The air inside the lower telegraph vault of the Vanguard was stifling, thick with the smell of scorched copper wire, machine oil, and cold salt water.
The copper grounding lead that Sarah had dropped through the cliff face at District Twelve was humming with an eerie, high-pitched vibration. Across three thousand miles of underwater telegraph wire, the physical circuit was holding, but the signal coming back through the sounder was no longer human.
CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK.
It was a machine rhythm—rapid, cold, and mathematically precise.
Sarah sat huddled over the brass receiver, her ears bleeding slightly from the high-decibel acoustic static. Her fingers were cramped into rigid claws, but she refused to let go of the primary induction coil.
"It's not coming from London or Amsterdam," Sarah whispered, her voice rasping against the dark quiet of the steel vault. "It's a automated loop... an offshore backup server housed inside a armored vault ship."
