And that feeling had followed him. He had been glad to leave the archipelago. But leaving wasn’t enough—the feeling returned every time he thought of the ocean.

Con Dao had been his home—the first he had ever had. What happened at the ship took that from him. That was the story he had wanted to tell. But the woman from DIANIMA wouldn’t have understood anyway.

Was she from DIANIMA? She had never said she was, had she?

It didn’t matter. Maybe she was from DIANIMA, maybe she was from a rival company. The HCMATZ crawled with corporate spies, international conspiracies.

A week ago, he had gone to Vung Tau, to the ocean. He hadn’t seen the water for months, had thought it was time to swim again. But he walked out before the waves reached his waist, got a drink at a beachside bar, then went back to his hotel room and checked out early.

He’d never dive again.

He would go back to his little apartment now in District Three, and continue to watch DIANIMA’s “generous compensation” dwindle while he failed to find a way forward.

Two blocks from the café, the cramps hit him, sending him crashing to the pavement. A motorbike stopped. A stranger’s hands on him. A woman’s voice. “Are you all right? Sir?”

His vision was a hazy tunnel, filled with rain. “Call help. Please.” Then he saw the injector in the woman’s hand.

The motorbikes drifted past, outlines distorted by rain ponchos covering bikes and riders. The rain fell into Lawrence’s open, staring eyes.

He was there again. The ship. Murky water full of shapes … blurred shapes his mind kept making into something else …

Chapter 2

We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

2

THE DRONE HEXCOPTER’S LANDING LIGHTS, their beams filled with windblown rain, panned over the ocean chop. They cut through a span of mangroves and flooded the airport tarmac.

There were no lights anywhere on the ground. The ruin of a runway slanted across most of a narrow neck of the island. The helicopter landing circle was a faded smear. Ancient planes rotted against a black tree line. The plastic siding of the main building was peeled away like scales torn from a dead fish.

The hexcopter swung into final descent. It twisted and settled with a lurch, indifferent to human comfort but efficient. The rotors cut off. The doors winged open.

Ha heard the insect cacophony of the jungle, the hooting call-and-response of macaques. Rain blew sideways into the pod. She hauled her gear from the storage compartment. The drone’s engines ticked, cooling.