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When 19-year-old Isla Reyes hears her missing brother’s harmonica echo through an old lighthouse radio, it draws her into a hidden network beneath a Maine harbor. With a retired acoustician and a scrappy intern, she exposes a corporate scheme and finds a new way to listen—to the sea, to grief, and to herself.
The lighthouse museum closed at nine, but Isla Reyes lingered, dragging the rag across the brass plaque as if polishing could slow time. The Fresnel lens overhead caught the last of the late-summer light and split it into syrupy bands that slid over the whitewashed walls. Down on the rocks, the tide sighed and drew back, leaving the smell of kelp and wet iron. She cracked the window, and fog eased in, cool, tasting like salt on her tongue.
“Night, Isla,” called Mr. Hendry from the stairwell. His keys clanked. “Don’t fall asleep up there.”
“I won’t,” she said, smiling across the echo. When his footsteps faded, the building settled into its old bones. The museum radios were supposed to stay off after hours. The placard read: Do Not Operate — Display Only. The knob had the dulled shine of a thousand fingers, the kind of temptation that pressed on her like the weight of the lens.
She flipped it anyway. The antique shortwave hummed awake. Static crawled like dry snow. Isla leaned in, lips parting, heart picking up a silly rhythm. She had done this every few nights for weeks, catching pieces of fishermen complaining, students laughing on some coastal net. Tonight, the noise shifted. It bent around a tone she knew like the smell of laundry from home. A thin ribbon of sound threaded through the hiss, three notes up, two down, a pause where she knew the breath would be.
Her brother’s harmonica, the cheap one with the dent at the top, had always opened the same way. She could see Eli at the foot of her bed, nineteen and reckless, shushing her while he tried to nail the first line of a tune their grandfather used to hum. She could hear the smile in the air now, bright and impossible.
Isla froze. The radio coughed, rearranged itself, then the line came again, buried but unmistakable. Three up, two down. She fumbled for her phone and hit record. “No way,” she whispered. “No way.”
She crossed the room to the gallery door and stepped into the night. The fan of the beam painted fog into a moving wall. Out beyond the breakwater, pinpricks of white shifted where boats sat at anchor. The harbor bell clanged, stubborn, and somewhere a gull complained in its sleep. She pressed the phone to the radio’s fabric grille, the screen blue on her hands. When the tune broke off, a different sound crept in: a mechanical whine that didn’t belong to wind or waves.
Isla slid her gaze along the horizon and found it: a low, wide shape sitting beyond the No Entry buoys, lit like a floating parking lot. Its lights poured a flat sheen on the water. She had heard the name tossed around the diner in the mornings—Blue Azurite, new installation, jobs coming. The company logo stuttered in the fog every time the crane swung. The whine deepened, and the hair on her arms stood up.
“Eli?” she said to no one. The radio answered with white hiss and a thin, familiar ache.