I’m not a particularly good swimmer. I’m never going to win prizes for my diving, and that O was small and impressively far below. But I was calm. I felt good. Everything was going to be fine. Better than fine. Novo leaned into the void, then dropped like a hammer into the water—immaculate, almost splashless. I took a breath. I didn’t think about it. Same as the first time I saw him, he went and I just followed.

The sea when I hit it was the earsplitting cold of feedback and sheet ice and sharp metal, shocking my skin and peeling open my eyes as I drilled down. My heart stopped, my chest locked, and my brain seized, and I thought, I am a body that’s forgotten how to breathe. Ahead of me, arms by his sides, Novo swam, sleek as a tern diving for fish. Dancing fingers of sunlight lit up his suit where they cut through the water, and he swam farther down still, and out of their reach. I couldn’t feel the cold anymore. The water was no different than the air, and I didn’t think about breathing or not breathing, I was just there, following Novo effortlessly down into the dark. He turned and pointed for me to look up, and above us, the refracted shapes of cloud and bird flock and cliff face loomed and swayed on the other side of the water. And all around us, the fish flashed their silver bellies when they sensed us, and flickered out of sight.

I almost lost sight of him too, in the glowering dark, and then there was new light ahead of us, getting closer, this wavering space of lit blue. Novo’s body curved upward and his head and shoulders broke the surface and then so did mine. We were breathing air instead of water, and I thought, Did I just breathe water? That’s impossible, and still I knew that it was also most definitely true.

Inside the cave, the sea echoed and popped and the sound of it bounced up high against the walls and ceiling, each drop-sound grown large, the flat hand of it slapping against the smooth stone like a rifle crack. Light flooded in stern lines through the gaps between rocks, geometric, like church light, or forest light, the sky above us the same perfect O as the circle of water where we’d dived. Novo climbed out onto a ledge and pulled me up after him into a patch of warmth, and I was cold suddenly, and my teeth began to chatter. The sea sucked and pulled itself in and down beneath us, then swelled and pressed up toward the ledge, but it was dry and warmer there and Novo put his heavy arms around me. My shivering stopped at once and I leaned into him and we were still.