The first time the streetlights sang to Maya Santos, she thought it was a trick of the wind. Northpoint always hummed. The town sat on the narrow jaw of a peninsula that bit into the gray Atlantic, and everything buzzed—boat engines, refrigerator cases at Lee’s Market, the sorrowful moan of the foghorn low on the rocks. But the streetlights’ song was different. It slithered into her bones like a chord you feel more than hear, a note that tightened when she skated under the sodium glow on her battered board. She pushed harder, wheels rattling on the cracked sidewalk. The lights above her flickered, just once, like they were trying to wink a message she didn’t know how to read. “Hey, lightning bug,” Theo called from behind, breathless and too loud in the empty street. He was thirteen and had the kind of endless energy that made teachers sigh and couches squeak. He had a backpack slung over one shoulder, dangling open, a soccer ball threatening to tumble out. “Don’t call me that,” Maya said, but without heat. She coasted to a stop at the corner by the bait shop and put a sneaker down. The Atlantic lay ahead in a stretched ribbon of pewter, the horizon a blur between sky and water. Off to the left, Northpoint Light stood like a pencil mark against the clouds—thin and white and mostly forgotten. No one had kept it lit in years. Budget cuts, Mr. Calder at the library said. GPS made it old-fashioned, he’d shrugged, as if a beam that could split fog mattered less now that phones had maps. Maya hadn’t bought that. Some things you felt mattered, whether or not an app could do them for you. Jin rolled up beside her and steadied his bike with one foot on the curb. He had a milk crate zip-tied to his rack for lugging broken radios and a helmet plastered with stickers from robotics tournaments. He rested his chin on the handlebar and squinted at the lighthouse. “You get it again?” he asked quietly. Maya nodded, pressing her tongue to the back of her teeth, testing the aftertaste of the hum. It had been getting louder for a week. She’d told only Jin, mostly because he understood circuits and signals in a way that didn’t make her feel like she was breaking. She had tried to tell herself it was stress, that her mom’s overnight shifts and the new school year pressing at the edges of summer were putting her nerves on high alert. But then the lamps started flickering in rhythm when she walked beneath them. “I can bring the portable,” Jin said. “If it’s, like, a radio thing. Maybe there’s interference.” “From what?” Theo hopped in a circle to keep warm, dribbled the soccer ball between his sneakers, then caught it under his heel. “Aliens? Don’t say aliens.” “Not aliens,” Maya said. The word tasted immature, like something you whispered under blanket forts. This felt too sharp for that. “It’s… it’s like the lights are talking. Only it’s not words.” “Well, good thing one of us is multilingual,” Theo said. “You’re fluent in weird.” She bumped his shoulder with her board and tried to smile. The smile faded when the hum slid up the back of her neck again, a chill in electrical clothing. The wind had shifted; it carried salt and something metallic, like penny tang on her tongue. Far out, a thin line of dark clouds stitched the horizon. By the time they climbed the hill to the library, the first sprinkle had started, pinpricks of rain dotting the steps. Mr. Calder looked up from behind the desk when they pushed through the door, his glasses perched low and his sweater too big for his shoulders. He’d been the lighthouse keeper once, before the layoffs, before the door was chained and the lens collected dust and seagull droppings. “Afternoon, Nighthawks,” he said, using the name the whole town used for any kid from Northpoint High. “Shelter from the storm?” “Just research,” Jin said innocently, which was also not a lie. Maya didn’t go to the shelves. She drifted towards the long windows that looked east, towards the lighthouse. The rain came heavier, ticking against the glass. The hum stepped closer, the way footsteps sounded nearing a door. “That thing still works, you know,” Mr. Calder said softly beside her. He didn’t mean the window. “They left the Fresnel lens up there. Crystal rings. Beautiful, if you like seeing how light bends. They said we’d keep it for history. As if light belongs in a museum.” “Can it turn on?” The question slipped out. He watched the rain for a moment, watched the lighthouse turn gray with the weather. “Power’s cut. But that doesn’t mean it’s dead.” He set a book on the sill. “If you’re looking to read about it, this one’s good. The engineer who built the first lenses wrote it. He thought light should be concentrated, so it can’t help but find its way through fog.” Theo picked up the book and made a face at the diagrams. “I like it when things explode,” he announced, which was not helpful. “Explosions are just energy deciding where to go,” Jin said, already flipping through. “I like it when energy listens.” Maya pressed her palm against the cool windowpane. Somewhere, low and persistent, the hum throbbed. It didn’t feel separate anymore. It felt like it was in the wall, in her arm, in the birds’ wings beating past the gutter. That night, after her mother left for overnight shift twelve of fourteen, Maya lay awake and counted seconds between lightning breaths of the sky. The storm had rolled in with the stubbornness only Northpoint storms had, slow and steady and certain of themselves. Each flash unfurled the room in brief negatives—posters of bands, the corkboard of Polaroids from a summer that already felt too far behind, the glow-in-the-dark stars Theo had stuck to her ceiling when he was eight and fearless. The hum built. It threaded through the rain into her pillow, into the coil of the old mattress. It didn’t frighten her so much as demand her attention. Her phone lit up on the nightstand. A text from an unknown number: 0722. Beneath it, a symbol she’d seen carved into the underside of the ferry dock as a kid, four lines intersecting in a neat star. Maya stared at it until her eyes watered. The storm boomed. Across the hall, Theo snored like a puppy. She typed: Who is this? The three dots blinked. Blinked. Vanished. No reply. She sat on the edge of the bed and tried not to shake. 7:22. A time? A frequency? Jin would know. She sent the number to him with a lightning bolt emoji. His response arrived in seconds: *HAM band. That’s a weirdly specific channel. Also: are you awake bc that thunder just said my name.