The Rapture of the Deep

Eloise hated and adored her scuba gear in equal measure. On the deck of the Aphrodite, she stripped it away like the plating of an exoskeleton—her monocular face mask, her breathing apparatus, and the sticky second skin of her wetsuit. Sunset stained the sky, reflected in choppy shards across the surface of the ocean. There would be no more diving today. The ship was chugging toward shore.

With a frown, Eloise stowed her gear below deck. The metamorphosis was complete: she had devolved once more from a splendid aquatic life-form into a boring land mammal. On the one hand, her scuba equipment was a remarkable gift, a marvel of science, allowing her to spend hours in the belly of the sea, moving in three dimensions and carrying a mini-atmosphere on her back. On the other hand, she suffered withdrawal at the end of every single dive. Her coworkers knew not to talk to her for the duration of the voyage back to shore. She needed that time to mourn, to accept the burden of gravity once more.

Back in her hotel room, she showered the salt off her skin. The evening air was filled with the roar of waves, the ocean breaking against the beach on the other side of the trees. Eloise wove her hair into a frowsy braid. Daily immersion in seawater had changed its consistency from limp ash-blond to spongy copper. Voices and laughter carried on the breeze from the hotel bar. Stefan and the others gathered there most nights to blow off steam and trade shark stories. Eloise rarely joined them, though her fish tale could have topped them all. She slipped a hand under her T-shirt and ran her fingers along the elaborate scar on the right side of her rib cage: the precise imprint of a tiger shark bite. Four hundred and sixty-seven stitches. A mottled red ribbon of teeth marks. Her torso no longer smooth but topographical. Her belly button torn away.

On the nightstand, her cell phone lit up and buzzed. Eloise picked it up, observing that she had missed thirty-four calls during today’s underwater sojourn. All from her brother. There were a few texts too: Call me back. And later: The ten-year anniversary is next week. Can you please get in touch so we can figure out what we’re going to do? And later still: I won’t pick a fight, I promise. Finally: You are such a goddamn brat.

Eloise considered several replies before turning her phone off and sticking it in a drawer.

○

In the morning, she led the way down the winding trail through the trees to the beach. The sun was just rising, and the sand glowed bronze between the trunks. Eloise brushed aside the low-hanging branches. Behind her, José tripped on a tree root and swore. Alana and Beth were murmuring together in low voices. At the back of the caravan, Stefan moved with a lithe, easy grace. As always, he carried the bag of gear slung across his shoulders, clanking faintly with each stride.

When Eloise reached the beach, she noted the dark patches by the horizon: moody, dangerous places where the waves prevented sunlight from reflecting. She observed the bite of the wind and the heavy clumps of seaweed tossed up on the beach. The air was filled with energy. A shiver tracked up her spine.

The marina lay half a mile down the shore. Alana and Beth set the pace, walking side by side on the firm, packed sand at the water’s edge. They had been best friends since joining the team a few months earlier, two marine biology grad students from different universities united by a summer of fieldwork on the sea. Eloise treated them with politeness and reserve; she never got attached to the interns who came and went, as ephemeral as mayflies.

José and Stefan, on the other hand, had been her colleagues for nearly a decade. The three of them had traveled the world together. They’d tagged sleeper sharks in Alaska, stealth predators with an eerie, silent glide. They’d braved the storms and wild surf off the Farallon Islands to track the diminishing number of great white sharks. And now they were in North Carolina to chart the astonishing migration of the Prionace glauca.

The shore was deserted. It was not yet hot enough for the tourists—reeking of sunblock, toting towels and small children—to collect there. Eloise noted the melting body of a medusa rolled ashore in a rubbery paste. Alana and Beth were so far ahead now that the rising sun reduced them to shadow puppets. José strolled in their wake, smoking his daily cigarette—one per morning, Eloise knew.

Stefan caught up to her, the gear clattering on his back. He was pale and dark, a slim reed of a man, exactly her height. Years in the United States had done little to erode the sharp edges of his Polish accent.

“Listen,” he said, nudging her with his elbow. She turned to him, expecting some detail about their plan for the day—coordinates, oxygen sats, timing.

