“Oh there’s a register. We contact the register and find people when we can, and charge them a salvage fee if they want the stuff. If they’re not on the register, we sell it on the island. People are wanting furniture and such. Here, look— we’ll see what that is.”

He pushed a key, and the screen got brighter. “Ah yeah. Refrigerator. We could use it, but it’s hell getting it up.”

“What about the house?”

“Oh we blow that up. Clean shot if we set the charges right. But not this morning. We’ll tag this and move on.”

They puttered away. Bly and another man continued to watch the screen, arguing mildly about where to go next. “This town wasn’t much even before the flood,” Bly explained to Nirgal. “Falling into the drink for a couple hundred years, ever since the empire ended.”

“Since the end of sail you mean,” the other man said.

“Same thing. The old Thames was used less and less after that, and all the little ports on the estuary began to go seedy. And that was a long time ago.”

Finally Bly killed the engine, looked at the others. In their whiskery faces Nirgal saw a curious mix of grim resignation and happy anticipation. “There then.”

The other men started getting out underwater gear:full wet suits, tanks, face masks, some full helmets. “We thought Eric’s’d fit you,” Bly said. “He was a giant.” He pulled a long black wet suit out of the crowded locker, one without feet or gloves, and only a hood and face mask rather than a complete helmet. “There’s booties of his too.”

“Let me try them on.”

So he and two of the men took off their clothes and pulled on the wet suits, sweating and puffing as they yanked the fabrics on and zipped up the tight collars. Nirgal’s wet suit turned out to have a triangular rip across the left side of the torso, which was lucky, as otherwise it might not have fit; it was very tight around the chest, though loose on his legs. One of the other divers, named Kev, taped up the V split with duct tape. “That’ll be all right then, for one dive anyway. But you see what happened to Eric, eh?” Tapping him on the side. “See you don’t get caught up in any of our cable.”

“I will.”

Nirgal felt his flesh crawl under the taped rip, which suddenly felt huge. Caught on a moving cable, pulled into concrete or metal, ka, what an agony— a fatal blow— how long would he have stayed conscious after that, a minute, two? Rolling in agony, in the dark. . . .