The sound of the first impact against the Cathedral walls wasn't a thud; it was a rhythmic, wet slapping of something gargantuan. The ancient ship-hulls that formed the ceiling groaned, shedding dust and salt like a dying giant.
Elias didn't move toward the Needle immediately. His legs felt as though they were rooted in the black silt floor. The void where his tenth birthday had been—that stolen memory—was a cold ache in the center of his skull. He knew he had lost something precious, but he no longer knew what it was, and that was the cruelest part of the Bishop's tithe.
"Elias! The glass! Move!" Miller's voice cracked through the fog.
Miller stood near the entrance, his boots braced against a tilted deck-plank. He fired his flare gun. The silver-tipped bolt hissed through the air, illuminating the shadows of the 'Echoes' as they scattered like rats. The flare struck a massive, translucent tentacle that had breached one of the sea-glass windows. The creature shrieked—a sound that vibrated in the marrow of Elias's bones.
Elias lunged toward the stone map.
The Needle sat there, pulsing with a pale, rhythmic light that seemed to answer the ticking on his palm. 46:12:05. As his hand hovered over the artifact, the girl in the yellow raincoat stepped into his path. She didn't look afraid of the monster outside; she looked afraid of him.
"If you take that, Elias, you aren't just holding a compass part," she said, her voice barely a whisper against the chaos. "You are holding the anchor of the Seraphina. You are connecting your heartbeat to the engine of the Drowned Fleet. Once you pick it up, there is no 'Under-London' and 'Surface-London.' There is only the sea."
"I don't have a choice," Elias gasped, his lungs burning from the salty air. "Miller said this is the only way to stop the clock."
"Miller is a soldier of the Agency," the girl hissed. "They don't want to save you, Elias. They want to use you as a lightning rod to catch the Captain."
A second impact rocked the Cathedral. A massive beam of rotten oak snapped above them, falling toward the girl. Elias reacted without thinking—he tackled her, both of them skidding across the damp stone map. The beam shattered the spot where she had stood a second before.
For a moment, they were inches apart. Her eyes weren't just grey; they were shifting like a stormy ocean.
"Why did you save me?" she asked, stunned.
"I've spent my life preserving history," Elias panted, pushing himself up. "I'm not about to let a life be crushed by a piece of wood."
He reached out and gripped the Needle.
The world turned white.
It wasn't a jolt of electricity this time. It was a flood of data. Images of the 1954 shipwreck, the screaming of sailors, the cold embrace of the Atlantic, and the face of Captain Harithon—not as a monster, but as a man who had been betrayed.
Elias saw the Blackwood Museum, but in the vision, it was submerged under fifty feet of dark water. He saw Eleanor Blackwood crying as she locked the vault door for the last time.
The Needle fused with the brand on his palm. The glowing blue rivers on his arm turned a deep, bruised purple. The countdown froze.
46:05:00.
The ticking stopped. But the silence that followed was even more terrifying.
The creature outside stopped hitting the walls. The Echoes stopped moving. Even Miller stood frozen, his flare gun still raised. Time hadn't stopped—it had thickened.
"You've done it," the girl whispered, standing up and looking at Elias's glowing arm. "You've accepted the first shard. But the Captain isn't outside anymore, Elias."
She pointed toward the whirlpool in the center of the room. A hand, encased in a rotted, gold-braided sleeve, reached out from the swirling dark water and gripped the edge of the stone map.
"He's already inside."