It is only five seconds that he is out under the sky listening to the wind and the night insects until his feet touch the flat rock that perches like a balcony over the sea. The air is still, and the darkness cossets him more tightly as he plunges into the shadow-stained gap in the mountain. For a moment his feet skitter as he hesitates and considers a more laborious and careful descent by the thin path that winds in tight, back and forth, down the stone, but it is too late: his legs have taken him on and out, as if he hears the whine of a she-anophelius, and he has left the rock and is falling.

There is nothing but air beneath him, more than fifty feet of air, and then the slickly moving water that glints like iron. He has seen the movement of the sea in the chasm below. And he is a sea creature now, and he can read the shapes of the currents. He knows the water beneath is deep, and so it proves to be.

He pulls himself up tight, and the surf opens to him with a plunging sound and smashes the air from his lungs, and he opens his mouth with the shock of it and breathes the water across his poor, desiccated gills as the sea seals itself above him again, taking him into its body. It makes him welcome, little microbe that he is.

There is a blissful time, when he drifts unmoving in the dark water. The space around him is giddying, the safety of it. No mosquito-women come here (he thinks then of other predators, and is for a moment a little less secure).

Tanner feels the weight of the package in its greased pouch. He holds it against his belly and kicks out with his webbed toes. It has been so long since he has swum. He feels as if his skin is blossoming in the water, his pores opening like flowers.

The black is not absolute. As his pupils dilate, he can make out varying shades of darkness: submerged crags, the detritus of the village, the split into the open sea, and the unremitting pitch of the deep. He swims through the hole in the cliff and feels the flow of the water change. Above him the waves chew the shore like something senile and toothless.

His bearings, his directions, are clear. Little presences glide past him, little night fishes. Tanner is reaching out around him with his tentacles, swimming low until they feel the edges of rock and he begins to swim around the coil of coast. His tentacles are braver than he. He pushes them inquisitive as an octopus into holes in the stone from which he would snatch away his hands. They are the most aquatic part of him, those appendages, and he accepts their lead.