A personalized dark romance novel, written for you.

From chapter one

The calibration bench in the North Pier control tower smelled of turbine lubricant and the dead weed left behind by an ebbing tide. Forty meters below the concrete sill, the North Sea swung against the foundation piers in long, curdled swells, beating an octave lower than the hum of the 50 Hz mains line feeding the console banks.

Mara Venn kept her thumb flat against the knurled gain-wheel of her sound-level meter. The brass ring was worn smooth at the detent where forty decibels met forty-five, the threshold below which the Harbor Drainage Board officially classed a channel as dormant.

"Read it aloud, Mara," Quentin Armitage said.

He did not turn from the curved glass of the watchtower. His overcoat was charcoal wool, cut broad across the shoulders to accommodate the harbor draft, and on his left pinkie the gold drainage crest caught the amber needles of the hydraulic indicators.

"The three outer siphons are sitting at forty-two decibels," Mara said. Her voice stayed flat, dry as pine shavings. "Mainly cavitation from the drainage pumps at the Old Brewery intake. But the buoy array around the St. Jude tower is registering an irregular flutter. Six hundred hertz, intermittent. It drops off before the third harmonic can resolve."

Quentin turned then. He had an administrator’s easy, forward-leaning posture, the posture of a man who spent his mornings signing relocation warrants and his afternoons being photographed beside concrete retaining walls.

"A sensor fault," he said mildly. "Salt crusting on the piezoelectric element. We saw it twice during the August neap tides."

"It doesn’t look like crusting. The flutter recurs every nineteen minutes." She touched the ledger page with the tip of her steel stylus, marking the coordinate grid where the lower ward met the deep-draft culvert. "That’s a displacement wave. Something with a small engine is cutting through the submerged arches after the gate-keeper locks the street gates at dusk."