Read Chapter 17: White Noise

The sarcophagus-shaped incubation racks hummed with the low, wet thrum of circulating fluid. Élise played her beam across the nearest cylinder, where the pale shape of a specimen floated in amber gel, its features unfinished, blurred like a photograph left out in the rain. Behind her, Girard’s breathing was labored, his hand pressed to his chest as he surveyed the chamber with the haunted look of a man walking through his own grave.

“How many of them did you make?” Élise asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

Girard shook his head. “I didn’t make any of them. I was the containment specialist, not the architect. The bio-lab was run by a man named Favre. He thought the dimensional energy could be shaped—grown, like tissue culture. He believed he could build a bridge that could carry a human consciousness across intact.”

“And these were the bridges.”

“Failed ones. They never woke up. Not properly.” He paused, his eyes fixing on a far rack. “Except one. At the end. There was one that opened its eyes for eleven seconds before the system killed it. Favre called it a success. The rest of us called it a warning.”

A sharp mechanical shriek cut through the chamber air, high and piercing, and red light flooded the lab. Élise spun as heavy pressure doors began to descend from the ceiling on hydraulic arms, sealing off the passage they had entered through.

“What the hell—?”

Girard’s face went slack. “They’re flooding the lab.”

“Who?”

“Doesn’t matter. They’ve seen us. Move.”

He grabbed her wrist and yanked her toward a service duct half-hidden behind a bank of dead monitoring equipment. Élise stumbled, her dive lamp clattering to the floor, but Girard didn’t stop. A hiss rose from the floor vents—seawater, spraying in white jets from pressure nozzles along the wall.

“That duct goes to the eastern airlock,” he said, shoving her ahead of him into the narrow crawlspace. “It’s meant for maintenance divers. It’ll flood in about ninety seconds, and the lock cycles automatically. If we’re inside when it closes, we’re fine. If not, we drown here.”

Élise crawled on her hands and knees through the dark, the metal cold against her palms, Girard’s breathing ragged directly behind her. The water reached her ankles, then her knees. It was the sea, cold and purposeful, rising with a terrible patience.

“Faster,” Girard gasped.

The duct ended at a round hatch. Élise spun the manual wheel, muscles screaming, and the hatch swung inward to reveal a small chamber—the lock, six feet across, with two dive suits hanging from rubberized hooks. She hauled herself inside and turned to pull Girard through. His face was gray, sweat and seawater mixed on his brow.

“Close the inner hatch,” he said. “Quick.”

She wrenched the hatch shut and spun the wheel until the seal hissed. The water outside hammered against it, a dull drumming that grew muffled as air pressure stabilized inside the lock. Girard slumped against the curved wall, eyes closed.

“The alarm will have triggered a full protocol,” he said. “Sensors in the lab detected unauthorized biological material. The system is designed to sterilize the space.”

“By flooding it?”

“By drowning whatever was in there. The specimens were never allowed to leave. The whole lab was built to be a kill box. If they’d sealed us inside, we’d be fish food.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Someone remotely triggered the flood. That wasn’t automatic. Someone knows we’re here, and they didn’t want us walking out with what we saw.”

Élise checked the lock’s pressure gauge—rising steadily, now matching the ambient depth pressure outside. “We surface,” she said. “Now.”

They exited the lock through the outer door thirty-eight minutes later, breaking the surface of the Mediterranean in the shadow of the *Atalante*’s hull. Dawn had not yet arrived, but the horizon had gone the color of bruised steel, and the first patrol boats were visible in the channel approach—one, two, three of them, moving in formation toward the dive site.

Girard clutched the dive ladder, head low. “You need to get ahead of this. The flood alarm will register on monitoring systems as a containment breach. They’ll file a report. But if you call it publicly first, you control the story.”

“You’re telling me to lie about what happened.”

“I’m telling you to survive.” He pulled himself up onto the deck, unsteady. “Call it a diving accident. Say one of your support divers got tangled and triggered a hull-mount sensor. You don’t know any more. You’re deeply shaken. You’re suspending the expedition.”

Élise climbed aboard, dripping seawater onto the deck plating. She looked back at the sea, flat and deceptively calm, and thought of what was still down there—the engine, the chamber, the rows of half-formed things in their amber wombs.

“They’re going to take everything,” she said.

“They already did, thirty years ago. I’m trying to make sure they don’t take you too.”

By the time Leclerc emerged on deck with a coffee in hand and a phone pressed to his ear, the story was already forming. Élise did what she hated most: she gave an official statement to the Maritime Gendarmerie over a crackling radio line. A support diver had suffered a panicked ascent. Air was cut as a precaution. The expedition was suspended pending a full safety review.

Leclerc listened from the hatchway, eyes narrowed. When the radio call ended, he descended the ladder and walked to her, boots echoing on the metal.

“A diving accident,” he said. “That’s your cover?”

“That’s my statement,” Élise said. “I’d be careful how you choose to read it.”

Leclerc smiled, thin and unamused. “You put the site under a voluntary suspension. Under my insurance charter, that triggers a hold and a liability review. I’m well within my rights to start the paperwork on the claim now—equipment damage, crew leave, lost diving days. The clock is running.”

“You’d claim insurance on a fabricated accident?”

“You just declared a fabricated accident on an open marine channel. I didn’t fabricate anything. I’m just a businessman reading the reports.” He let the words settle. “Your call, Captain. But if you want to keep playing explorers, you need to do it from a desk. Because the moment this suspension goes formal, you don’t have a boat, a budget, or a crew that can legally work a single square meter of that sea floor.”

He turned and walked back toward his cabin, already dialing his phone.

Girard stepped beside her, water still running from his suit. “He’ll call the ministry. By noon, you’ll be grounded for real. The question isn’t whether you can dive again. We both know you can’t. The question is whether you can find another way down there before they pull the site entirely.”

“And if I can’t?”

Girard looked at her, his old eyes pale in the gray light. “Then the engine stays sealed, and Sophie stays wherever she is, and the twelve specimens go on sleeping. And you spend the rest of your life knowing you saw what’s under there and chose to walk away.”

He didn’t wait for her answer. He walked forward, his back bent, toward the crew quarters.

Élise stood alone on the deck as the patrol boats grew larger in the distance. The *Atalante* bobbed gently, tethered to the sea floor by a cable that ran down to a city no one was supposed to have seen. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. An unknown number. She thumbed it open.

*They know what you found in the lab. Do not trust anyone on that ship. – L.*

The message vanished a second later, wiped by self-destruct.

She looked around the deck, at the crew beginning to stir, at Malik emerging from the galley with tea and a questioning glance. Someone down there had watched her enter the bio-lab. Someone had triggered the flood. And by sunrise, someone would smile at her across the mess table and ask if she wanted eggs, while reporting her every move to the Navy.

Élise crumpled the phone in her fist and went inside.