“Don’t open it, Marina. It’s not treasure. It’s a trap.”

Marina slammed the box shut. The vision vanished. The sea was calm again.

Behind them, a single amber light flickered on in the deep, then went out.

Not a collision , she realized. An explosion.

The Ilhabela 2 .

Dr. Tanaka had lied. This wasn’t a collector’s piece. This was something else. Something that had been deliberately sunk.

“We dive at dawn,” Marina announced. The water was a cold, green cathedral. Marina’s dive light cut through the murk like a knife, revealing the Ilhabela 2 in terrible glory. Her brass fittings were verdigris-green, her wooden hull encrusted with feather stars. She lay on her side, as if sleeping.

The hunt had begun.

Not the muffled silence of depth—a total, absolute absence of sound. No creak of the wreck. No hiss of her regulator. She heard her own heartbeat, then her father’s voice, as clear as if he were next to her.

The expedition had been funded by a maritime historian, a quiet woman named Dr. Yuki Tanaka, who believed the Ilhabela 2 held something more precious than lost souls. A cargo manifest from the 1920s, never declared, about a jade box bound for a private collector.