Bell had all kinds of crazy images in his head of what he’d see when they finally reached the source of the magnetic anomaly. Some behemoth alien machine. An extensive industrial site. All kinds of things. But what he saw was definitely not among them. Sonar told them that the chamber before them was roughly circular in shape and had a mean circumference of something like 3,000 feet. Certainly the largest chamber thus far. But that’s all it could tell them.

It couldn’t account for what was spread out beneath them.

“Fuck is this?” Murphy said. “You seeing this, Javy? You seeing this?”

“Yes,” she said.

A town. The ruin of a small town as seen from above.

Here in this godawful city at the bottom of an ancient lake tucked away beneath the glacier…a town. It was lying just beneath them in a hollow: streets with houses on either side and lanes fronted by shops. Weeds and kelp grew up amongst them, roofs set with a flowing green moss. And it was lit up down there. Not brightly, but with a sort of phosphorescent shine that let you see everything.

“This can’t be,” Bell said. “A town…a fucking town? Down here?”

“It’s a mirage,” Javonivic told them.

And Bell knew she was right. But it was there, right beneath him and as much as he blinked his eyes, it would not go away.

“It can’t be what it seems to be,” Orr told them. “It’s something, but it’s not a town. Just look at it. Looks like Shitsplat, Illinois sunk into the weeds.”

Bell and Murphy hovered over it with their jets, moving slowly forward, panning with their cameras and getting a nice panoramic view of the sort that might be seen from a helicopter buzzing a real town. But this one was a desolate graveyard.  A weedy run of buildings and rotting houses, shadows pooling from askew doorways, leaning walls encrusted with sponges and flowering anemones, fences lost beneath clustered corals. Brown silt was raining from above, falling over the town like snow. The streets were thick with accumulated sediment, the sidewalks buried beneath the skeletons of crabs and shrimp and the mounded shells of bivalves. The storefronts and porches were barnacled and lumpy.