But when she reviewed the recordings at her lab, she found a final, inexplicable detail. A pause in the storm’s audio, as if someone had taken a breath. Or held one.
She risked the answer. “You’re tied to this place. The lighthouse. You can’t leave it!”
The name sent a chill deeper than the storm. He moved without footsteps, his form flickering like a faulty lantern. Clara’s recorder—her tool for tracking the lighthouse’s acoustics—picked up a rhythmic pulse in the air: a low, hum-and-reverberate pattern. Her mentor’s notes had described the same thing. A “heartbeat” of the deep.
