In the ocean town of Montauk, where the water is always a little too dark and the gulls circle as if waiting for something to surface, the allegations start with a single, trembling livestream. A bruised and bandaged teenager appears on every phone and screen in town, whispering about what the military base on the cliffs has been doing to kids like them. The confession is cut short by a power outage that rolls through the town like a held breath, but it is enough. By morning, the story has gone completely public, and Montauk will never be the same.
The book follows a small, fractured group of teens whose blood carries an experimental power, awakened and twisted by government trials beneath the base. Their abilities are as unpredictable as the tides, and every time they use them their fingertips split open and bleed, forcing them to wrap themselves in layers of bandages that never stay clean for long. To the adults, the kids are either dangerous or delusional. To the base, they are unfinished weapons that need to be retrieved or erased. To each other, they are the only people left who remember what it felt like to be human.
As Montauk descends into a fog of fear and propaganda, the town splits along invisible fault lines. Some residents rally outside the base with protest signs and recording devices, desperate to prove the children are telling the truth. Others stand in silent, watchful lines at the checkpoints, convinced that the military is the only thing holding back chaos. Curfews are imposed. Sirens become part of the nightly soundscape. Strange “safety announcements” hiss over emergency channels, insisting that the footage was faked, that no children are missing, that no one is bleeding behind those guarded walls.
The teens quickly learn that the adults are powerless or compromised. Officials are bought. Officers who once smiled at them now stare with empty eyes that belong to something else. Patrol drones circle the skies, hunting for “unstable subjects.” When one of the kids vanishes after turning themselves in, the group understands a terrible truth. No one is coming to save them. No one is coming to stop the base. The only people who can end this are the ones who are already bleeding.
They retreat to an old, rotting boathouse on the edge of town, a place that smells of mildew, riverweed, and rust. Here they build their own fragile resistance. They stockpile bandages, stolen medical supplies, and bits of purloined tech. Every surface bears the marks of their fear and obsession: portal sketches scrawled in charcoal, maps of the base stitched from rumor and memory, lists of names for the missing that get longer with every passing week. A non powered friend serves as their lookout and lifeline to the shifting moods of Montauk, crossing police tape and checkpoints with careful lies and a frayed school ID.
Together they experiment, learning to bend their pain into something strategic. One can fold light in on itself and erase her outline, at the cost of skin that splits open in sudden, stinging lines. Another can reach into the electric hum of cameras and phones, but emerges from each attempt with their hands wrapped in fresh blood and gauze. A third can tear temporary seams in the air, opening unstable portals that smell of salt and metal, passageways that sometimes lead where they want and sometimes to places whose echoes cling to their dreams. They swear to one another that they will never overuse their powers. They write their rules on the boathouse wall in permanent marker and, when that fades, in blood.
Outside their hidden refuge, the base is changing shape. Officially it is a research facility. Secretly it is a nest for something that can never be shown in daylight. At its center is a shapeshifting commander whose true form no one has seen and survived. In public the commander appears as a calm military hero in crisply pressed uniforms, a different face for each press conference, each televised denial. Behind the doors that never open for the public, it becomes whatever it needs to be to control its assets: a gentle scientist, a stern parent, a trusted friend. For the teens who escaped, it is the nightmare they hear in the radio static, the presence waiting behind every reflective surface.
The heart of the book is the group’s terrible decision to organize not just to survive, but to bring the base down and expose the commander’s true nature to the entire town. To do this, they must weaponize the very powers that are killing them. They divide roles with the precision of people who know that one mistake will be fatal. One teen agrees to pretend to betray the group and “return” to the base, luring the commander and its troops into a carefully prepared trap. Others work to destabilize one of the experimental portals and anchor it directly over the ocean cliffs, where a wrong step or a broken anchor point could send all of Montauk’s shoreline, and anyone on it, somewhere between dimensions.
At the same time, they plot to hijack the base’s own surveillance system and broadcast live footage from inside the restricted levels, forcing every television and phone in town to become a window into the truth. The plan is obscene in its scale and desperation. It requires one of them to open a portal large enough to engulf the base’s central chamber, even though their hands already shake and drip red from smaller attempts. It requires another to stay wired into the network far past the point their body can tolerate, risking seizures and cardiac arrest for the chance to tear down the commander’s mask in real time. It demands that the one who goes back inside the base look their abuser in the eyes and act like a grateful child again.
Across five chapters, the narrative moves deeper into claustrophobic horror. We watch Montauk shift from uneasy denial to outright panic, its streets patrolled by soldiers whose shadows sometimes move out of sync with their bodies. We follow the kids as they test the limits of their abilities and their relationships, their bonds tightening and fraying in equal measure. Arguments turn vicious as everyone recognizes that the final plan comes with a cost they have not yet admitted out loud. Someone will not survive this. Someone may be lost forever in the violent shimmer of the portal. Someone may have to stay behind in the base when the world outside finally sees what has been hiding there.
As the day of the operation approaches, the tone tilts toward suffocating dread. Small omens multiply. Fish wash up on the shore with their bodies folded at impossible angles, as if they swam too close to a tear in reality. Streetlights flicker whenever the teens pass beneath them, their powers interacting with the grid. The bandages they wrap around their fingers and wrists refuse to stay clean for more than a few hours. Each roll of gauze becomes another reminder that the act of fighting back will also be an act of self annihilation.
The climax of the summary hints at the group’s infiltration of the base, the roaring, vertigo inducing instability of the oceanic portal, and the frantic broadcast that turns Montauk’s isolation against the commander. As the leader’s shapeshifted disguises begin to peel away under the eyes of an entire town, the narrative promises a collision of personal trauma and public spectacle, a final confrontation in which truth itself becomes a weapon. The book will explore not only whether the teens can trap the shapeshifter between dimensions, but what it means for children to burn up their own futures in order to stop the horror that adults allowed to grow.
Beneath the Bleeding Tide is a dark, atmospheric horror story rooted in bodily violation, institutional betrayal, and the fragile, furious courage of the young. It builds from whispers and rumors to a storm of blood, seawater, and unraveling reality, asking at every turn how much of yourself you can give away in the name of justice before there is nothing left to save.