“Your brother called me,” he said.

Eloise stepped into the sweep of a wave, as warm as bathwater.

“Did you hear me?” Stefan said. “Your brother called me last night.”

“I’m going to kill him.”

Stefan raised his eyebrows.

“How on earth did Noah even get your number?” Eloise asked.

“He didn’t say.”

A seagull soared overhead, making its lonely cry. Stefan was watching her steadily. They rarely ever talked about personal things. Their relationship had been forged in the silence of the deep ocean; they always dove together. Eloise knew that Stefan was left-handed, a quick thinker, and clearheaded in a crisis. But she did not know if he had any siblings. She’d never mentioned Noah to him before.

“What did you tell my brother?” she asked carefully.

Stefan averted his gaze. “He asked me to make you call him. He wanted to know where in Africa we were working right now.”

“Oh, hell.”

“He seemed to think we were tagging requiem sharks somewhere in the Indian Ocean.”

“That’s what I told him,” Eloise said, the words tumbling out. “Yes, I lied, but you have to understand that Noah is persistent. He lives in D.C., and I figured he would drive right down if he knew I was just a few hours away. He’s smart, so I had to make something up that he would actually believe, and he wouldn’t fall for just any—” She broke off, shaking her head. “I’m sorry you ended up getting involved.”

Stefan shifted the bag of gear from one shoulder to another. His expression was inscrutable.

“Did you tell Noah the truth?” Eloise asked, adding quickly, “It’s okay if you did. You don’t have to lie for me. I know he put you on the spot.”

“I didn’t tell him anything. I said I’d pass on the message, and I have.”

“Thank you.” She reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze.

“It isn’t my business,” he said, offering an answering squeeze. Then he dropped her hand, and they walked in silence to the Aphrodite.

○

Eloise had learned to scuba dive from her mother. Ada had been an adventurer, always outside, eager for new experiences, dazzled and elated by the natural world. She’d backpacked through the Amazon rainforest. She’d skied with expert daring along The Tunnel in Alpe d’Huez. She’d skydived at least once a month. The walls of Eloise’s childhood home were decorated with framed snapshots of Ada perched on rocky cliffs, scuba diving in caves, or free-climbing trees.

Eloise had spent her youth hiking up mountains and white water rafting. She and her mother were kindred spirits, excited to tackle a black-diamond trail, gasping in tandem at an eagle in flight, saying yes to every new experience. Eloise begged to skydive with her mother, but you had to be eighteen years old. Scuba diving, however, was legal at ten years of age, so that was when she learned. She spent the best days of her young life underwater at her mother’s side, kicking through clouds of sand in the chilly California surf off the coast where she grew up.

And then there was Noah. Eloise often wondered if her brother resembled their late father, who died before she was old enough to form memories of him. She’d only ever seen her father in pictures: a bearded, narrow face, eyes hidden behind Coke-bottle glasses. He left a sizable estate, which their mother used to care for her children and fund her adventures. Eloise had never missed having a father; her mother was enough, and they were so delightfully in sync, two peas in a pod.

But she did wonder where careful Noah had come from. An old man at the age of eight. He flatly refused to scuba dive or even snorkel, remaining on the shore. He would wait for the walk signal before crossing the street, even when there was not a car in sight. He saved every penny of his allowance, never wasting it, as Eloise did, on adventure comics or toy sharks. As soon as he was old enough to stay home alone, he let his mother and sister spelunk and backpack without him.

Eventually they both went to college—Noah for accounting, Eloise for marine biology. In their absence, their mother had decided to free-climb Hyperion, the tallest tree in the world. At the summit, 380 feet in the air, Ada took a selfie, beaming, her cheeks bronzed by wind and sun. Eloise sent back a heart emoji. Noah texted, Please come down from there.

A month later, Ada died while skydiving. Her parachute failed to open, a freak accident. There was nothing she could have done to save herself, despite her years of experience. Eloise got the call in her dorm room. Upon hearing the news, her first response was to laugh. The voice on the other end of the phone had to be mistaken. Her mother could not be dead. Her mother was more alive than anyone else in the world.

