Chapter One

Atlantic Ocean: Friday, October 31, 10 a.m.

The Egg creaked as it dropped, the sound like distant thunder inside the titanium shell. Floodlights pierced the dark water ahead two hundred miles offshore of Boston, revealing a haze of suspended particles drifting past the viewport like falling ash. Tank Riley kept a light grip on the joystick, eyes flicking between the external readouts and the slowly descending terrain below.

A veteran submersible pilot with over a decade underwater, he carried the calm confidence of a professional who had made dives like this over a hundred times. Compact and lean, with weathered hands and a sun-creased face, Terry looked more like a seasoned fisherman than a high-tech navigator, but beneath that rough exterior was a sharp, calculating mind that rarely missed a detail.

“Current's light—maybe two knots tops,” he shared, adjusting the trim tabs with practiced ease. The submersible shifted, nose angling downward into the ink. “Visibility’s not bad under this cliff feature.”

“Better than I expected,” Beth Souder replied, leaning toward her own console. Beth was the type who double-checked every reading, calibrated every instrument herself, and could hold her breath for two minutes without thinking about it. She was sharp, analytical, and relentlessly curious, with a quiet drive that pushed her to volunteer for this dive.

Her voice was steady, but her fingers moved quickly, toggling through seismic overlays and sonar pings. “No distortion on the bottom scan yet.”

She tapped the screen, pulling up a grid of recent epicenters. Tiny red blips clustered in unnerving patterns just west of their descent line—earthquake swarms that, according to the USGS, hadn’t existed here in recent history.

“This whole area was quiet,” she said, more to herself than to Tank. “Not a single recorded quake. Now look at it.”

“Same song, different verse,” Tank said, angling the sub a few degrees west. “San Andreas, Cascadia, New Madrid. Now the Atlantic’s getting in on the act.”

A sharp ping sounded—proximity sonar. Tank eased back on the throttle. The seafloor emerged from the gloom, and Terry blew a low whistle.

What should've been a smooth stretch of silt was shattered—ripped wide open. Jagged fissures spiderwebbed across the bottom, some wide enough to swallow the Egg whole. Chunks of the seabed had been thrown aside, forming chaotic ridges and broken ledges. Clumps of seaweed drifted aimlessly, torn from their moorings, swirling through the murky water like green ghosts.

“It looks like a giant stomped through here,” Beth murmured, staring through the viewport. Her eyes, sharp, sea-gray, missed nothing.

Tank nodded grimly, his strong forearms maneuvering the submersible around a yawning crack that dropped into blackness. “If this place was sleeping, it's awake now—and it’s pissed.”

He adjusted the ballast slightly, the Egg settling lower with a hiss of displaced air.

“After the other megaquakes this year, this doesn’t feel like a coincidence,” Beth said. She scanned the camera feeds, logging the condition of the sediment. “It doesn’t fit. There’s no known fault structure here. Nothing on the maps.”

“Yeah, well,” Tank said, eyeing a jagged line etched into the seabed that he bet hadn’t been there two weeks ago, “maybe the map’s about to change.”

A long silence filled the cockpit. Just the soft whir of servos and the occasional creak as the pressure outside climbed higher. Beth adjusted the external manipulator arms, readying the sampling gear. Anxiously, she tugged at the ball cap covering her sun-streaked brown hair.

“Bottom fracture looks fresh,” she said. “We might be right on top of one that just happened.”

Tank kept the Egg steady, lights sweeping over a ripple of sharp ridges ahead. Not coral. Not rock. Something cracked and lifted, as if the seafloor had shrugged.

“Tell Adventurer we’re starting the grid,” he said, switching channels.

Beth keyed in the signal. “Egg to Adventurer, we’ve reached the target zone. Beginning pass one of the survey grid. And Tank’s got a bad feeling.”

“Damn right I do,” he muttered, fingers tightening on the controls as they glided forward.

Tank guided the Egg along the base of the underwater cliff, keeping it a few dozen feet off the bottom. The wall loomed to their right—an immense vertical face of ancient stone, cloaked in deep-sea darkness and marine life that clung like forgotten ivy. Beth swept the sonar left to right, eyes locked on shifting readouts.

“Fractures running vertically up the cliff face,” she said, voice low. “This looks fresh, too. Like it’s been split open from below.”

Tank kept one hand on the controls, the other on the stabilizers. “That outcrop is over four hundred feet tall. If it comes down…”

He didn’t finish.

Like his words wished it to be so, a shiver rolled through the water. Just a tremor at first. The lights on the cliff flickered with sudden clouds of silt as sand puffed upward in slow-motion explosions. Pebbles bounced and spun in the water like startled fish.

Another jolt.

Then another—closer.

Beth’s head snapped up. “That’s a swarm. Short bursts, shallow focus—like the ground’s trying to make up its mind.”

She flipped a switch on the comms. “Adventurer, this is Egg. We’re registering multiple microquakes—the cliff structure looks unstable. Requesting—”

She never finished.

A deep groan vibrated through the hull. Not from the sub—but the earth itself.

The Egg pitched violently as a massive shockwave punched through the seafloor. Lights flickered. Tank swore and fought the controls, trying to stabilize the sub as it spun slightly off-axis. Above them, the cliff shuddered—visibly flexing, a behemoth awakening from slumber.

