“Keep her safe,” Marianne had whispered in her final moments. “Keep her close.”

“Don’t do this,” Jeremy said, but there was no stopping the beast that had come to collect.

He watched other parents beam as their daughters trotted to the family minivans with laptop satchels dangling from shoulders, hair pulled into Mickey-Mouse style buns, hot pink tee-shirts with white hashtag text reading #girlpowered and #crackingthecode. How could these be the weapons of future warriors who’d grow to lock horns with a punishing, ruthless world? Most days it was like they weren’t even speaking the same language.

Emilia opened the passenger door and sat down like she was hiding. Long strands of golden-brown hair danced out from beneath a grey beanie.

“I don’t want to fight,” she said and tugged at a loose thread from the laptop bag. Coastal air pushed through the vents alongside the AC.

“Fight about what?” Jeremy asked. He didn’t understand why Emilia insisted on wearing that beanie. Jeremy had lost his hair years ago and thought she should be proud of a full head of hair.

Emilia, unaffected, shrugged.

“You don’t want to be here,” Emilia said.

“Honey…”

Jeremy had considered suicide several times, but believed the thoughts were tucked so deep in his psyche where Emilia couldn’t mine them. The pain of watching Marianne die, a daughter that bore a striking resemblance, the world had already moved on. Some days it was too much to bear. If Emilia had picked up on his energy, he’d slipped. Just another thing to add to the long list of pain.

“Other parents meet their kids at the door, but not you.”

Jeremy put his hand on the back of his daughter’s head and palmed the wool cap. “The lighthouse,” he said. “Lost track of time. Tomorrow, I’ll be at the door.”

The car behind them honked with a dinky electric vehicle honked. Jeremy rolled down the window and waved an apology before tucking his fingers and almost flipping the bird. It’s always about them.

His Prius hummed like the fan of an internal processer, the final purchase Marianne made before every day became a battle against time. Jeremy missed his pickup truck, missed the sound of a roaring engine screaming down the Colorado highways, but those days were gone. Instead, he pulled into the traffic-clogged California highway as Emilia popped open her laptop.

“I coughed up blood today. The counselors tried to call, but it went straight to voicemail. Please don’t be mad.”

Jeremy’s insides twisted. The gridlock traffic inched on.

“I was working on the lighthouse. I didn’t see.” he said. “Do you feel better?”

“Yup”

There it was, that little fighter clawing to the surface. She had it in her, but it often took prodding to rise. When it first happened, they went to the hospital – the same hospital Marianne expired within – only to be told that Emilia’s trachea was scratched raw from screaming into her pillow. Those silent, muffled nights asking questions that had no answers, waging war against self instead of world, emerging with scars instead of salvation, perhaps they were more similar than not.

The doctor also said that Emilia showed signs of something called trichotillomania. While it sounded like a blood disease, it wasn’t. Just a grooming practice gone too far, something induced by stress and trauma. As such, she’d probably grow out of it.

“The neighbor girl stopped by today. Lissy? Asked about you,” Jeremy said.

“She’s weird,” Emilia said. She closed the laptop and watched a plane overhead make its approach toward SFO. She opened and closed her hand silently counting the time it took for the plane to exit her sight, then drew a line from the bottom of the plane to the Pacific ocean like a falling bomb. At the water, she opened her palm like a soft explosion.

“Why is she weird?” Jeremy asked.

“She talks too much,” Emilia said. “Boys and Instagram.”

“Ha!” Jeremy said. Her emotionless honesty always took him by surprise. The blunt phrases acted like sharp blades jabbing into his core. Marianne began to suspect their daughter might be on the spectrum, but Jeremy was too chickenshit to follow through and get her tested. He didn’t want another thing to add to the list of daily complexities, an irony not lost on his simple mind. She’d still be Emilia regardless of tests or confirmation.

Jeremy looks out across the ocean as traffic snails. A ripple in the distance, a flash of a fin. They’re out there waiting, those beasts of the deep, and their insatiable bloodlust created whirlpools of dread. If he doesn’t want to drown, Jeremy needs to confront them before they rise up and attacked the last bits of his will to live.

