470798_424218 Here

Elias reached for the red telephone on his desk to call central command. His hand hovered over the receiver. If he reported this, the military would swarm the station, redact his logs, and send him into a forced, silent retirement. But if he didn't report it, whatever was down there in the dark, frozen water—screaming out after decades of absolute silence—would be lost forever.

Inside the concrete bunker, Elias sat before a massive reel-to-reel computer system that clicked and hummed against the freezing Siberian winds outside. For forty years, his job had been simple: monitor the incoming emergency satellite feeds from the deep Arctic research buoys and log the numbers. 470798_424218

The first number, , was the identifier for Buoy Theta—a station anchored directly above the deepest trench in the Arctic Ocean. The buoy had been declared lost and struck from the records in 1994 after a massive sheet of shelf ice crushed the surface station. It shouldn't have been transmitting at all. Elias reached for the red telephone on his

With a heavy sigh, he withdrew his hand from the phone. He reached into his desk, pulled out a black marker, and carefully wrote the date and the two numbers in his personal leather logbook. Then, he tore the thermal printout from the machine, dropped it into the small electric incinerator by his desk, and watched it turn to ash. But if he didn't report it, whatever was

The printer clicked once more, rolling out a blank, white tongue of paper. There was no third number.