A deep crack thundered through the water, silent in the air but bone-rattling here.

The top of the cliff snapped back, then lurched forward like a massive tower giving way. Entire shelves of rock sheared off. Boulders the size of buildings broke loose, tumbling in slow, deadly arcs.

“Hold on!” Tank shouted.

Beth barely had time to brace before the mountain let go.

A massive slab, hundreds of feet wide, detached from the cliff face like a calving glacier. The slab tilted, broke loose completely, and began its descent—slow at first, eerie in its grace. But the second it moved, the cliff face responded like a collapsing dam. Tons of rock and sediment followed, ripped loose by the violent displacement. What began as a single fall became a cascading avalanche, a wall of destruction tumbling down the cliffside.

Enormous boulders tumbled end over end, some shattering on impact, others bouncing and ricocheting as they plunged. Whole layers of seabed tore away, sucked into the growing slide. The motion churned up a blinding cloud of silt and debris, thickening the water into a muddy fog. Fine particles, uprooted seaweed, and fractured coral swirled through the surge like wreckage caught in a whirlpool.

The descent carved a gouge into the mountain’s side, leaving a raw wound hundreds of feet deep, as if a piece of the Earth’s crust had been peeled away. The sheer weight of it all displaced millions of gallons of water, generating a pressure wave that rolled outward in all directions.

From afar, it looked like the mountain was melting, its face liquefying and collapsing into the abyss below.

And at the base of it all, the darkness grew deeper as the landslide dropped.

Hands flying over the controls, face set in a grim mask, Tank yanked the joystick hard and spun the Egg around, thrusters screaming as he gunned the engines. The sub lurched forward, lights cutting through a rising blizzard of silt and debris.

Beth clutched the mic with white-knuckled fingers, her voice raw with urgency as she shouted into the comms.

“Egg to Adventurer! Cliff collapse—massive landslide—repeat, massive underwater slide! We’re trying to—”

A thunderous crack drowned her out as another surge of debris slammed past the sub. The cabin shook violently.

She held on, teeth clenched, fighting to stay focused. “We’re at the base—being overtaken—heading north, trying to get clear—It’s everywhere!”

Static hissed in her earpiece. No answer.

Behind them, the ocean roared—an avalanche of stone and earth crashing down the cliffside like the wrath of a sinking continent. Chunks of rock tumbled past, some the size of small cars, others indistinguishable in the swirling chaos. The Egg groaned under the strain as Tank drove it forward, trying to outrun the mountain.

The world exploded around them.

A tidal surge of silt, rock, and debris blasted outward. The lights vanished in a choking cloud. The Egg was picked up like a leaf in a hurricane, thrown sideways as the wall of collapsing earth engulfed them. Screams of grinding metal echoed through the cabin. Alarms wailed. The viewports went blind with darkness and grit.

Tank wrestled the controls, but the currents were too strong. The Egg spun, slammed into something hard, and rolled again. Beth’s monitor cracked, sparks showering her console. A boulder scraped along their side, grinding the hull like a grinder over bone.

Then, silence—brief, muffled, terrible.

Above them, the collapse sent a shockwave screaming up through the water column. At the surface, the Adventurer's sensors would be the first to register it—a surge of water racing outward in all directions, the birth of a tsunami.

Two hundred miles east of Boston, the ocean rose. A long, rolling swell gathered speed and shape, invisible at first, then monstrous. It raced west, growing as it hit the shallower waters of the continental shelf, heading straight for Boston Harbor.

Unstoppable.

And far below, buried in a suffocating avalanche of earth, the Egg lay still, its lights flickering in the dark as they went out one by one.

***

            Tsunami sirens shrieked up and down the Atlantic coast, their wail cutting through the morning calm like a blade. From the sultry marshes of Georgia to the rocky coves of Nova Scotia, towns sprang into motion. Fishermen dropped their nets. Parents grabbed their kids. Shopkeepers bolted doors without looking back.

Nobody hesitated.

They’d learned from the events of the past year.

Just past noon, the first of the swells rolled in—deceptively smooth, deceptively slow. Walls of water, ten and twenty feet high, surged into harbors and river mouths with the force of a freight train. Fishing boats were torn from their moorings and flung onto piers. Sailboats capsized. Steel berths twisted and groaned as the sea claimed them.

In the northeast, the blow hit hardest. Boston, Portland, Providence—cities braced behind seawalls and sandbags. The ocean surged inland, swallowing intersections and parking lots, pushing four blocks deep in places. Water curled around street signs and lapped at storefront windows. Cars floated, then crunched against each other like driftwood.

But the people were gone. Evacuated.

This time, there were no screams, no panicked last-minute flights—just the grim efficiency of a population that had already watched the world crack open twice in the last six months. Shelters buzzed with quiet tension, radios crackled with updates, and people huddled, listening, waiting.

The surge began to recede by evening, leaving behind sodden roads, a wreckage of boats, and layers of salt and silence. Emergency crews moved in before nightfall. Drones swept the coast. No mass casualties. No body bags.

Just stunned relief.

And a single, shared thought rising with the steam from the flooded streets:

Please let that be the worst of it.