An hour later, they pulled up to their one-story cottage that Jeremy had built on a seaside cliff overlooking the Pacific. Originally the partial grounds of a naval base, old rusty cannons still faced the ocean from their clifftop perches. A whaling harpoon bought from a seller of nautical antiquities stood forever aimed toward the horizon. A stone barricaded bunker dug into the ground with mossy roof kept a shaded enclosure cool, damp and quiet. In this room, Jeremy stored boxes of photographs, love letters, and articles of clothing from Marianne’s closet. He called these items heart grenades, loaded things that, when used, would explode his existence from this mortal coil. Jeremy bought the land from a friend with gambling debts. As such, he got it for dirt cheap. Raspberry bushes lined the inlaid stone walkway with long, thorny arms that clawed at flesh if anyone walked too close. Purple, white, and blue wildflowers grew across the green lawn blooming and dying with different seasons. Beyond, the ocean roared.

Jeremy unlocked the door and the two stepped inside. The calming scent of fresh-cut cedar from the exposed beams created a natural potpourri. An open concept floor plan, the only doors existed for the bathroom, bedrooms, and outside. Everything else connected and flowed from kitchen, to living room, to stone fireplace. The house was its own living, breathing entity. Every room had a view. Jeremy had built the home in Marianne’s final year to occupy his pain. He truly believed that she’d be cured, and they’d all live there together.

But that didn’t happen, and the day after the funeral, Jeremy drew up plans for a lighthouse, the final work of which was on track to be finished on the one-year anniversary.

“Em! Em! Oh my god, I have GOT to tell you about Bobby R’s response to my selfie!” Lissy said, letting herself in through the side door after seeing that they were home. The neighbor girl was bold that way, a boundaryless creature with so much fuel in her energy tank that she could probably swim to Hawaii and back without batting an eye. It was like she glanced at the social contract every time she stepped outside, tapped accept terms and conditions, but disregarded them almost immediately. “Hear that? Bobby R!” Jeremy said. Emilia rolled her eyes.

Jeremy accepted Lissy’s entrances and exits as something to break up the day-to-day silence and keep Emilia occupied with something other than computer code. She was funny in her own way, that single purpose drive of preteens in the quest for attention defining her routines.

“Look. At. This…” Lissy said. She thrust her phone in Emilia’s face and chirped about how seconds, literally seconds after she posted a picture, Bobby R. commented Nice.

“Ok, real quick – selfie before I go? Kissy face on three! “Do you want to take your hat off?”” She reached over to yank the silver cap, but Emilia caught her arm and pulled it away.

“Hat stays on,” she said.

The two put their heads together with Lissy pouting her lips, Emilia smiling with only her mouth. The camera snapped. Lissy shoulder danced, posted the pic, and promised to keep everyone updated on the unfolding Bobby R. situation. The door closed behind and the room fell into silence save for the distant rumble of crashing waves.

“Did you know,” Jeremy began, eyes out the window toward the darkening horizon. “Your mother and I met in college. A literature and history class about the sea. People once believed the Earth was flat and oceanic beasts lived at the edge. On maps, cartographers wrote Here be Monsters.”

“But there weren’t any. The horizon hid new beginnings” Emilia said.

“There were jagged shorelines that sank many-a-ship. And great white sharks, and giant squid. Real monsters. The ocean is a dangerous, formidable place. Hence lighthouses.”

“Early technology,” the girl said.

“I promised your mother that one day, we’d sleep in the smallest room of the tallest tower and guide ships to safety.”

Emilia looked out the window and up into the sky.

“Did you know that when scientists mapped the human brain, it bore a striking resemblance to a cluster of stars? Sometimes I wonder if we’re just neurons firing at the edge of a giant’s mind.”

“We are the beasts,” Jeremy whispered.

“Life is simple. Binary code was invented by Gottfried Liebniz in the late 1600’s. He broke our entire existence down into 1’s and 0’s. And George Boole created Booleans, a series of Yes and No’s. That’s it. That’s everything.”

Jeremy rubbed the stubble on his cheeks. Was it really that simple? 1’s and 0’s? Yes’s and No’s? Life and death? Hero and villain?

