Water utterly fails to support her weight and down she goes, past light, past shadow. Weight of atmospheres presses against her skin, metal creaking and popping; she feels it in her bones and the roots of her teeth. Instrument panel lights and the whirr of machinery: too aware of what a thin width of metal there is before the abyss, she flicks lights on and out into nothing.

Vast this space, and unceiled. Petra reaches yellow arms out and out and out and loses strength without finding anything firm to hold, anything tangible. Her ears mislead: sideways she descends, or rises. There may be movement just beyond her reach. There may be antediluvian shapes watching her from below. She tells herself patience.

Contact! Lights seize on ocean floor and pull her along. Down here she is thronged by leviathans, cells grown wide as her palm. They haze against her eyes, tease among her fingers. She pours a cup of coffee and settles down to work, home again for just a while.