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to shake the thoughts as he emerged from the ship at last and glanced around at the crumbling remains of what had once been a beautiful city.
    Slowly, it sank into his mind that it looked far worse than it had directly after the meteor had struck. All of the damage wasn’t from that impact.

    Time had done this.

    Coldness swept over him as he moved through the ruins of the city and paused now and then to run a hand over the broken stones of a building, feeling the smoothed edges of the stones, rounded now when once the edges had been crisp and sharp.
    Hundreds of years, then, he realized, feeling stunned, disbelieving even though he knew it would have taken that for the ocean to smooth the stones.

    23

    Almost as soon as he made that connection, though, he noticed formations of coral had grown up around the perimeter of the ship.

    A wave of nausea went through him as he stared at it, trying to convince himself that the ship had simply settled amongst the coral when it had sank.

    For many moments, he simply stared at it. Finally, reluctantly, he moved toward the formations to study them.

    He swallowed a little sickly once he had.

    They had to have been in stasis closer to a thousand years—at the very least—not hundreds, he realized. They’d expected the possibility that it might be several hundred, but nothing like this.

    His thoughts went to the woman he’d captured, or more specifically to the breathing unit she’d been wearing. It had been clumsy to his way of thinking, but the technology of creating such a thing, so that air breathers could move beneath sea ….

    He shook his head, wondering what other technology the humans had mastered while they had been sleeping.

    Lifting his head, he stared toward the surface of the sea. None of them had been carrying weapons. Knowing the human propensity for violence, however, he returned to his stasis unit to retrieve his trident. He’d dropped his weapon when he’d gone after the woman.

    A flicker of annoyance went through him.

    He hadn’t simply ‘dropped’ it, he acknowledged reluctantly. He’d tossed it aside.
    He still wasn’t entirely certain why.

    He hadn’t needed it to subdue her, of course—there hadn’t been a moment of doubt that there would be any contest of strength or speed between them—but that was beside the point. A sentinel, captain of the guard or not, did not simply decide to disarm himself when faced with a potential threat. She could have been a decoy sent to lead him from his post—or into an ambush.

    He’d tossed it aside because he’d seen she was terrified and he hadn’t wanted to frighten her more by waving the weapon in her face.

    Mayhap the years in stasis had slowed his wits? Or scrambled them, he wondered in self-disgust?

    He’d been born a soldier, had trained for it his entire life. He was still a man, but he had never been prone to allow a woman to distract him from his duty, however delightfully formed, however pretty.

    And she was that.

    He did not think he’d been thinking of any of that when he’d gone after her, though—not how appealing she was physically.

    He’d been thinking about the look in her wide eyes.

    He shook his head, trying to shake the thoughts as he propelled himself upwards, climbing steadily until he broke the surface. Images kept flickering through his mind, however.

    She’d clung to him, he knew, from fear of drowning, sought the air she desperately needed, not offered her mouth to him. He knew that with the logical side of his mind, but the other part of himself, the side governed by instincts, persisted in interpreting those moments in an entirely different way.

    24

    She’d tasted—sweet. It wasn’t just surprise to discover that that had sent a jolt through him the first time he’d covered her mouth to give her air. He’d told himself it was, but he had never been one for self deception. He’d enjoyed the taste of her, the feel of her clinging tightly to him.

    That