Son was speaking to one of the other prisoners, whispering in the dark: “At times, I feel like I don’t care what happens to me. If I can never go back to my islands, what does it matter? Even before they took me, I was lost. In the Autonomous Trade Zone, I just existed. Not like on Con Dao. But I heard that the charity wing of DIANIMA that bought it from the ATZ has cordoned it off. It is safe—my home. These soulless ships travel the world, scraping the last of the fish from the sea, making a desert everywhere. But Con Dao is safe now. The fish are safe, the dugongs and the sea grass and the reefs are safe. The turtles. All of them are safe.”

Con Dao. Eiko wouldn’t forget the name now. He would stop forgetting names, people. He would stop not caring.

Because that was what had brought him here. He had not cared. Yes, that was it. He had not cared, and this was how the world had punished him.

He had not cared about anyone, until he had seen Thomas go over the rail. But that—finally—had moved something in him. There had been something broken in him, until then. Maybe now it was getting fixed.

In his mind, in his memory palace, Eiko wrote the name “Con Dao” on a scroll of rice paper. He tied it with a length of rough rush-hempen twine to the branch of a sakura tree in the garden of the Minaguchi-ya as it had existed in the year 1691.

He heard Son’s soft laughter in the dark. “Even the Con Dao Sea Monster is safe, down there in his shipwreck.”

Chapter 10

Communication is not what sets humans apart. All life communicates, and at a level sufficient to its survival. Animal and even plant communications are, in fact, highly sophisticated. But what makes humans different is symbols—letters and words that can be arranged in the self-referential sets we call language. Using symbols, we can detach communication from its direct relation to things present around us. We can speak with one another about things not here and now. We can tell stories. Tradition, myth, history, culture—these are storage systems for knowledge, and they are all products of the symbol. And the use of symbols is something we have not seen outside our own species.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

10

“IT WAS HARD TO MAKE ANYTHING OUT down there, on the video. The drone submersible had a good light on it, but there was too much silt in the water, and fish everywhere obscuring everything. But what I was able to see was—”