“Are you happy?” he asked. He didn’t know how else to say it.

“I like what I do, and I like the camp and the counselors.”

“Then I’m happy for you,” Jeremy said, and tried his best to smile. But something didn’t feel right. She wasn’t telling him the full truth. He wanted a Boolean, a yes or no, a 1 or 0, but instead got the gray matter of the great in-between, the fog of war.

“I can teach you Binary,” Emilia said. She clicked off the light above the small circular table and fired up the flashlight on her phone. “Think of it like Morse code from World War I. Short blips are 0’s, long stretches are 1’s.”

Though Jeremy tried his best to stay interested, he only retained a handful of information. Short is 0, long is 1. Just another language to that kept them off the same page, behind enemy lines, and bound to each other like POW’s.

Something moves within the depths inside Jeremy. He feels it the same way he feels the waves colliding with the cliff rocks, the same way he can’t see the bottom of the ocean but knows it’s there, the same way he senses being watched and stalked by the very things he refuses to face. Something swims beyond his vision in the dark, deep places that contain enough pressure to crush a man exposed to the elements. These things are beginning to surface.

Emilia, since birth, had always been mama’s second in command. Marianne and Emilia did everything together and Jeremy figured that once she was old enough to buy a house, Emilia would move in next door. The two ladies had their own secret, coded language.

“Breaky pies?” Marianne used to say when sleepy-eyed Emila stumbled into the kitchen.

“Egg mu ju-ju,” the girl would reply. It wasn’t until Emilia turned ten, the 1 and 0, that she broke down the mother-daughter language for her outsider father.

“Breaky pies is breakfast. One time Mom coughed when she said breakfast and it sounded like breaky pies. We laughed so hard we couldn’t breathe. Egg mu ju-ju means scrambled eggs, blueberry muffin, and orange juice. I couldn’t pronounce everything, but mom understood.”

Jeremy wanted a thing, but his daughter showed no interest in construction, architecture, or design. The only architecture Emilia had interest in was for The Cloud.

As Jeremy stood outside by the coding camp’s exit scorching in the sun, he looked inside the giant glass windows and found a cool world where everything glistened and sparkled, where happy people moved like schools of fish from station to station grabbing free snacks and drinks only to post up in a hammock or papasan chair. Large monitors relayed real-time updates with data about the day-to-day operations, a seemingly foreign language like that of binary or egg mu ju-ju.

Skinny men in skinny pants and plaid shirts pointed at the screens to laugh about a number, their black-rimmed glasses crooked and dirty. Women with bleach-blonde hair dyed with blue and pink and purple and green tips wore lanyards with ID cards around their neck.

A crowd gathered like a cluster of clouds and moved toward the door. One by one, the campers pushed outside to find their parents, many of which had gathered near Jeremy. The girls trotted out rattling off what they’d learned as though phrases like data repository and compression bank had the weight of hang ten or cannonball.

When Emilia pushed open the door, she headed toward the parking lot.

“No hello?” Jeremy asked, and tucked his large hands into his workman’s jeans. They moved down the wooden steps in the side of a hill and across the asphalt to their car.

“I know you’d rather drive a truck. Mom made you buy the Prius.” Emilia said.

“I worked on the lighthouse again,” Jeremy said. “Electric is up and running. We could camp out there Friday. Suiting, don’t you think?”

“Why? Because mom died a year ago Friday?” Emilia said. She pulled the door handle. Locked. “I miss the old house. Friday is the last day of camp.”

Jeremy pressed the unlock button on the fob and stared at his daughter. Emilia opened the passenger door and sat down into the seat.

“I know things are hard,” Jeremy said as he got in. “Your camp is a different world, and I don’t feel like I’m part of it.”

“You’re not.”

Jeremy noticed a piece of paper sticking out of Emilia’s laptop bag. He started the Prius and merged onto the highway home

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Permission slip,” Emilia said. “Sleepover on Friday. They’re letting us bring someone. But I can’t go because of Mom and the lighthouse.” “I think the sleepover is a great idea,” Jeremy said. Finally, his daughter would open a door to her world, a coded world of safety and comfort that Jeremy didn’t know how to foster without waging war on himself. “We can go to the sleepover Friday, then camp Saturday night in the lighthouse.”

