The silence on the Isle of Mull was absolute, but to a mind trained to listen to the ocean's quietest nerve endings, true silence was a myth.
For three weeks, Dr. Julian Vance had kept his word to Clara Mercer and to himself. He logged barometric drops, plotted high-altitude wind vectors, and recorded sea-surface temperatures with meticulous, mundane precision. His hands had stopped shaking. The phantom hum behind his sternum had receded into a dull, forgotten memory.
Until the afternoon of August 28.
It began not with a sound, but with a anomaly in his thermal oceanography logs. The water temperature in the Sound of Mull was supposed to be hovering around twelve degrees Celsius. Yet, at 14:15 PM, the deep-water digital sensor mounted to the submerged pier piling recorded a sudden, loca