○

The canned air tasted sweet, like cinnamon. Weightless, Eloise pumped her powerful flippers, circling the interior of her cage. Stefan filmed it all from thirty feet away, the lens poking between the bars of his own cage. Eloise waved at the camera. Stefan waved back. She had the feeling that José, on the deck of the Aphrodite, watching the live feed on the snowy monitor, was waving also.

She shook her bag of chum, emptying bright scales and fish juice into the sea. She was calling the blue sharks to her—graceful creatures, sky-colored, with long, flowy tails. They filled the North Carolina waters in the summer. Eloise was here, fifty feet below the surface, to document the profundity of the blue sharks’ migratory path. The females, once pregnant, crossed the entirety of the Atlantic Ocean to give birth in the warm seas off Italy and Spain. Then they coasted on the Gulf Stream all the way back to the Yucatán. And then, as if that were not enough, they swam north along the eastern shore of Mexico and the United States to return to the icy depths near Massachusetts, where they mated and began the whole journey over again.

At this depth, the sunlight began to fail. There was no land in sight, the shore miles away, no seabed visible below, only water deepening into black. The blue sharks came in a group, six or seven, maybe—Eloise could not be sure in the erratic dappling of wave-broken glow. They emerged like clumps of cobalt coalescing from liquid to solid. By shark standards, they were skinny creatures, pencil-shaped, with sharpened conical snouts. Their oversized eyes, perfectly round, seemed surprised in sunlight and hollow in shadow. They swam toward Eloise with the classic Selachimorpha waggle, noses swinging back and forth, tracking the faint trails of blood from the chum.

Twenty feet from the cage, they stopped their forward progress and began to circle. They ignored Stefan’s cage completely; there was no intriguing smell coming from there. Sharks were mechanical creatures. They circled when they were interested and bit when they were curious. Most recorded shark attacks were not attacks at all, merely an inquisitive animal checking out a strange object in the best way it knew how, as innocent and guileless as a dog sticking its nose into a compelling pile of garbage. If startled, sharks voided their bellies in a cloudy explosion and swam off. When there was blood in the water and a throng of them gathered close, with a helpless figure at their center, they boiled gradually into a frenzy. And—Eloise’s favorite—when sharks were turned upside down, they went momentarily into a coma.

Clearly the blues did not like her cage, an unfamiliar object in their domain. Eloise knew that her body bewildered them too, roughly seal-sized but shaped wrong—gangly, almost amphibian. Still, the chum drew them inexorably toward her. By degrees, they narrowed their orbit around the cage. Stefan signaled to Eloise, and she opened up the second sack of chum, tossing a handful into the open water. The bloody pulp sank slowly, twirling in the light. A brave but undersized shark cut loose from the pack and swallowed the mess whole.

They were all around her now. Eloise readied her tagging pole and tossed more chum through the bars. She loved their dance, how they were always coming back to her, maws agape, never losing focus. They could actually feel her on their skin; the bow wave she made with the smallest motion registered to them like a caress. She threw a glob of chum into the open sea, and when a shark came rocketing to gobble it up, Eloise lifted the pole and struck. The telemetry tag flashed orange, clipped like an earring to the animal’s dorsal fin. The shark did not appear to register the impact. The flesh of the dorsal fin was impervious to sensation, lacking blood flow or nerve endings. And anyway, there was chum in the water, so nothing else mattered.

Another shark approached the bars. The blues had snub dorsals, scarcely bigger than a human palm, but Eloise’s aim was precise; she had not missed her mark in years. As the speed of the animals increased, the telemetry tags bobbed gaily from their backs. Each stroke of their scythe-shaped tails brought them a little closer. Not a muscle wasted. Eloise tagged another, and another, and soon the chum was gone, and the sharks glided away, dissolving into the blue.

○

As the boat chugged back to shore, Eloise stood alone at the prow. Alana and Beth were below deck, reviewing the footage from the day under Stefan’s tutelage. The team did not always film their efforts; it was a biweekly thing at most. Their sponsors at the Marine Environmental Laboratory, who controlled their funding, liked to see documentation every so often. Verification of their dollars at work.

