The Eden Legacy

THIRTY
I

The seas outside the Eden reefs were blessed with extraordinary variety. On his second descent, Knox passed through fields of sea-grasses to reach a spectacular coral garden, a gaudy city of fish where vast shoals of wrasse, angels and butterflies billowed like iridescent sheets as he passed between them.

His third dive was completely different again. The seafloor here was a rocky labyrinth, as though the canyons and -gulches of a Wild West movie set had been swallowed whole beneath a lake. He swam through this maze for a while, reached the end of a ravine to find the seafloor falling away almost sheer beneath him: he’d reached the shelf. He swam north along it for a few minutes, until, away in the deep waters to his left, he glimpsed something the fluorescent orange of a life-jacket. His heart gave a little lurch; he feared the worst. But when he swam closer, it proved to be only a cluster of four buoys held down by a cable that vanished into the depths. A fish aggregating device, most likely. He’d read about these things, though he’d never seen one before. They were an occasional tool of marine biologists, who’d tie one end of a long cable to a job-lot of broken truck axles; the other to some kind of flotation device, then sail the whole rig out over deep water and dump it. The idea was that the axles would sink to the sea-bed while the buoys would stay near the surface, and the cable would stretch out between them. Algae would grow upon this cable, drawing shoals of algae-eaters that in turn drew bigger fish, and so gave marine biologists a fixed point to study changing pelagic fish populations, and local fishermen somewhere to ply their trade that wouldn’t damage the reef. This one was certainly doing its job. The cable beneath him was surrounded by a pointillist haze of small fish, and the larger shadows of their predators. A juvenile white-tip shark saw him and lazily headed his way, curiosity rather than menace. He retreated to the relative safety of shallower waters. Back through the canyons again, he reached a place like an underwater rubbish tip, where tides and currents had brought together a great mass of detritus over the centuries. He floated inches above it, careful not to stir up sediment, scoured it for artefacts. It didn’t take long for him to pick out several fragments of porcelain and coarse-ware, though he’d never have spotted them unless he’d been looking, for they lay in an almost perfect camouflage of old shells, dead coral, cartilage and bone. He didn’t find a wreck, however, or any sign of Adam or Emilia. And the day was getting on, and he’d still barely put a dent in the vast expanse of the Eden reefs.

The search area was too big for him alone, that much was clear. He needed help. There were fifteen other divers on board the Maritsa, searching urgently for the wreck, but surely in the wrong places. He needed to bring them down here. But before he could even broach that with Miles, he needed to speak to Rebecca.

He couldn’t lie to her any longer. It was time to tell her who he was.