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to the boat she saw one small school of coin-sized silver fish. They darted into sight and disappeared, like an omen of good fortune that decided not to stay.
    Cameron Quang was drinking another Coca-Cola when she climbed out of the water. “See anything?” he asked.
    “A few small fish. A lot of garbage.”
    She made two more dives as the red-eyed boat journeyed slowly out to the oil-drilling platforms.
    The offshore fields were tapped out, but the platforms still found use as the hubs of vast fish farms. As the boat drew closer, Ela could make out fiberglass poles rising from the ocean, with floating lines strung between them that enclosed vast acres of calm water. The closest fishing boat was a quarter mile away. “Can I dive out here?” she asked the captain when the boundary was only a few hundred feet off the bow.
    His answering grin was sly. “You wanh uh do some poaching?”
    “I want to get some pictures.”
    “That’s what theah all say.” But he cut the boat’s engines. Then he used his farsights to talk with someone on the platform. “Okay, ah warned them you’ll be out here, so maybe they won’t shoot you? You dive while ah do my business. Half an hour, and ah’ll pick you up.”
    She nodded and slipped her rebreather pack on. “Don’t forget where I am.”
    His grin widened.
    Ela dropped over the side of the boat, letting her weight carry her slowly down through the blue water. At thirty-five feet she found the bottom . . . and a robotic drone found her. The meter-long robo-sub eased silently out of the murk, moving with fishlike sinuousness. Button cameras studded its prow, while two racks of steel harpoons were mounted on either side. Ela froze, staring at the device, afraid to move, afraid some jerk on the platform was looking back at her through the cameras, just waiting to launch a harpoon if she so much as twitched a finger. She understood now why the fisherfolk stayed away.
    The standoff continued for two or three minutes, and then Ela’s patience gave way. The rebreather pack would let her stay there all day, but the captain had given her only half an hour. She did not believe he would spend much time looking for her if she failed to appear.
    So she dug her fingers into the muddy bottom and pushed off, gliding slowly backwards. The robo-sub followed her—but it didn’t shoot. She took encouragement from that. Checking her compass, she determined the direction of the fish farm, and with a slow kick of her fins, she set off to find it. The robo-sub kept pace, but it did not try to stop her.
    In less than a minute a dark shadow loomed in the murk, resolving into a wide-gauge mesh wall, rising from the ocean floor all the way up to the bright blue surface. It marked a boundary of terrible contrast. Beyond the mesh she could see a seemingly endless school of meter-long fish swimming counterclockwise along the barrier, moving with machine efficiency through the middle depths. Outside the mesh there was nothing.
    She started to swim closer, but her presence startled the school. It broke up, the fish spilling inward to escape her predator shape. The robo-sub responded, slipping in front of her to block her advance.
    It was time to go anyway. She headed for the surface, feeling only a little worried when she discovered that Cameron Quang was not there. She inflated her buoyancy vest and drifted a few meters outside the mesh. After several minutes her worry grew more intense. She was a long way from the dock on the distant platform. She could probably swim that far . . . if the patrolling robo-subs would let her.
    Several more minutes passed. She listened to wavelets slap against her rebreather pack and wondered why she had chosen to devote herself to a journalism career when she could have been telling fortunes or dealing in stocks or . . . or . . . teaching Thai at some university in Australia. Yeah.
    After another minute she tapped her fingers, sending a link request to her job broker, Joanie