Eloise was thinking about her mother. This was Noah’s fault, Noah and his calls, his texts, his insistence on marking the ten-year anniversary of her death, as though a memorial could ease the profundity of this grief.

Eloise and her mother had made so many plans. Skydive together for the first time, Eloise strapped to Ada’s belly like a kangaroo joey. Visit the Arctic during the season of the midnight sun. Scuba dive in the Great Blue Hole in Belize, an eerie, yawning abyss as round as a coin and more than three hundred meters deep, surrounded by a plateau of shallow, turquoise sea.

Ada had been there once as a young woman, and she described it to Eloise with glee—the way the sunlight disappeared and the pressure of the water did strange things to the mind. That far down, it was necessary to have a buddy or, better yet, a group, in case the dreaminess overtook you and you forgot to check your air. Divers had died in that crevasse, hundreds of them, lulled into soporific unconcern, eventually suffocating, their bodies entombed forever in the black water.

The rapture of the deep, it was called. Ada had experienced it too, she told Eloise. She dove the Great Blue Hole with four companions, all of them descending slowly to equalize the air pressure in their ears and sinuses. She had not felt the change coming until it was too late. Voices warbled around her, high and sweet. Mermaids? Sirens? Tiny lights flickered and shone in her peripheral vision. At first she’d thought they were bioluminescent organisms, but then she understood they were stars. This had not troubled her. She felt sure the water would only grow more euphoric the deeper she dove—more splintered with light and richer with melodies.

One of her fellow divers had tapped her shoulder then, and the group returned to the surface. Ever since, Ada had been itching to get back there and try again.

○

The next day, the sea was empty of sharks. Stefan and Eloise floated in the same cage, bumping elbows, each armed with a tagging pole. When he was not serving as cameraman, they usually worked side by side, while José remained on deck as their overseer and guardian angel. Stefan dumped a bag of chum into the sea. Eloise clapped her hands and yelled inside her mouthpiece. Sharks were attracted to the agitated movements of wounded fish. If the smell of blood was not enough to summon them, it often helped to add simulated death throes.

Minutes passed. Long columns of light shifted through the water. A few Atlantic spadefish, two feet long and striped like zebras, came to nibble the sinking chum. Stefan checked his watch and shrugged. At last he signaled to José, who winched their cage out of the ocean several hours earlier than planned. The Aphrodite was crowned by two long-necked derricks, a double-headed dragon. Each crane could easily lift and maneuver a midsize shark cage made of utilitarian aluminum (lighter than steel, noncorrosive in salt water, and foul-tasting to sharks).

As the ship motored back to shore, Alana and Beth unearthed a boom box from a cupboard and set it up on deck. A set of dusty CDs offered the greatest hits of eighties pop—no other choices. José swiveled his hips and snapped his fingers to the synthetic beat while Alana and Beth waltzed grandly with each other, giggling. Stefan joined the party, not exactly dancing, more swaying in place.

Eloise leaned over the bulwark, staring into the empty ocean. Quiet days left her unsettled. It had been the same on the fateful afternoon when she had been maimed by the tiger shark.

The team had been in the Gulf of Mexico then, tagging every shark they could get their hands on, regardless of species, as part of a worldwide study to determine how climate change was affecting fish populations. For a week, Eloise and Stefan tagged threshers, hammerheads, and makos. The creatures were greedy for chum, and the work was nonstop. Every night before bed, Eloise had to ice her biceps, sore from overuse.

Then came a quiet day. She remembered it perfectly, every detail etched into her brain. The sea was clouded with sand after a morning of wind and storms. A few mackerel passed by at a distance. A gelatinous mesh of moon jellies bobbed along the surface above, translucent in the sunlight. The sharks appeared to have left the area entirely. Not even the omnipresent blacktips, four feet long and incurably curious, came to check out the armloads of chum Eloise and Stefan hurled into the water.

