THE CURRENT WAS CALM, and for the first time Ha could see the ship clearly. The Thai freighter lay on its port side, in twenty meters of water. At that depth, most of the red, orange, and yellow in the light was muted. Everything was reduced to greens, blues, shadow. But there was still plenty of light on the hull. The entry hatch was visible, as was the gash that had sunk the freighter—a long tear in the steel beneath the waterline.

“Let’s not go into the hatch this time,” Ha said to Altantsetseg. “Let’s try entering through that breach in the hull, see what’s in that part of the ship.”

Altantsetseg twitched a finger and the submersible’s trajectory shifted.

“It’s a big ship, when you see it on the bottom in clear water,” Evrim said.

The three of them were at the table in the hotel lobby, where Altantsetseg had set up a more comfortable command center than was possible in the security module. Early dawn light streamed through the windows.

“It’s small for a freighter—sixty meters—but that’s a decent-sized ship, yes,” Altantsetseg said. “Especially for an island like this one. It wasn’t headed here. There would have been no place here for it to dock, no facilities for refueling. It was pushed off course in a storm, lost engine power, and then struck one of the submerged rock outcroppings of the archipelago and sank.”

“And now it’s a reef,” Evrim said. As the cloaked submersible made its approach, they could see the barnacles and other marine life that had colonized the ship’s surface, roughing its outlines.

“And a series of underwater caves,” Ha added. “An entire habitat. And a good one, once the diesel fuel and other pollutants it poured into the water when it went down dissipated. I wonder how long the octopuses have been living here. How many of their generations?”

“We’re headed in. Making the turn.”

The submersible made a slow, graceful arc in the water and slipped into the gash torn in the freighter’s hull. Sunlight poured into the cavern of the ship’s interior, angling down into a space partly filled with strange forms that looked, at first, like broken columns. They were steel barrels scattered across the bulkhead, and the squares and rectangles of other containers. The marine life that had colonized them blurred their edges, blending the forms into one another so that they looked like rough stone.

“It’s like a ruined city in here,” Evrim said. “This must have been a main hold.”

“Yes. Lots of space. But more importantly,” Ha said, “plenty of cover. Look. Altantsetseg, can you get close to that scattering of barrels to the left? Yes, there. You can see the octopus’s gardens. These barrels are inhabited.”