The Sphere on Cracked Sands

Original story written for Revision Library.

After the storm, the beach at Marram Bay looked as though it had been turned inside out. Ribbons of seaweed lay tangled across the sand, and the tideline was littered with driftwood, shattered shells and one lonely welly boot, filled with water and swaying like a tiny drowned boat. Leila Rahman picked her way along the shore, her boots crunching over broken razor clams, glad of the cold morning air after a night spent listening to the wind rattle the windows.

She was not looking for anything in particular, just breathing, and half hoping to find a good crab shell for her collection, when something caught the corner of her eye. Half buried near the old groyne, where the sand dipped into a shallow crater, sat a shape that did not belong. It was smooth and grey, roughly the size of a football, and it did not move the way driftwood moved when the waves nudged it. It simply sat, humming, as though it were waiting for someone to notice.

Leila crouched beside it. Up close, the sphere was dented on one side, its metal skin scored with thin silver scratches, and a narrow seam ran around its middle like the join on a conker shell. A small light near the seam blinked blue, then amber, then blue again, patient as a lighthouse. She did not touch it straight away. Instead she called across the beach to Kofi Mensah, who was scuffing along near the rock pools with his trousers rolled to the knee. 'Kofi! Come and look at this!'

He jogged over, and for a moment neither of them spoke. The gulls wheeled overhead, screeching as if they too wanted a closer look, and the wind combed through the marram grass on the dunes behind them.

'That's not off a boat,' Kofi said eventually, crouching down opposite her. 'Boats don't blink.' 'It might be a buoy. Washed loose in the storm.' 'Buoys don't have hinges.' He pointed. Leila looked again and saw it: a fine line, almost invisible, running around a third of the sphere, with a small recessed catch beside it. Her heart gave an odd little skip, the kind she usually only felt at the top of the helter-skelter on the pier.

'We should leave it,' she said, not moving. 'We should,' Kofi agreed, and pressed the catch anyway.

The hatch sighed open on some hidden spring, releasing a thin curl of vapour that smelled faintly of ozone, sharp and clean, like the air just after lightning. Nestled inside, wrapped in a silvery cocoon of foil, was a device no bigger than a hardback book, its casing etched with a pattern of tiny hexagons. As the sea air reached it, the device gave a soft click, and a beam of pale light unfolded upward, painting a flickering, waist-high map in the air between them: a coastline, a scatter of islands, and, further out, a small blinking cross above the words KESTREL STATION - SIGNAL LOST.

Neither of them breathed for a moment.

'Kestrel Station,' Leila read aloud. 'I've heard of that. It's the weather platform out past the sandbanks. Mum said it does readings for the shipping forecast.'

'Signal lost,' Kofi said slowly, 'means somebody stopped hearing from it.'

The light flickered again, and a thin, synthesised voice crackled out of the device, patched together from fragments, as though it had been recorded in a hurry: '...escape capsule deployed... crew safe... please relay coordinates to...' The message dissolved into static and did not return, however many times Kofi tapped the casing.

Above them, the clouds that had looked merely grey now looked heavier, stacking themselves along the horizon like crates on a lorry. The tide, Leila realised with a jolt, had crept further up the sand than she had expected, licking at the base of the groyne where minutes ago there had been dry sand.

'We can't leave it here,' she said. 'If the tide takes it back out, nobody will ever find it.'

They did not discuss it further. Kofi peeled off his jumper and wrapped it around the sphere, cradling it against his chest like something newly hatched, and together they half walked, half ran up the beach, the wind shoving at their backs as though it, too, wanted them to hurry. By the time they reached the coastguard station on the harbour wall, both of them were out of breath and speckled with the first fat drops of rain, but the sphere sat safe in Kofi's arms, its little light still blinking, patient as ever, blue then amber then blue again.

The duty officer, a woman called Mrs Whitlock with silver-streaked hair and no patience for nonsense, took one look at the device, one look at the two dripping children on her doorstep, and reached for the radio without a word of doubt. Within the hour, a coastguard launch was cutting out towards the sandbanks, and Leila and Kofi sat wrapped in blankets, watching the horizon, wondering what else the storm had washed up, and what it might yet reveal.