“People a lot braver than us, I’ll tell you that much. Did you know Marty was a cave diver?”

“I knew he was a good open-water diver. He’s taken me diving to a few coral reefs. But, no, he never mentioned cave diving.”

“I guess it comes with the territory.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you dedicate your life to finding mermaids,” Jacky explained, “and you think they live in underwater tunnels beneath islands, you’re probably going to want to explore those tunnels at some point.”

Rad shook her head. “I’ve tried almost every extreme sport there is on land, but there’s no way I’d go squeezing through a tight little tunnel underwater. I’d completely freak out.”

“What extreme sports have you done?”

“Name something.”

“Rock climbing?”

“Yup. Been ice climbing in Switzerland too.”

“Paragliding?”

“Of course.”

“Skateboarding?”

“Skateboarding? That’s not exactly an extreme sport, is it?”

“I mean, downhill skateboarding. When they close off a stretch of highway. I’ve seen it on TV.”

“You got me beat there.”

“White water rafting?”

“Yup! I love it.”

“Parkour?”

“Park what?”

“It’s an urban sport. Have you seen those nuts who scale the sides of buildings and leap from rooftops over alleyways and stuff?”

“I’m not Spider-Man, Jacks.”

Jacky tucked her phone away. “I wrote a story in the Daily Mirror a couple of years ago when parkour was starting to take off in Colombo. It’s based on those obstacle courses in military training. My Lord, it’s cringeworthy to watch. One wrong move or calculation and you’re likely to find a bone protruding from a limb or your skull smashed open. While researching the sport—if you really want to call it a sport—I followed a teenager around Colombo for a day. He was one of the best traceurs—that’s what they call themselves—in the city. His last trick was running up the wall of a building to a second-floor balcony, and then doing a back flip off it to the ground. I looked away at the last minute because I knew he wasn’t going to land properly. When I looked back, he was lying flat on his stomach, not moving. The doctors at the hospital told me he had compression injuries to his C5 and C6 vertebrae and had no movement below his shoulders.”

Rad felt queasy. “He became a quadriplegic?”