It was the same with the diver women. They would refuse to stop their diving activities some of them until near childbirth. The diver women would swim side by side the men and dive deep to the drowned city to mine for plastic, bricks and steel that was still usable. Some believed that the drowned cities enchanted them by their mysterious labyrinth of ruined buildings and destroyed roads. Once they saw the magnificent fallen grace of the pre-rain cities, they couldn’t resist going back, gazing at mankind’s greatest construction ravished by the giant waves. Not wanting to be idle was only an excuse. It was the thrill, the adventure and the mystery of the fallen cities that addicted them to diving. Fishing was less mysterious, but the thrill of the waves still drew the fishers to the sea. Tirad’s father sometimes blamed his wife’s childbirth death and Tirad’s physical weakness on the fishing trips that his wife had taken during the first few months of her pregnancy. But these thoughts would neither bring her back nor solve the problems of his weak son. To avoid this long-lasting grief, he had drowned himself with work. He seldom came back to the ship and would go fishing even in the rain seasons. The whole time on long fishing trips-away from Tirad, he thought about him and how he grieved for having to be separated from his son sometime in the future; he never knew that this future was closer than he could imagine.

It was in one of his journeys to Oxan Island that without any preparations, he was unexpectedly separated from his son. The Oxan market was crowded. Many things were sold and bought in the large and small shops of the market: different kinds of fish, prawns and octopus, produced goods like textiles, tools and oxygen masks imported from far away ships and raw material dived out of the drowned cities like wood, plastic bulks and metals. Tirad’s father wanted to sell his sacks of dried fish and find a new, cheap fishing net. He had given a coin to Tirad and had told him to go off and buy something for himself. Tirad had wandered off from his father, walking through the shops and stalls. He had gazed at other children playing and running around the market. The relishing smell of cooked seafood had filled his nose. He had sat down tired in a corner and stretched his bare heels among the soft dust that covered the island. He had taken the coin his father had given him and started drawing vague shapes on the sand. Then he had drawn more concrete shapes like a circle and a rectangle and had sketched the four-line Saviour tattoo of the sea residents that he also had on his arm. This was something he had enjoyed the most. He had wandered more between the stalls and the stands in the market but nothing had caught his eyes until he had come across a counter that sold strange dived out goods: large and small things that no one could clearly say what they were and what could they be used for. A lanky, old man was trying to come up with stories and uses for each item at his counter. He had raised a screen the size of two hands with a glass surface and a silver back and explained that the pre-rain people could see the whole world through this gadget. The children had gathered around his stall listening to the tales of the old man, and looking in wonder at the deformed plastics and the misshaped metal items that no one knew whether they were individually used for something or they were parts of another bigger unknown thing. Tirad had stood beside them and tried to imagine how the pre-rain people could communicate with each other through a small, glass surface.