. I tried again on the emergency frequency. Then the coast guard channel. Then the civilian marine band. Nothing but the empty hiss of the Atlantic and, beneath it, the station’s low thrum.

Then a click.

Not static. A click, sharp and deliberate. Like a switch being thrown.

I froze with the handset pressed to my ear.

A voice came through. Distorted, warped by the station’s internal speakers rather than the comm system—I realized that a second too late. The sound wasn’t coming through the handset. It was coming from the wall speaker above the door.

"Jack."

My name. Spoken slow, drawn out, like someone tasting it.

"Jack Mercer."

My grip tightened on the handset. I looked up at the speaker grille. Dust shook from it as the voice continued.

"Little Jackie. Always fixing. Always mending. Snakes don’t need mending. They shed."

That was Snake. Or Snake’s voice, at least. But the cadence was wrong, the rhythm off. Like someone who’d learned to imitate speech by reading transcripts.

"Where are you?" I said. Stupid question. I knew better.

"Where we’ve always been," the voice replied. "Waiting. The veil is thin here, Jackie. You can hear them if you listen. All the voices beneath. All the ones who came before. They sing."

I reached up and ripped the speaker wires loose. The voice cut off mid-syllable.

But not before I heard something else. A whisper underneath the main signal, almost too faint to register. A word I hadn’t heard in seven years.

A nickname. My brother’s nickname.

*Charlie.*

Not from Snake’s mouth. A different voice. Soft. Female.

The same woman from the wardroom, the one with the luminescent film over her eyes. She’d said Charlie was still alive. Now she was using his name like a key, trying to turn something in my chest.

It worked. I felt the turn, the small ache of it.

I forced myself to breathe. The handset was still in my hand, still transmitting. I keyed it again.

"Surface, this is Mercer. We have a hostile situation at ADRS. Repeat, hostile situation. Crew appears transformed—" I paused. What word described what I’d seen? "—infected. Possibly under the influence of a biological agent recovered from the seafloor. Recommend quarantine protocols. Do not approach. I repeat, do not approach."

I released the transmit key.

Static.

Then, faintly, through the noise—a single syllable, stretched and distorted by distance. Or by something else.

*"…Little…"*

Not Snake’s voice. Not the woman’s.

A voice I knew better than my own heartbeat. A voice from a childhood spent in tide pools and boat sheds, from the last conversation we ever had before the *Meridian* went down with all hands, before the navy sent me the letter I still kept folded in my suit’s inner pocket.

*"…Charlie…"*

My throat closed. I told myself it was interference. A fragment of a radio signal bouncing off the atmosphere, a trick of the storm that had been building over the Atlantic for days.

But I knew that voice. I’d known it since I was six years old, watching my big brother dive off the pier in Gloucester, fearless and laughing.

The speaker I’d ripped loose lay on the deck, its wires sparking. I stared at it.

The woman had said Charlie was alive.

Snake had said Charlie was waiting.

And now, through the station’s own audio system, through wires I’d just severed, my brother’s voice was calling me by the name only he had ever used. Little fin. Because I followed him everywhere, like a remora under a shark.

"Little fin," the speaker whispered, even though I’d cut its power. The voice was coming through the metal itself now, vibrating the deck beneath my boots. "Little fin, come down. The water’s warm here. The dark is full of light."

I dropped the handset. It clattered against the console and swung, spinning slowly at the end of its cord.

The comm room was silent. The jammer was dead. The surface was open, waiting for my signal.

I should call again. I should get a response. I should try to raise the *Nautilus*, the support vessel that had dropped me here four hours ago.

But my hand was shaking. And the voice—the impossible, familiar voice—was still echoing in the room, even with no speaker to carry it. It seemed to be coming from the walls themselves, from the rivets and seams, from the very structure of the station.

Little fin.

Charlie was down there. Below the station. In the dark.

In the Scar.

I had a choice. I could stay, keep trying to raise the surface, wait for a response that might never come. The jammer was dead, but something else had replaced it—something that moved through the station’s infrastructure like blood through a vein.

Or I could go down.

I picked up the handset one last time. Keyed the transmit button.

"If anyone receives this," I said, my voice steadier than I felt. "Tell them Jack Mercer went looking for his brother. Tell them I found the source. Tell them—"

The line clicked. Not static. A deliberate, human click.

Then the woman’s voice, soft and close, as if she were standing directly behind me.

"We know, Jack. We’ve always known."

I turned.

The comm room door was closed. It had been open when I entered. I was certain of it.

Now it was sealed, the manual release spinning slowly, as if turned by an invisible hand.

And through the small porthole window, I saw a face. Not Snake’s. Not the woman’s.

A face I hadn’t seen in seven years, wearing an expression I couldn’t place—half smile, half grief.

Then the face turned away, and the corridor lights died one by one, like candles being snuffed.

The way down was open.

I went.