* She didn’t ask what the symbol meant. She knew what it meant in her gut, where her secrets sat. The first time she’d noticed it was on a coin her grandmother had kept in a velvet bag, two halves of it fused together wrong, like someone had started to pull it apart and changed their mind. Abuela called it a guardian’s mark. Maya had thought it was just a story, something to make a kid feel protected. At 7:19 the next evening, they were already on the rocks below the lighthouse, rain returned to mist and the sky an iron lid. Out here, the hum was louder, the way an ocean is louder when you sit on its lip. The lighthouse loomed, shabbier up close, paint peeling like old sunburn and a chain crossing the door at knee height with an official sign: **No Trespassing. Dangerous Structure.** “Define dangerous,” Theo said, already ducking. He wore his bike helmet like a talisman and carried a flashlight whose batteries rattled when he shook it. “Hold up,” Maya said, but she didn’t sound like herself, even to her own ears. She sounded like the hum. Focused. Narrow. She undid the latch on the broken chain, surprised when it slid off as if someone had oiled it for tonight. Inside, the air smelled of salt and rust and old tools. The narrow staircase spiraled up in fits and starts, grated metal treads worn slick. Jin took the lead with the portable radio, the kind with too many knobs and a taped antenna that made him look like he was carrying a very serious lunchbox. “Channel 7.22,” he said, fiddling. “Which is not a normal way to say that, by the way, but okay.” The radio warmed in his hands with a tiny click-spit of sound, then hissed, the kind of static you hear when someone is about to breathe into your ear. Maya climbed, palm sliding along the brass rail, every hair on her arms lifting as if charged. Her backpack bumped her spine; inside, the coin from Abuela thudded against her water bottle with each step. She hadn’t meant to bring it, but when she’d stood at her dresser earlier, trying to decide, her fingers had moved on their own. They reached the lantern room like surfacing from underwater. The world spread itself in every direction—sea, town, the dark scar of the marsh, the highway ribbon cutting out toward the mainland. The Fresnel lens rose like a glass beehive at the room’s centre, prisms layered and perfect, dust suspended among them like confetti frozen midair. It wasn’t wired to anything. It wasn’t supposed to be able to do anything at all. The hum had a centre here. It was as if all the sound in the town had been filaments leading to this bulb. “Wow,” Theo breathed. He leaned his forehead against the glass and made a circle with his hand to block the glare of evening. “It looks like it wants to move. Is it supposed to do that?” “It can’t,” Jin said, equally awed, equally not certain. He adjusted the radio. “Okay. Seven point—no, wait—this is… this is different. Someone’s on this band. They shouldn’t be, but they are.” He held up a finger. “Listen.” The static thinned. A tone bled through, high and pure. Maya’s bones answered like tuning forks. Another tone joined it, lower, richer. The notes braided themselves into something like a word, but not in any language she recognised. Her heart found the beat and settled into it, like it had been running slightly off-tempo for years and was now finally catching up. “Do you hear that?” she whispered. Jin nodded, eyes wide. Theo shook his head, impatient. “I hear fizz. Is it secret fizz?” Maya stepped to the lens. The brass frame holding the glass glowed dull in the last light. Without thinking, she set her palm where the metal met the crystal. The hum surged. It wasn’t a noise anymore. It was pressure, a gentle push from all sides, like being under a warm wave. The work lights in the ceiling—dead for a decade—winked once, twice. The radio crackled and then smoothed into a line of sound so clean it made Jin’s mouth drop open. Through it, faint and shimmering, came a voice like a record played too slow. “...guardian...” Maya jerked back. “Did you hear that?” “Say it again,” Jin breathed to the air, to whoever owned that voice. “Guardian,” it whispered, closer now, enough that the glass trembled in its frame. “Anchor. Key.” Theo’s eyes darted to Maya’s bag. “Uh… did your coin just get creepy?” Before she could answer, the floor under their feet gave a soft thud, as if the lighthouse itself had exhaled after holding its breath too long. The lens shifted, a fraction of a degree, and then, impossibly, began to rotate. Dust skittered off in a ring. The prisms caught the last smear of daylight and concentrated it, a faint blade that swept the harbour once, twice, a heartbeat. Jin looked around wildly, searching for a hidden outlet, a trick panel, wires he’d missed. There was nothing. Only the lens moving and Maya’s hand buzzing like she’d shocked herself on a doorknob and not let go. “Okay,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “Okay, it’s doing that.” “That’s not what it used to say,” a voice cut in from the shadows at the top of the stairs. All three of them spun. A figure stepped into the light, lean and rain-slick, hair plastered to her forehead. She looked older than them but not by much, her eyes pale as sea-glass and narrowed like she’d been waiting for this and also hoping it wouldn’t happen. “You’re early,” the girl said to Maya, and when she lifted her hand, the air around her fingers crackled, tiny sparks spitting into existence and dying in the damp. The lens’s glow reflected in her eyes like twin stars. The hum in Maya’s chest swelled, answering. “What are you?” Theo said, but it came out as a whisper because the room suddenly felt too small. “Wrong question,” the girl said, glancing at the radio, at the coin-shaped bulge in Maya’s backpack, at the lens. Outside, the fog rolled fast over the water, pulled in by some intention beyond weather. “Better ask what’s coming.” Another tone, deeper than the others, climbed up through the spiral stairs from the base of the tower—the sound of something old remembering itself. Maya swallowed. Her hand hovered over the lens, the coin heavy against her spine, the hum now a roar in her blood. She met the stranger’s sea-glass eyes and did not look away as the beam swung and, for the briefest instant, lit up a shape in the fog below that was not a boat. The voice on the radio tightened into a single clear word, as if choosing for her. **“Answer.”**