So Eloise had decided to go for a swim. It had been a long time since she’d scuba dived just for pleasure. She’d been cooped up in the cage for so long that she felt like a goldfish in a tank. She communicated her intentions to Stefan—they had created their own sign language over the years—and he replied that he would stay in the cage and maintain watch.

At the time, Eloise had only ever seen tiger sharks at a distance. They were solitary creatures, passing by occasionally in the deep ocean, charcoal gray and bulky, the juveniles banded with those trademark stripes. She knew that tiger sharks were the most unpredictable members of their species. Their migrations were irregular, their diets variable. Unlike other sharks, they could be intentionally aggressive toward humans. Eloise had once read about a tiger shark that had solved a murder mystery. After a week in captivity, the beast suddenly went wild, thrashing and vomiting. Finally it coughed up a human arm that had been severed medically at the shoulder and bore a distinct tattoo that matched it with a missing man. Without the tiger shark’s assistance, no one would ever have found the corpse, sliced into pieces and scattered in the sea.

On that lazy afternoon, Eloise kicked toward shore, watching the ocean floor rise slowly to meet her, ridged like the roof of a mouth. Curtains of beige sand drifted idly on the current. She saw a school of grouper moving along the seabed, mouths molded in permanent grimaces. She saw a silver tarpon dart by. She did not see the tiger shark, not until it was too late, a blur on her periphery, a glint of teeth, the inky cave of its mouth opening, the shock of impact. She saw her own blood coiling dark against the water before she felt the pain.

Stefan saved her. He’d watched the whole thing unfold from inside the shark cage. Eloise later heard about how he swam fearlessly into the open water, pulling his dive knife from its holster. The tiger shark did not react to his approach, intent on the kill. Stefan had stabbed it in the eye. Nothing else would have stopped it, and even that might not have deterred it forever; Eloise had seen sharks shake off worse injuries to continue hunting. There was a perpetual debate in the marine biology community about whether sharks felt pain at all.

Stefan never got his dive knife back. The tiger shark had thrashed away from him, the blade jutting out of its flesh like a horn. It let go of Eloise’s body. Stefan folded her in his arms and swam toward the surface, trailing clouds of blood.

○

Around midnight, Eloise called her brother. Rain silvered the air outside. The mumble of someone’s television set penetrated the thin walls. Eloise sat curled in a ball on the bed, holding her phone in both hands like a child.

“Finally,” Noah said by way of greeting.

She closed her eyes. She had not seen her brother in three years, not since the aftermath of the tiger shark. Once her wounds had healed enough for her to leave the hospital, she had recovered at Noah’s house in the suburbs of D.C. It all came flooding back now—her brother’s anxious face, the fog of medication, and the pain, a loop of burning wire in her flesh, electrified every time she inhaled.

“Hello? Are you there?” Noah cried.

Eloise found her voice. “That was a cheap goddamn trick, calling Stefan.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“Well, stop it,” she said. “Stop leaving me messages. Stop texting me. Don’t bother the people I work with. It’s enough.”

Noah sniffed—a sound from childhood, the percussion of his breathing. He suffered from hay fever and sinus infections, constantly congested.

“Where are you?” he said. “You’re not calling from Africa.”

“It doesn’t matter where I am,” she said. “I don’t want to do a memorial. You can mark the ten-year anniversary however you want. Just leave me out of it.”

She heard the creak of Noah’s mattress and pictured him sitting up in bed, fumbling for his glasses. There was a painting of a forest on the wall above his head. Eloise knew it well; she’d spent long hours in a drugged stupor staring at the crudely rendered branches, the leaves that appeared to have been daubed on with a sponge. After the tiger shark had crushed her chest and filled one lung with water, Noah insisted that she take his bed to recover in comfort. He slept on the couch for months as she relearned how to move her arms, how to walk, how to breathe.

“You’re being selfish,” Noah said peevishly. “Everything isn’t about you. A lot of relatives have been asking if I’ll be doing some sort of memorial for Mom. Even some of her old hiking buddies contacted me. You aren’t the only one who loved her.”

