The distress signal came at midnight, a weak pulse that barely registered on the black ship's sensors.
Elias was on the bridge, alone with the quiet hum of the ship's systems. The crew slept in shifts—the children, or what the children had become, needed rest even if they no longer looked like children. Lyra had taken the first watch, but she'd been called below to check on a failing power coupling. So Elias sat in the captain's chair, staring at the dark sea, trying not to think about the voice that still whispered at the edge of his sleep.
The signal repeated: three short bursts, then a long one. An old maritime distress code. It was coming from the northeast, maybe thirty miles out, from a small island that wasn't on any chart. The deep's territory.
He keyed the intercom. "Lyra, Isaa
