The enormous shape beneath the lighthouse struck the shaft.
The platform jumped.
Miriam was thrown against the console.
The copper horn split along its length.
Black seawater surged upward.
Within it moved countless pale mouths.
They opened together.
Celia’s voice filled the chamber.
“Miri.”
Miriam looked into the rising water.
For one final moment, she allowed herself to imagine that her sister truly waited below.
Then she pulled the emergency overload lever.
Ellis saw what she was doing.
“What will that do?”
“Destroy the transmitter.”
“And us?”
Miriam gave him a tired smile.
“I haven’t read the manual.”
He crawled toward her.
Naomi rose behind him.
Her empty face turned toward the shaft.
“Don’t silence us,” she said in a thousand voices.
Miriam pushed the lever down.
The copper coils ignited.
White light consumed the chamber.
The last thing Miriam felt was Ellis covering her head with his body.
Then the world became perfectly silent.
Dawn arrived over Griefwater Point beneath a clear sky.
A fishing crew found Miriam and Ellis on the rocks below the lighthouse. The upper tower had split from top to bottom. Everything beneath the ground-level entrance had collapsed into the sea.
No trace of Platform Nine remained.
No trace of Naomi Kells was ever recovered.
Miriam woke in the hospital three days later.
Ellis sat beside her bed with bandages wrapped around his head.
He noticed her eyes opening and smiled.
His lips moved.
She heard nothing.
Miriam touched her ears.
Ellis handed her a notebook.
Both of us, he had written. Permanent, according to the doctors.
Miriam read the sentence twice.
Then she wrote beneath it.
The signal?
Ellis shook his head.
Gone.
She closed her eyes.
For the first time in twenty-seven years, there were no radios, no foghorns, no waves and no voices of the dead.
Only silence.
It felt clean.
It felt merciful.
Ellis stood and walked to the window.
Outside, sunlight covered the harbor. Fishing boats moved across the water. Gulls circled above them with open beaks, crying into a world Miriam could no longer hear.
She began to believe they had survived.
Then someone whispered her name.
Not through her ears.
The voice rose from deep inside her chest.
“Miri.”
Her eyes opened.
Across the room, Ellis had gone completely still.
He slowly turned toward her.
Miriam knew from his face that he had heard it too.
The voice beneath the lighthouse had lost its transmitter.
It had lost its horn.
It had lost the sea route through which it had called for generations.
But as Miriam felt the next whisper travel through her bones, she finally understood the mistake they had made.
The thing had never needed human ears.
It had only needed human beings to believe that it did.