“So invite them,” Eloise said. “Invite everybody. Have the biggest, saddest party in the world. But stop badgering me about it. I’ll be busy that day.”

Noah sighed, and she imagined him rubbing the bridge of his nose, where his glasses left tiny indentations at the end of a long workday.

“We both have to cope in our own way,” she said, trying to put some gentleness into her voice.

“I believe this is what Mom would want,” Noah said. “Something in her honor. I know you think you had this special bond with her, but—”

“I did.”

“But you aren’t the only one who misses her,” he continued, his voice rising. “I wish you would listen to me for once.”

“I’m listening. I hear you. You do what you need, and I’ll do what I need.”

“Selfish and hardheaded,” Noah said. “You never change, do you?”

Eloise hung up and hurled her phone against the pillow.

○

Noah hadn’t cried when their mother died. He only grew paler and more cautious. He was alarmed when Eloise dropped out of college. He was apoplectic when she took her first job as a shark tagger, traveling to Alaska with Stefan and José to count the sleeper sharks. Her team visited the Great Barrier Reef and the Indian Ocean. Their work was instrumental in getting angel sharks and great hammerheads declared endangered species. Eloise had never felt so vital, so fulfilled.

At first, Noah insisted that she text him proof of life after each and every dive. But gradually, grudgingly, he seemed to come to terms with the fact that he could not monitor her so closely as to keep her safe. At least he knew exactly how she was risking her life, a small mercy, he told her once. Their mother had done everything—climbing, skiing, mountain biking—while Eloise settled on one thing.

When she dove, she felt the way she used to in her mother’s company—dazzled by the glory and strangeness of nature. When she dove, she felt as though her mother might still be there with her, temporarily out of sight, like the time they’d been separated by a coral reef. Eloise, twelve years old, stayed where she was, kicking in place as she had been taught, waiting patiently until her mother came to find her. She remembered the moment when Ada swam around a bulbous arch of rock and blew her a kiss.

During her convalescence in her brother’s house, Eloise had been troubled by fish, haunted by them. Lying in Noah’s bed, each of her 467 stitches gripping her flesh like a cat’s claw, she felt fish flooding around her. She felt them in her throat when she drank. When she meant to be taking notes or writing letters, jellyfish and whales spread out beneath her pencil. And always, when the bedroom was dark and she was trying to sleep, she heard the swish of giant tails, as though sharks were passing in and out through the open window.

After her recovery, Noah had begged her not to go back to shark tagging. He got down on his knees, eyes filled with tears—the first time she’d seen him cry since childhood. Their mother’s death could not move him to weeping, but this did. He pleaded with her to find another line of work. Something sane.

Eloise explained, as she had done so many times, that her job was the great passion of her life. She assured him that this sort of injury would not happen again. She was wiser now, more savvy. Besides, tiger sharks were vanishingly rare.

The argument escalated. Noah informed her that her risk-taking was a hazard to his health, the source of his high blood pressure. Eloise retorted that she had no choice; her yearning for the ocean while landlocked in her brother’s bed had been more unendurable than the agony of her wounds. Noah screamed that she was just like their mother. Eloise roared back that she couldn’t think of a higher compliment. He accused her of having a death wish. She told him that he had never really learned how to live. Then she banged out of his house and had not seen him since.

○

She spent the next hour pacing her hotel room and having imaginary arguments with Noah, gesticulating furiously at no one. When her phone rang again, she snatched it up and yelled, “What? What now?”

“I didn’t mean to lose my temper,” he said. “I didn’t intend to pick a fight.”

She settled cross-legged on the bed. She knew this was the closest thing she would get to an apology.

“I don’t know why I got so . . .” Noah trailed off. “You bring that out in me. It’s like I’m fourteen years old again. Just trying to win the damn argument. I’m sorry,” he added stiffly.

Eloise was startled into a laugh. “Are pigs flying? Did hell just freeze over?”

“The memorial wasn’t the only reason I was calling,” he went on, ignoring her. “I honestly don’t care if you come. You don’t even have to plan it with me. I just wanted . . . I thought . . .”