“We?” Emilia said. “I’d bring Lissy…”

The ghastly feeling abandonment and loss crashed against the rocky shore of his broken heart like white-capped storm waves.

“You’re right,” Jeremy said, suddenly. “You can’t go. I can’t be alone that night. I don’t know what I might do, so you’re stay with me in the lighthouse.”

“Ok.” Emilia said devoid of any affectation. “You want to sleep in that tower because it’s in the sky and Mom is in the ground and that scares you.”

“Hey!” Jeremy said. “I want you to be happy. I want you to have a childhood. I want you to want to spend time with me. You’re being groomed by that company to be a little minion, a little worker doing their bidding. Forgive me if I don’t want my daughter to be another cog in the machine, a small piece of data to make the company money that you’ll never see. And would you take off that hat?!”

He snatched the wool cap from Emilia’s head. Bald spots pocked her scalp. 0’s in places where there should have been long, wavy 1’s.

“Dad!” Emilia screamed. She ripped her hat back and pulled it over her hair before slinking down inside of a moment that would not pass.

At home, the young girl stormed to her room and slammed the door. Jeremy figured he’d let the tension dissolve, that once she got hungry, Emilia would breach the surface.

But Emilia stayed in her room.

The next morning, the two didn’t speak. They sat side by side in the car shoving the blow-up into the suppressed depths of memory. Glassy waves rolled along the shoreline. Neither said goodbye at the drop-off point for the camp.

Once back at home, Jeremy worked on the lighthouse. The stone foundation had been set and painted white with navy blue ribbons around the base, the interior stairs from the small living room landing curving and secured against the concrete wall to the second story bedroom. Sanding the corners of the flooring behind the ladder that led to the lookout, Jeremy thought about the crane that came in and placed the enormous beacon light on the very top, how the surveyors and city engineers seemed impressed by the solid design and application of good, old-fashioned hard work.

“Hello?” A voice called from the entrance.

“Yes?” Jeremy answered, and turned off the sander. He peeked down the stairs to find Lissy and her cellphone staring up to him.

“Emilia let me know that the sleepover is off, which is a bummer, but I get it,” Lissy said. “It’s funny that you two are building similar things. You’re both, like, total geniuses. Geniusi? Like octopi? Anyways…”

Jeremy realized he had no idea what his daughter had been working on all summer, that he’d never bothered to find out.

“What did she build?” he asked.

“She calls it the HALO, a high-altitude light organizer that communicates in binary to passing aircrafts. She figured out how to bend light so it even reaches over the horizon. Or something. She engineered the receptor, too. It gives updates on air traffic, weather conditions, turbulence, all of that. So cool, right? Anyway, can I get a selfie from the lookout?”

Jeremy’s stomach felt like a sinking ship. Emilia had already been robbed of a mother. Would he really be the monster that robbed her of a childhood too?

“Of course, come on up. It’s an amazing view,” Jeremy said. Lissy did a small leap of excitement and scrambled up the steps, then up the ladder to the beacon. She looked out over the horizon momentarily stunned by the natural beauty of the California coastline. Then she popped her hip, made a peace-sign kissy face, and snapped a selfie.

“You know what? Sleepover is back on. Look after my little girl and make sure she has the most fun possible,” Jeremy said. Lissy did another bounce of excitement and furiously texted Emilia with the good news. Jeremy looked outside from the tall tower as wind blew across the grass below creating tidal currents of green. Each blade bent helplessly in the gust, formless until challenged, finally bowing to that which they could not change.

Jeremy catches a glimpse of a tentacle rising and slapping the water from the corner of his eye. It’s not the thorny tendril of a raspberry bush, he tells himself, they are coming to collect on the anniversary of Marianne. Jeremy vows he will be ready and, after Lissy leaves, stands between the old cannons and whaling harpoon looking out toward the horizon.

After double checking that Emilia had packed her toothbrush, hairbrush, a change of clothes, phone charger, laptop charger, and spare set of glasses, Jeremy dropped his daughter and Lissy off to the coding camp on Friday evening. Seconds out of the car, giggling, euphoretic preteens enveloped the girls in a group hug until they are a single organism flailing with multiple limbs, eyes, and thoughts.

