It's official: the drowned city of Greybridge is singing again. Ever since a storm cracked the tidewall, sixteen-year-old Mara Lark has been waking to voices braided into foghorns and radiators, spectral echoes that carry names, warnings, and one steady call from someone who should not be alive. Rumors say Warden Morcant, the old master of silence who smothered the harbor decades ago, has returned. His adherents - the Hushers - are crawling out of basements, smashing bells, and stapling Quiet Orders to doorframes. In response, the Resonant Circle has reconvened: Aunt Rae, lighthouse keeper Mr. Orrick, and professor Sol Valdez meet in the catacombs beneath the Palindrome Record Shop. They all know Mara is at the center of Morcant's plan; her pitch is the missing note that can unlatch the drowned lock under Pier Nine. But determined to protect her, they keep her out of every briefing and send her back to Ebb High with a salt-stained map and a promise they will explain soon.
Problems are surfacing at school, too. The Bureau of Acoustic Safety has installed dampeners in the auditorium, confiscated tuning apps, and ordered Principal Kavanagh to oversee daily Hush Periods. Exams loom; Regents do not pause for hauntings. Meanwhile, Mara's link to Morcant is tightening. Through sleepless static and broken radio songs, she slips into his blackwater rooms and feels his intent as if it were her own heartbeat. So Mara, Theo Pike, Juniper Hale, and Elio Santos take action, charting ghost currents with coil mics and violet chalk. Their midnight raid on the power substation beneath Pier Nine snatches the Gray Tuning Fork - but cracks a seal that lets the Undertow Choir loose. The harbor lights die, secrets flood the streets, and the price of being heard could drown them all. Dangerous nights have arrived in Greybridge, yet the world still shivers with wonder: skateboards hum on seawalls, rooftop rehearsals carry stars, and a dusty jukebox predicts the weather in perfect, impossible chords.
