My Brother Called From the Ocean Floor, So I Hung Up novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Surface

The Institute's own array puts the Halcyon's beacon on the surface forty miles away; the clip of Emmett hanging up goes viral and the board suspends him; Rask announces Kit survived.

Quist's smile followed me out of the room.

"He switched off the array himself," I said to Joan on the stairs. "He wants us to know he can."

"Then he thinks nobody can prove it," she said. "Come up to the roof. There's one more thing he can't switch off."

Joan took me up to the roof.

Nobody goes up there. There's a gravel deck, a rusted rail, and an old satellite receiver we kept after the array went in.

She keyed it on with the flat of her hand.

"Every Institute vehicle carries a surface beacon," she said. "Rask's Halcyon has one too. It only talks when it's out of the water."

The screen warmed up slowly.

A single green dot appeared.

It sat on the surface of the Pacific, forty miles from the coordinates on the ops floor.

It hadn't moved in four hours.

"That's the Halcyon," Joan said. "It never went down."

"It never went down."

"Then who was on the phone?"

"A recording," I said. "Played twice."

She looked at me for a long moment. The wind pulled at her cropped gray hair.

"You knew this before you hung up."

"I knew the call was wrong. I didn't have this."

"How?"

I'd have to tell somebody someday. It wasn't going to be on a roof, on the first day.

"The lag," I said. "Sound from that depth takes several seconds to reach the surface. His answers came with no gap."

Joan thought about that.

"I've listened to that line a hundred times in drills," she said. "I never once counted the gap."

"Nobody does."

She photographed the screen with her phone, then saved the log to a drive and put the drive in her jacket.

"Kit is not at the bottom of the ocean," she said.

"No."

"Then where is he?"

"Somewhere on the Meridian," I said, "being told to keep quiet."

We went back down.

The hall outside the ops floor was full.

Staff had gathered in clusters, and every one of them held a phone.

When I came out of the stairwell, the whole hall went quiet.

A young analyst held her screen toward me without meaning to. I read it before she could pull it back.

It was a clip from the catwalk. My face, a handset, my hand putting it down on the cradle.

The caption said: ENGINEER HANGS UP ON BROTHER'S DEATH CALL.

The number under it read 2.1 million.

"It's on every feed," she whispered. "I'm sorry. I didn't post it."

"It's all right."

"It isn't," Joan said.

The board chair was waiting at the end of the hall, in a navy blazer and a worried face.

He had a security guard with him.

"Emmett," he said. "I'm sorry. With the clip out, the Institute can't have you on the floor tonight. You're suspended, effective now, pending a hearing."

"For hanging up a phone?"

"For how it looks."

"The Halcyon is sitting on the surface," Joan said, sharply. "I have the beacon."

"Joan." The chair held up a hand. "Rask Marine is our largest private partner. Harlan is on my phone every ten minutes. Whatever you think you've found, bring it to the hearing."

"The hearing will be after the news cycle ends."

"Yes," the chair said. "That's the point of a hearing."

He looked at the guard, and the guard held out his hand.

"Badge, sir."

I unclipped the lanyard.

It had hung from my neck for eleven years.

I laid it in the guard's palm, and forty people watched me do it.

Joan walked me to the doors.

"I'll hold the drive," she said. "Nobody else gets it. Not the chair, not the Navy, not Quist."

"Why not the Navy?"

"Because I don't know yet which of them already told Harlan what the flange meant."

She was right to say it. I hadn't considered it.

In the parking lot, my phone buzzed with a voicemail.

My mother's voice. She was crying so hard the words came apart.

"Emmett. I don't know who you are. You will pick up this phone when he's dead, and then you will hear me."

The message ended.

I sat in my car and didn't start it.

I wasn't angry at her.

She believed every word she had said, and that was the part that hurt.

I started the engine.

At 11:40 that night my phone lit again.

It was a news alert from every outlet at once.

RASK MARINE: KIT RASK SURVIVED.

I opened it.

The statement was one paragraph, signed by my father.

It said the Halcyon had suffered a catastrophic flooding event, that Kit had escaped in the sub's emergency pod, and that he had been picked up by the support ship Meridian.

"We thank the Almighty for the miracle," my father had written. "We are heartbroken that the one man in the world who could have helped him chose not to."

Under it, the comments were already full.

Thousands of people wanted my name, my address, and my head.

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