Depth Report

The station logs for Day 94 read: *Anomaly persists. Signal unchanged. Crew psychological status: nominal.* Dr. Moreau had written that last line herself, which meant she was the only one who knew how false it was.

Below the observation bubble, the hadal zone stretched in its absolute darkness—a darkness that had weight, that pressed against the reinforced glass with a patience that geological time had made infinite. The instruments measured pressure in values that sounded like science fiction. The sonar painted shifting topographies of a landscape no human eye had seen.

The signal came again at 0347, as it had come every night for eleven days: a sequence of sixty-four pulses, perfectly spaced, in a frequency that did not occur in nature. She recorded it for the sixty-eighth time. She ran the translation algorithms for the sixty-eighth time. She got, for the sixty-eighth time, the same result: a set of coordinates.

Coordinates that pointed to a location six kilometers below their current depth.

"It wants us to go deeper," said Reyes from the doorway. He had stopped sleeping. They all had.

Moreau closed the log…