The first thing the divers noticed was the singing.
Two hundred and forty meters beneath the skin of the Greenland Sea, the Hegni Rift opened like a long black mouth, swallowing the cold green light from the Kestrel-12’s floodlamps. Dr. Soren Hale steadied his breath in the submersible’s cradle as the sound threaded the hull—too low for instruments at first, more felt than heard, like a hum through bone. The ocean wasn’t supposed to sing. Not here. Not at this pitch. Not with this hunger.
“Confirm resonance?” he asked.
“Negative on known patterns,” replied Okafor, fingers white on the controls. “It’s… new.”
New. Soren’s heart climbed his throat. He had spent fifteen years on maps and funding proposals to get to this crack in the world, the place where the Company swore Source Matter pooled like starlight in stone. The boards called it the Answer. The protestors called it sacrilege. The divers called it a pay raise. He called it a last chance to pull the planet back from the brink.
The floodlamps carved out a trembling cathedral of rock. Feather stars waved pale fronds as if in benediction. Beyond them, the Rift yawned deeper, edges rimed with a mirror-dark sheen—the film they were after. The sample arms unfolded, delicate as praying mantis limbs. Data rained across the monitors: temperature drops where there should have been heat, pressure spikes like skipped heartbeats, metallic signatures that refused to fit into any table.
Then the singing grew teeth.
Every bolt in the sub trembled. The Kestrel-12’s nose tilted, just slightly, as if a hand had taken hold of it and was deciding where it belonged. Soren stared at the live feed and finally saw it: the Source itself, no longer a rumor, a skin stretched thin over the planet’s raw grief, rippling with a music that echoed all the way up his spine.
“Easy,” he whispered to Okafor, though he meant it for the ocean. “We take the scrape and we go.”
On the deck of the drillship, the winter light was the color of old coins. Ice mist blew off the rails. The communications array coughed and blinked. In the operations trailer, Ava Lark, chief of logistics, watched four screens at once and fielded three calls she didn’t have time to translate. The storm they’d been ignoring all morning had pivoted right, as if it, too, had heard the song.
“Hold position,” she told the captain, who swore at her, then did it. “Put the Arkline on?”
He arched an eyebrow. “We’re not broadcasting recruitment propaganda in the middle of a pick.”
“It isn’t propaganda,” Ava said, already patching it through. “And it isn’t for you.”
A voice, quiet, threaded into every open channel in a two-hundred-mile radius: This is the Arkline. If you receive this message, you are within the H-17 corridor and eligible for assistance… The words weren’t for the Kestrel; they were for the fishing boats and research vessels, for the icebreakers and remote stations, for the remote little towns that clung to the edges of the world. Ark Island, rumor made wood, was still just a schematic to most of them. But rumor had a way of growing legs when the sea started to sing.
Nine hundred kilometers south, in the village of Qeqertaq, a boy stood ankle-deep in slush, squinting at the northern horizon. His name was Ethan. He had a coat that used to be his mother’s and boots that didn’t fit and a habit of holding his breath whenever the wind went truly quiet, as if the world might be about to decide something.
He was holding his breath now. The wind had stopped as if cut with a knife. The dogs beyond the breakwater had gone silent. Even the sea ice seemed to listen.
“Inside,” called Old Maja from the doorway of the store, but it sounded far away.
Ethan’s radio, a cobbled thing older than he was, clicked on. The Arkline voice arrived under a wash of static, promising coordinates and protocols, enumerating the things to bring if you had to leave your whole life in a hurry: water, heat, hope. He touched the volume wheel with mittened fingers and turned it higher.
Something like a bell tolled under the ice.
Okafor’s hand hovered over the sample control. “We take the scrape and we go,” he echoed, as if the repetition could unmake the song.
“On your mark,” Soren said.
The arm extended. The scraper kissed the film. The world inhaled.
Every sensor shot into red. Pressure leapt. The Rift flexed as if it knew exactly where they were. The song rose three octaves and divided, harmonics blooming into a lattice that made Soren’s teeth ache. On the deck, Ava’s coffee sloshed into her lap and she only noticed when the cup was empty. The captain barked orders that the wind took and scattered.
“Pull back,” Soren said. “Slow. Don’t shear it.”
“It’s pulling us,” Okafor said, voice gone thin. “Soren—”
The Source rippled. The scraper flared a cold light, not blue and not white but the color you see when you close your eyes against lightning. The arm bucked; the sub groaned. The Rift’s edges brightened as if lit from within. For a second, everything was beautiful. Then the seabed moved.
No one on the bridge had time to process the data coming up from the Kestrel-12—the weird arithmetic of energy spiking where matter refused to be counted—before the first fracture appeared. On the seafloor map, it cut a line like a surgeon’s incision, then split into a thousand threads.
On the surface, the sea hushed.
In Qeqertaq, Ethan watched a dozen black points gather on the water, seals or rocks or something else, until he realized they weren’t on the water at all—they were in it, like bubbles but not bubbles, as if something was turning the world inside out from below. He tasted metal. He smelled snow that hadn’t fallen yet. The bell note chimed again, nearer.
Old Maja didn’t call him twice. She came down the step and caught his sleeve with a grip that had shut down more fights than police. “Inside,” she said. “Now.”
But the sea was already rising.
On the drillship, the captain finally overruled Ava and fired the thrusters. The deck canted, then righted. A crane swung, chains moaning. Across the water, smaller boats cut their lines and ran. The sky went the color of old bruises. Radios stuttered. The Arkline voice cracked and dropped, relocated to a stronger dish, and came back clear as a prayer: Proceed to designated elevation zones. If you are within the H-17 corridor—
“We shouldn’t have come,” Okafor said.
