In the center, suspended in the water, was a single, intact object: a buoy from the Mana One. Its light was still blinking. One long, two short. One long, two short.
“Give me the manipulator arm,” Jonas ordered. “I want a rock sample.”
Then she turned, swam to the fissure’s mouth, and released a single, powerful jet of water that shot toward the surface—a signal to the rest of her kind, hidden in deeper, darker trenches around the world.
The titanium claw extended into the murk, fingers grasping a chunk of basalt. As it lifted, a cloud of super-fine sediment billowed up—and something moved within it.
The sediment swirled into a spiral, then a helix, then a grid. It wasn't random. It was geometry . Jonas’s blood ran cold. Megalodons were animals. Animals didn’t draw blueprints in the sand.
The sub drifted into the darkness of the fissure. Inside, the walls were not rock. They were bone. The remains of a dozen other Megalodons, arranged in a spiral pattern, their skeletons interwoven with scavenged submarine wreckage and human diving equipment. A throne of vengeance.
It was a message from the deep, to the surface.