The Second Dive

Their mother made seven calls that afternoon and two more the following morning. By the time the sea was calm enough to dive, three other scientists from the institute had arrived by boat and were gathered around the dive tablet watching the footage with expressions ranging from careful professional neutrality to barely contained excitement.

The second dive used Big Lemon.

All five adults went down, plus Mara and Sol, which was the most people Big Lemon had ever carried and made it feel considerably less spacious than usual. Everyone was very quiet on the descent, the kind of quiet that happens when a group of people who are trained to be measured and precise encounter something that tests that training.

The plateau appeared below them exactly as Mara and Sol had left it.

She heard someone behind her draw a slow breath.

The structures were exactly as they had been. The low rounded buildings with their regular openings. The pathways between them. The collapsed ones showing their layered walls. The markings on the surfaces, worn but deliberate. The large structure at the far end with its carved geometric patterns and its circular symbol above the entrance.

The wave reaching upward.

"I want to exit the sub," one of the visiting scientists said. His name was Dr. Ferreira and he specialised in ancient structures and had flown in from Lisbon that morning. "Can we exit the sub?"

"Depth is twenty-two metres," their mother said. "Everyone is equipped. Yes."

Mara and Sol exchanged a look.

"You two stay inside," their mother said, without turning around.

"We found it," Sol said.

"You did," their mother said. "And I am very glad you did. And you are staying inside the sub."

She said it in the tone that meant this was not a discussion. Mara and Sol settled at the portholes.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary hours of Mara's life, and she spent it watching through a porthole.

The scientists moved through the structures slowly and carefully, their lights sweeping across walls and floors and doorways. Dr. Ferreira spent a long time in front of the large structure, his hands moving slowly over the carved patterns without touching them, recording everything with the camera mounted on his suit. Their mother collected water samples and rock samples and something from inside one of the collapsed buildings that she held up to her light for a long time before placing it very carefully in a sample case.

Sol was drawing in his notebook beside her, sketching the layout of the structures as best he could see them from the porthole, adding notes in his small careful handwriting.

"What do you think it is?" Mara asked him quietly, so the adults could not hear.

Sol kept drawing. "A city," he said. "Or something like a city. Something that people built and lived in and cared about enough to put art on the walls of." He paused. "A very long time ago."

"How long ago?" Mara said.

"I do not know," Sol said. "Long enough that the sea covered it. Long enough that nobody remembered it was here." He finished a sketch and looked up at the porthole. "Long enough that finding it feels like finding something that was not supposed to be lost."

Mara looked at the city through the porthole. The buildings in their clear green water. The pathways between them. The large structure with its wave and its upward-reaching shape, its question carved in stone for however many thousands of years it had been sitting here asking it.

The divers moved between the structures like slow fish, their lights sweeping back and forth.

Outside the porthole, the city waited. It had been waiting a very long time. It could wait a little longer.

But not much longer now.

Now it had been found.