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2:13 A.M.
The first time Imani Okoye heard the silence, she thought her radio was broken.
It was a Tuesday in October, two weeks after she turned fourteen, and she was sitting on the floor of her bedroom with a pair of headphones that were older than she was. The radio in front of her was even older: a big grey box with dials and switches and a needle that twitched across a glowing strip of numbers. It had belonged to her grandfather, back when he kept the Averly lighthouse, and he had given it to her the summer she moved in with him because, as he put it, "You need a hobby that isn't staring at a phone, and I need someone to talk to who isn't a seagull."
Imani had not expected to like it. She had expected to hate everything about Port Averly: the fog, the fishing boats, the single café that closed at five, the way everybody knew her name and her business and the reason she had come to live with her grandfather instead of her parents. But she liked the radio. She liked the way the static sounded like the sea. She liked turning the dial slowly through the night and catching fragments of the world: a trawler captain reading out weather reports, a man in Norway singing, two truck drivers arguing about football in a language she didn't know.
Mostly, she liked that nobody on the radio knew who she was.
At 2:13 a.m. on that Tuesday, she was drifting through the low frequencies, half asleep, when the static stopped.
It didn't fade. It didn't crackle or wobble. It simply stopped, as sharp as a door closing, and for exactly one second there was nothing in her headphones at all. A perfect, clean, complete silence.
Then the static came back.
Imani sat up. She checked the cable. She checked the switches. She was reaching for the power button when it happened again: one second of perfect silence. Then static. Then half a second of silence. Then static. Then half a second more.
Short. Short. Long.
She sat very still. The silences kept coming, evenly spaced, as regular as a heartbeat. Short. Long. Short, short, short. Some of them were so brief she almost missed them. Some lasted long enough that she held her breath.
It went on for four minutes. Then, at 2:17, the static rolled back in and stayed there, rough and restless as the sea outside her window, and no matter how long she waited, the silence did not come back.
Imani took off her headphones. Her room was dark except for the orange glow of the dial. Far out in the bay, the dead lighthouse stood black against the stars.
She didn't sleep for the rest of the night.
