Tomáš was at the surface before I could blink, but I hung there, frozen—on the edge of sanity and sheer terror—looking at the figure through the glass fogged with algae and salt.

The phone in her hand glowed. Faintly, but it glowed. Underwater. In a wreck. At a depth of forty meters.

I climbed up.

Tomas shouted at me before I could even take the regulator out of my mouth: “Did you see that?! Tell me you saw that!”

He saw. And I wished I hadn’t seen.

We got back on the boat. Our hands were shaking. I checked the footage from the GoPro camera — and I came across something that made me sit on the bottom of the boat and just be silent for a few minutes.

There was no character on the recording. Not at all.

But there was something else. As I watched it, the camera recorded a brief flash of light coming from the depths of the wreck—regular, rhythmic. Like a signal. Like Morse code.

Tomáš is an IT specialist. He took his laptop and started playing back the footage frame by frame.

Ztuchl.

“This is no coincidence,” he said quietly. “Someone is broadcasting this. And it’s broadcasting a single sentence — over and over and over again.”

He moved the screen towards me.

I read the translated message once. Twice. Three times.

And then I understood why the colossus had disappeared from the nautical charts. Why there was no record of it. Why a dark boat with no license plate had followed us all the way back to the harbor.

The message was: “Don’t come back. They already know you were there.”