Soren wanted to tell him that should had never fed a furnace, had never rebuilt a city, had never, ever, stopped a board vote. He wanted to tell him that no one else had a plan and that was why the Company had made itself a god. He wanted to tell him that the world had been ending very slowly for a very long time and he’d decided to die doing the math. But he didn’t say any of it, because math didn’t matter if the ocean meant to take them.
The arm jerked. The sampler shattered. The Kestrel-12 lurched backward so suddenly Okafor’s head hit the brace with a crack. Soren grabbed him and swore and watched, powerless, as the hull scraped the rock and kept going. The Source film peeled where the scraper had touched and spilled outward, not as liquid, not as gas, but as decision, finding lines it liked in the stone and amplifying them.
On the side monitors, they saw it: a column of water rising, circular and precise as a drill bit, cutting upward like the barrel of a gun. For a heartbeat everything held its breath with Ethan—divers, deckhands, dogs, the old women with their lists, the men with their rumors, the kids with their radios and their feet in the wrong boots. The column reached the surface and became a wall.
“Wave,” someone said on the bridge, almost admiringly, before the alarms cut admiration in half.
Ava’s voice went flat, the way it had the day her sister called from a hospital with a cough the doctors couldn’t stop. “All hands brace. Cut lines. Cut anything that ties.”
The wave didn’t look like the waves in movies. It had no elegant curl, no photogenic apex. It was simply the sea deciding to be somewhere else and taking everything with it. It moved with the ungentle speed of a bad idea that had finally learned how to run.
Ethan heard the dogs before he saw the water—howl, yelp, silence. The breakwater, a row of stubborn stones older than his grandfather, became a suggestion. A fishing shed slid sideways and then wasn’t a shed anymore. He took two steps backward and his foot found air where there had been street. Old Maja hauled him inside with a strength borrowed from a world that still owed her.
“Up,” she said. Stairs, then more stairs, each creaking like a promise that might not be kept. The shop windows bowed inward and held. A box of dried cod leaped from a shelf and split on the floor like pottery.
“What is it?” Ethan asked, though he thought he knew. He had a drawer full of flyers for Ark Island, printed on cheap paper and heavy ink, soaked in the smell of diesel and hope. When the water rises, come to the mountain. When the sky breaks, come to the mountain. When they tell you to stay, come anyway. He had laughed at the slogans with the older boys, then kept the flyers anyway.
Maja’s mouth tightened until it was just two lines crossing. “It’s the bill,” she said. “For everything we thought we could take.”
On the Kestrel, the wave lifted them like a toy and set them down wrong, hard, metal screaming. The rope to the Kestrel-12 snapped with a sound like a tree splintering in cold. The sub rolled, alarms spilling red across panels. Water punched through a seam and turned breath into ice.
“Surface,” Soren said, though there wasn’t a surface anymore, there was only up and the rule that said living things hunted for it. Okafor’s hands moved because hands do, because training stitches itself into muscle when you’re not looking. The sub’s nose found a thinner patch of water. They rose with a violence that made the world smear.
They broke through into a different ocean.
The horizon had moved. Icefields had become islands. The nearest village, a scatter of roofs Soren had counted on the way in, was a stippled gray under churned green. The sky had found new colors and not all of them belonged on a sky. Lightning walked sideways through a snow that didn’t fall but chose. The Kestrel-12 bobbed like a cork on a boiling pot.
Ava’s voice clawed its way through static. “Soren. We’re making for H-17 Evac. If you’re alive, you go east. Repeat: east.”
“Copy,” Soren said, and wasn’t sure what continent east belonged to anymore.
Okafor coughed water and laughed, a bark that had no room for humor. “We took a scrape,” he said. “We did it. We did it.”
Soren stared at the sampler housing, at the hairline crack where a sliver of something that wasn’t light bled through, refusing to choose a state. The sea’s song had subsided to a memory he could feel in his teeth. He thought about the board presentation scheduled for spring and the graphs he’d promised and the money he’d written his soul’s name on. He thought about the Arkline, which he had mocked in rooms with very expensive air filtering, and the mountains everyone joked you couldn’t move.
“Seal that,” he told Okafor, voice steady again only because that was what it did when the world demanded it. “Whatever you do, don’t touch it.”
In Qeqertaq, Ethan and Old Maja reached the roof. From there, the water looked like a roomful of people all trying to talk at once. To the east, the mountains rose like dark shoulders, farther than the oldest men could walk now, closer than the wind could lie about. The radio at Ethan’s hip, battered and faithful, found a clear throat.
This is the Arkline. Elevation zones are open. If you can move, move now. If you cannot move, listen.
He looked at Maja. She looked at him. The water tapped the eaves with two gentle knuckles and then hit with both fists.
“Go,” she said.
“Where?”
“To the mountain.”
He hesitated. “Is it real?”
“It is now.”
The shop beneath them groaned, wood remembering it had been trees. A plank slid; a crate went by as if late for a train. The dogs had found a roof three houses over and balanced there like saints on a pillar. The wave drew back, greedy as a gambler, and held its breath.
Ethan didn’t wait to see how it would exhale. He ran.
Behind him, somewhere under the rising, the earth began to sing again. This time he didn’t mistake it for the wind. This time he understood that it wasn’t a song at all.
It was a countdown.