She waited, but he did not finish the sentence. The rain had dwindled into mist outside, a damp, chalky gray that erased the world beyond the window.

“I’ve started dreaming about her again,” Noah said. “I see her at the top of that redwood. Or on a mountain. She’s laughing and talking and not paying attention. She starts to fall—it’s the same every time.”

“I have that dream too,” Eloise whispered.

“I watch it happen in slow motion, kind of. You know how dreams are like that sometimes? How everything gets really slow and out of focus?”

“Yeah.”

“I try to grab her arm,” Noah said. “I try to stop her from falling. I never get there in time.”

“Neither do I.”

In the distance, a church bell tolled a single doleful note. One o’clock in the morning.

“What are you doing up so late?” Eloise asked softly. “You never even make it to midnight on New Year’s Eve.”

He blew his nose like a goose’s honk, another nostalgic echo from the past. Poor Noah—antihistamines, nasal sprays, and sinus rinses every night.

“How’s work?” he asked. “I assume you’re still chasing sharks around?”

“I thought you weren’t going to pick a fight.”

“I’m not. I’m having a normal conversation. Work is a normal thing to talk about.”

“Huh.” She adjusted her pose against the bed frame.

“My work is going well,” Noah said. “The business has expanded, and I’ve hired more staff.”

“Nice.”

“It is.”

There was a small, awkward silence. To fill it, Eloise asked, “Do you like the people you work with?”

“They’re great. Solid citizens. This last tax season was like a tsunami. But we banded together and got through it.”

Eloise thought about Stefan and José, who had saved her life from the tiger shark. Stefan carried her out of the ocean. José put pressure on the wound and radioed for a helicopter extraction. She would have bled to death without their swift, skillful intervention. She trusted them, respected them, all the way down to the bone. She intended to work with them until they all retired or died in the field.

But they were not family. They were something else—comrades-in-arms, maybe.

She had not realized how profoundly she missed Noah. It was like putting on corrective glasses after years of a slow drift into astigmatism. You didn’t understand how much you had lost until the world slipped back into focus, every edge crisp and defined.

“Can we just . . .” Noah began, then paused. “Can we chat sometimes? No arguing. Just catching up. I wish you’d answer the phone once in a goddamn while.”

When she did not immediately reply, he went on quickly, “Or we could text. If phone calls are too much, I’d be happy with just—I don’t know—a meme or something. A selfie. You don’t even have to use words.”

Eloise laughed. “Words have never been my strong point, have they? Yes, we can text. I’ll text you tomorrow, okay?”

He exhaled sharply, a crackle down the line. “You promise?”

“I’d pinkie swear if you were here.”

Another silence bloomed, but this time it did not feel strained. Tendrils of mist pooled in through the window like ghostly fingers.

“I wish you understood why I do this,” Eloise said, all in a rush. “I wish you would come diving with me sometime. It would open up your mind in ways you can’t even imagine.”

Noah laughed. “I wish you would get a job where nothing could possibly eat you. But we can’t always get what we want.”

○

In the morning, Stefan saw it first. Eloise was tired from her late-night conversation, thinking about Noah and their mother, not paying attention to her surroundings as her cage drifted downward. Descending into the sea was less perilous than ascending. The former could, at worst, cause sinus pressure and earaches, while the latter could trigger the bends: joint pain, paralysis, brain damage, even death. To be safe, José always winched the cages up and down at a steady thirty feet per minute.

Stefan was filming today from his separate aluminum cube. Eventually Eloise noticed him waving and gleaned from his posture that he had been trying to get her attention for some time. He pointed down.

The ocean beneath them teemed with shadows. It was a school of what appeared to be dozens of fish. The haziness of their forms told Eloise that they were at some distance, so they must be large creatures, bigger than humans. Too thin to be whales, too broad to be tuna, too sluggish to be dolphins. Stefan aimed his camera into the deep. Eloise flattened herself prone on the floor of the cage, peering eagerly down into the gloom.