Driving along the coast at twilight, Jeremy’s car managed the winding California highway as the Ocean’s surface smoothed into mercurial shades of orange and purple.

Jeremy went to the tower and sat along the edge of the second story bed next to his workman’s journal. A pencil sat tucked between the pages. He smoothed the comforter and looked at the cot on the opposite wall where a purple sleeping bag should have been. A wall outlet with a power-strip dangled beneath the metal frame. His heart thumped harder than he wanted.

Jeremy climbed the lookout. He could do it right now, a quick toss over the edge and it’d all be over. He could walk to the rocky cliff and lose himself to the tides. Even through unstable eyes, the ocean water paced, black like an oil slick under the night sky. Something roared. He saw it then, the bald head rising from the water screaming in both pain and terror using tentacles to reach up and swipe passing gulls. This was it, he thought, the beast has come.

Down the stairs and to the harpoon, he tracked the monster’s shore bound movement as it glided through the dark water, its pale flesh ashen, dying teeth crooked through purple lips. Crickets chirped like hospital machinery tracking heartbeats and blood pressure. Acorns and pinecones blew through the wind like empty, abandoned pill pottles doomed to never fulfill their true purpose. Jeremy stood behind the harpoon and caught the creature in the crosshair.

“I will not let you drag me under!” he screamed. Thunderclouds boomed and rain unloaded from the sky like silent tears from sleepless nights. “You are not welcome here anymore!”

He fired. The harpoon sailed through the air and stuck smack into the side of the beast’s head. It wailed, wrapping a tentacle from the harpoon, and yanking it free like an IV from a fitful patient. It pushed forward as waves collided with the rocky cliff sending salt spray over the lawn and onto Jeremy. He leapt inside the stone bunker and peeled back the lid of his heart grenades.

Photographs of Marianne, of a fragile, bonelike body tucked beneath the thin hospital blankets of a partially upright bed, this was not the past Jeremy wanted to remember. Each memory bore violence against his personal truth – that he had done his best, that no more could have been done, that it was his turn to fight a different kind of battle in a very different war. Crumpling the hospital pictures in his hand, he leaned out the window and hurled them into the sea. The ocean exploded against the rocks. Spray blasted through the window opening. He took one of Marianne’s old shirts to his face and inhaled. Soft scents of honey and raspberry drew a lump of sadness from his throat, a beast rising to the surface. He balled the fabric and threw it toward the ocean. In the distance, the creature screamed.

Rain pounded. The floor of the bunker had begun to flood, so Jeremy ran to the lighthouse and climbed for the lookout. In the darkness, he saw the beast pacing the water defying currents and raging against the waves.

Then, from his periphery, a flashing light appeared on the coastline. Short flashes, long flashes. The camp. Emilia. She was trying to communicate something.

Grabbing his workman’s journal, he jotted down the sequence. Binary. 01001001 00100111 01101101 00100000 01101111 01101011. He typed the pattern into a search engine on his mobile phone and sat down when the results appeared.

I’m ok.

The beast roared as water entered its mouth. Lightning crashed. Gulls swarm and dove. The natural world fought back as a reminder that no one is ever truly alone. When it fell beneath the surface, the winds changed, and the rain ceased.

Jeremy typed a message into the English to Binary translator and looked at the results. He jotted down the series of long and short blips and then stood next to the beacon’s light switch. As the halogen light flashed on and off, he sent out 01000010 01110010 01100101 01100001 01101011 01111001 00100000 01110000 01101001 01100101 01110011.

The beast’s carcass flopped against the cliff rocks. Crabs and smaller fish came to feast.

The light from the campus ceased momentarily. He could feel his daughter there in that moment, could see every way that she was stronger than him. It made him proud to be a father, and that feeling of hope shred any doubt of his monstrous self-image. A moment later, the light along the distant shore flashed 01100101 01100111 01100111 00100000 01101101 01110101 00100000 01101010 01110101 01101010 01110101.

Finally, Jeremy thought, we’re speaking the same language,