Meg2 -

“The deep-sea research pod,” Mac breathed. “The one we used to trigger the vents. She’s been wearing it like a trophy for two years.”

The male Megalodon opened its jaws. But it didn't attack. It simply swam in a slow, deliberate circle around the Neptune’s Grave , herding it. The female took up position behind, nudging the sub toward a fissure in the trench wall—a fissure that wasn’t on any map.

It was a Meg. But wrong.

“They’re not hunting us,” Jonas said, his hands gripping the controls. “They’re arresting us.” “The deep-sea research pod,” Mac breathed

A pattern.

Unofficially, Jonas had never slept well.

We are not extinct. We are awake. And we remember every harpoon, every net, every sonar blast that broke our silence. But it didn't attack

The female Megalodon pressed her scarred snout against the sub’s viewing port. Her purple veins flared bright. Jonas could have sworn she smiled.

The sediment swirled into a spiral, then a helix, then a grid. It wasn't random. It was geometry . Jonas’s blood ran cold. Megalodons were animals. Animals didn’t draw blueprints in the sand.

In the center, suspended in the water, was a single, intact object: a buoy from the Mana One. Its light was still blinking. One long, two short. One long, two short. It was a Meg

The Neptune’s Grave , a state-of-the-art research sub, drifted over the collapse zone. The sonar showed nothing but rubble and the faint thermal signature of the buried vents. Then the tick-tick-tick stopped.

“You hearing this, Mac?” Jonas asked, his voice flat over the comms.

Not a fish. Not a current.

The sub drifted into the darkness of the fissure. Inside, the walls were not rock. They were bone. The remains of a dozen other Megalodons, arranged in a spiral pattern, their skeletons interwoven with scavenged submarine wreckage and human diving equipment. A throne of vengeance.

“That’s not possible,” Jonas whispered. “That’s the male. We buried him under fifty thousand tons of rock.”