Read Chapter 6: The Phantom Crew

The corridor beyond the dock stretched into absolute black, the beam from Élise’s helmet lamp cutting a pale cone through air thick with the smell of salt and rust. Behind her, the submersible’s hull gleamed in the dark like a buried secret, its console still cycling through its silent countdown. She had told the others to wait by the shaft—just a quick sweep, she’d said, to map the secondary passages. Antoine had argued. Antoine always argued.

The footsteps came from nowhere and everywhere at once.

A soft scuff of leather on stone, then another, measured and slow. They echoed down the corridor to her left, the sound of someone walking with purpose, unconcerned about being heard. Élise froze, her breath catching in her throat. Her lamp swept the tunnel and found nothing. Empty walls, ribbed with ancient masonry, swallowed by shadow.

“Renard?” Antoine’s voice crackled over the comm, tinny and strained. “What was that?”

She didn’t answer. The footsteps continued, steady, unhurried. A second pair joined them—heavier, with the drag of a boot sole. Then a third.

Her team was safe at the shaft; she knew their positions. This was someone else. Something else.

“Élise, we’re pulling you out,” Antoine said, his voice hardening. “Now.”

“Wait,” she whispered.

The footsteps stopped.

Silence pressed in like deep water. Élise’s pulse thudded in her ears, louder than the groan of ancient stone settling around her. She took a step forward, then another. The corridor curved gently, and her light caught the edge of something—a door frame, fitted with modern seals that gleamed incongruously against the weathered rock.

She reached for it.

The footsteps resumed, faster now, closing distance. A shape resolved in the darkness at the far end of her beam. Tall. White. It wore an old French naval uniform—dark serge, brass buttons, the peaked cap of a bygone era. The figure stood perfectly still, facing her, though she couldn’t make out its face beneath the shadowed brim.

“Hello?” Élise’s voice came out steadier than she felt.

The figure took a step toward her. Then another. Its movement was fluid, almost mechanical, and it made no sound despite the motion. The comms erupted behind her—she heard footsteps of her own team, shouting her name, boots ringing on stone.

“Renard, get back to the shaft, that’s an order!” Antoine’s voice cracked.

She raised her free hand, palm out, a gesture that meant *stop* to her team and *halt* to the figure alike. For a moment, the corridor held its breath. The figure cocked its head—a slow, deliberate tilt, as if studying her through the gloom. The cap’s shadow shifted, and she caught a glimpse of the face beneath.

There was no face.

Just smooth, pale skin, unbroken where a mouth should have been. No eyes. No nose. A blank canvas of flesh that should have been impossible, should have been a trick of the light, should have been anything except what she was seeing.

The figure’s arm rose, pointing a single finger at her chest. Then it turned and walked into the darkness, and the darkness swallowed it whole.

“Élise!” Antoine’s hand clamped on her shoulder, yanking her backward. She stumbled, grabbed his arm, and turned. The rest of the team crowded behind him—grenache pale, eyes wide, faces already set toward the exit.

“Did you see that?” she asked, breathless.

“I saw something,” Antoine said. His grip was painfully tight. “And I’m not going back to look.”

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The ascent to the surface was a blur of panicked silence and overworked regulators. The shaft opened into the deeper water beyond the city’s perimeter, and sunlight filtered down like a promise they all clutched at. By the time they breached the surface, the deck of the *Alea Jacta* was golden with late-afternoon light, the sea calm as if the morning’s storm had never happened.

Élise pulled off her helmet, gasping, and let the crew haul her aboard. She found her stateroom, locked the door, and played the helmet camera footage back eleven times.

The figure was there. Grainy, shadowed by the limits of her lamp, but unmistakably humanoid. It wore the uniform of a French naval officer—the style suggested the late 1960s, a decade before AEGIS-VII had supposedly been buried. The face was impossible to make out in the low light, blurring into static at the edges. But there was no mistaking the shape, the carriage, the way it had pointed at her as if marking her for something.

She paused the footage at the final frame, the figure half-turned toward the dark. In the corner of that frame, barely visible against the corridor wall, she caught the glint of a brass plate.

She zoomed in. Enhanced. The characters resolved: *ABYSSAL ACCORD — GARRISON 9 — ALL HANDS CLEARED FOR DUTY.*

Garrison 9. Not a ship. A place. A crew stationed here, beneath the sunken city, in an era when the world above still hadn’t learned the truth about the deep.

Élise sat back in her chair, the chill of the dive still settling in her bones. Her phone buzzed with a text from Antoine—*We need to talk. About what we saw. About what we do now.* She typed a reply with trembling fingers: *Drinks tonight. My cabin.*

Then she opened her laptop and began digging through the archives she’d spent years accumulating, looking for any mention of the Abyssal Accord. The phrase wasn’t new to her—she’d seen it etched near the lockers below, in the same pre-Latin script that marked the recovered AEGIS-VII probe. But now it had a name and a location. And a face, perhaps, or the lack of one.

Her search returned nothing. No declassified files, no war records, no mention of Garrison 9 anywhere in the French Navy’s history. It was as if the phrase had been scrubbed from every record before it could exist.

A knock at her door. She checked the time—late evening now, the windows of her cabin dark except for her reflection and the faint glow of her screen. She opened the door to find Antoine, his face drawn, a bottle of cognac in one hand and two glasses in the other.

“You watched it,” he said, not a question.

“Eleven times.”

He poured without asking, handed her a glass, and stepped inside. They drank in silence for a moment. The cognac was warm and sharp, a welcome anchor against the cold memory of the corridor.

“That thing,” Antoine said quietly. “It wasn’t a person.”

“It wore a uniform. It moved like a person.”

“It didn’t have a face, Élise.”

She finished her glass and set it down. “I need to go back down there. I need to find where it came from.”

“No.” Antoine’s voice was firm, almost pleading. “Whatever that dock is, whatever that program was, it’s buried for a reason. We’re not equipped for this. We don’t even know who’s still maintaining it down there.”

“That’s exactly why we have to go back.” She picked up her laptop, turned the screen toward him. The frozen frame of the faceless sailor stared back at them both. “Someone kept that dock in working order. Someone is keeping it secret. And that thing pointed at me like it knew I was coming.”

“You’re not going to let this go,” Antoine said, resignation dragging at each word.

“I can’t.”

He exhaled, long and slow, and poured himself another glass. “Then I’m going with you. But if we see that thing again, I’m not running. I’m filming. We need proof for Leclerc, and we need it before he shuts us down.”

Élise nodded, though doubt gnawed at her. Leclerc’s shutdown was the least of her worries now. The countdown on the sub’s console had been ticking since the moment she’d touched it. And somewhere beneath the waves, a faceless crew was still on duty, still watching.

One thing was certain: she couldn’t shrug this off as debris anymore. The thing in the corridor had been waiting for her. It had pointed at her like it recognized something in her face.

Or perhaps, she thought with a shiver she couldn’t suppress, it had recognized what was coming.