## Chapter 3: Project Echo

The encryption on the file was military-grade. David had learned enough about cybersecurity from his college roommate to know he couldn't crack it alone. But Marcus had given him the drive for a reason – there had to be a way in.

He studied the login screen. Below the password field was a hint: "James knows the way down." His father's last message to him? David's fingers hovered over the keyboard as he thought about his father's obsessions, his patterns.

Then he remembered – the depth. His father had repeatedly referenced 2000 meters in his notes. David typed in "2000m_down." Nothing. He tried various combinations until...

The screen flickered. Files appeared.

Project Echo was a classified military research initiative dating back to the 1980s. The documents revealed a network of deep-sea monitoring stations placed along the Atlantic coast, officially for tracking submarine movements. But in 2018, Station 37 – located exactly where his father had marked in his notebook – had recorded something unusual.

David opened a video file. The footage was dark, taken from a deep-sea probe. Timestamp showed it was from three months ago. Sonar mapping appeared normal until... there it was. A massive structure, clearly artificial, half-buried in the sediment. The probe's lights illuminated smooth surfaces that shouldn't exist at that depth, angles too perfect to be natural.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

A sound from downstairs made David freeze. Footsteps.

His mother was in surgery until morning. He should be alone.

He quickly copied the files to a secure drive, powered down the laptop, and moved to his bedroom door. The footsteps were careful, methodical – someone trying to be quiet and failing.

David's room was on the second floor. The old oak tree outside his window had been his secret exit route as a teenager. Now it might save his life.

He grabbed his backpack, shoving in the drives, his father's notebook, and a change of clothes. The footsteps reached the stairs.

The window opened silently – he'd oiled the hinges just last week, a habit from his sneaking-out days. The oak's branches were slick with rain, but he'd made this climb a hundred times.

He was halfway down when his bedroom door opened. Flashlight beams swept the room. Male voices muttered in professional tones.

David dropped the last few feet and crouched in the shadows. Two black SUVs were parked down the street, engines running. But they'd left the back of the house unwatched.

He cut through his neighbor's yard, keeping to the shadows of their garden shed. His phone buzzed – service was back. A text from an unknown number: "Need help? Library. Rebecca Hayes. Now."

Professor Hayes's daughter. They'd dated briefly his freshman year, before she'd transferred to MIT for computer science. More importantly, she'd inherited her mother's security clearance at the university's marine research lab.

David hesitated. Could he trust her? The sound of car doors slamming decided for him. He ran.