Ha was in the bow in her wet suit and the simplest of her scuba rigs—again, it almost seemed like overkill. The depth of the inlet was negligible: beneath the skiff, the sandy bottom stretched white-blue, five to ten meters down. At any point she would be so close to the surface that a few kicks of her fins would bring her to it.

But it felt as if she were about to dive off the end of the earth, into another world. This was the way she always felt before diving, especially if she had been away from it. The surface of the water was a membrane. Above it, our world of air and sunlight. Through and beneath, another planet. The world in which her cephalopods dwelled, and all the other alien creatures of the sea, shaped and adapted to modes of life and destinies as different from those on shore or in the air as anything on another planet might be.

But it wasn’t a feeling of alienation that took hold of her, underwater. It was homecoming. She always felt she was in the place she was meant to be.

“The world goes away,” she had once told Kamran. “A new world replaces it. When you dive, there is only the here and the now: no past, no future. You don’t think about plans for the next experiment, about grants and laboratory equipment purchases. You think about the world in front of your mask. There are so many times in life when you just aren’t there. When you are elsewhere, drifting through schemes for this or that, remembering slights and injuries, shortcomings and faults. But not when diving. Down there, there is only now.”

“This is a good spot,” Ha said.

They were at the approximate center of the half-moon inlet, perhaps a hundred meters from shore.

Ha began to drop the weighted mesh bags into the water. She watched them sink to the sandy floor. Onshore, she could see Evrim, robed in gold, watching.

At Ha’s insistence, Altantsetseg carried nothing but a sidearm—though Ha knew there were probably a dozen drones that could be summoned to their position in a few moments’ notice. There was no sense in which Altantsetseg was ever “unarmed” or even nearly so, anywhere here on the island. And only Altantsetseg knew the extent of her security web.

“I could have one of my units do this, you know,” Altantsetseg said. “I have a few that are capable of this kind of work. We could have a cup of coffee and watch it on the monitor.”

They’d already talked about this.

“No,” Ha said. “It needs to be done this way. By hand.”

“I doubt anyone is watching.”

Ha put her fins in the water, shifted her weight to plunge in. “Someone is always watching.” She secured her mask with one hand and dropped through the surface. Through the membrane.