They were blue sharks. As the cage sank, she could distinguish their whiplike tails and thin backs. At least forty animals swam together in a planar formation, strewn like pockets of afternoon sky across the twilight beneath. Eloise had never seen blues—or any sharks—behave this way. She climbed to her knees on the bottom of the cage and glanced questioningly at Stefan, but he was busy filming.

The cage descended farther. Eloise could see now that there were more sharks beneath the upper layer. Silhouettes beneath silhouettes, shifting like the gemstones in a kaleidoscope, overlapping and eclipsing one another, never still.

There were hundreds of them.

Both cages dipped into the school simultaneously. Sinking through the bodies, Eloise felt a tug of vertigo. The sharks were traveling northward, all cruising at the same languid pace, while she and Stefan fell slowly through their ranks. Everything around her was moving; there was no fixed point to use as reference.

At last the cage stopped, having reached the predetermined depth. Eloise kicked off from the bottom. As far as the eye could see, slender figures swam in synchrony, eerily similar in size and shape, differentiated only by the occasional scar—a torn dorsal fin or the gouged track left by a fishhook. There seemed to be no end to their ranks. Eloise had read about this phenomenon, blue sharks that crossed the sea in massive schools, but nothing could have prepared her for the reality of it. A scrap of manmade orange flashed among the bodies. Some of them sported her tags, but only a few, amazingly few, a tiny fraction, a visual representation of the tenuous connection between the human world and the much wilder world beneath the surface. The ocean brimmed with more life than even Ada could have imagined.

Eloise peeled off her dive glove and held up a pink hand. She had always wished for a lateral line, the sensory organ that allowed fish to detect pressure and vibrations through the water. In this moment, she did not need it. She could feel the sharks on her bare skin. The sea trembled with the weight of their bodies. Except for them, the ocean was absolutely deserted—not a fish or turtle in sight. Every living thing for miles had taken shelter when they felt the bow wave of this monstrous horde.

And the blue! Never had there been such a comprehensive study of a single color. The sharks were turquoise up close, navy in the distance, with every shade from teal to sapphire in between. Only blue was permitted here, erasing any rogue color that dared to interfere. Eloise’s tags shone as brief and bright as signal flares before the density of bodies snuffed them out. White and black were not tolerated either: the sharks blotted out the light above and blanketed the inky depths below. In this moment, blue transcended mere pigmentation to become something more—a statement of intent, a revelation of secret knowledge, a new theory of the universe.

Strangest of all, the sharks swam without urgency or desire. Mouths slightly open. Eyes glassy. Minds unfocused. They were not hunting, not fleeing, not mating, not pupping, not engaged in any behavior Eloise recognized. Sharks were always expressionless, but this was something else: a robotic repetition of manner, an absence of will. Like a swarm of bees or a flock of birds, the blues had sacrificed their individuality to form a blended whole, greater than the sum of its parts, a single organism. But what was its function? That was the question that cracked Eloise’s mind open. Bees pollinated, birds migrated, but here was a school of sharks that consumed an ocean with their numbers, a thousand discrete entities merging into one, a collective entity, an aquatic supremacy, wonderful and terrible, godlike in its power and unknowable in its purpose, beyond human understanding.

Eloise looked at Stefan, who lifted his hand to his brow and mimed an explosion. There was no protocol for this. She could not possibly tag this many animals. She would not have known where to begin.

And so she twirled in the middle of her cage, trying to take it all in. Sometimes there was no possible response but celebration. She laughed as her mother had laughed at the top of the tallest tree in the world. She could not stop turning, sharks above her, sharks beneath her, laughing and laughing inside her mouthpiece.

Stefan lifted the camera, and later that day Noah got a text from his sister, no message, no words, just a link to a video on the Marine Environmental Laboratory website. And there, once he discovered his reading glasses pushed up to his hairline, Noah saw Eloise underwater, recognizable by her leggy contours even beneath the wetsuit and face mask—and behind her a galaxy of sharks, more sharks than Noah had known existed in all seven seas. The sunlight failed before their numbers. A sound rose from his chest, halfway between a chortle and a sob, as his sister spun in a circle, her arms flung wide, then turned to the camera and blew him a kiss.