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from the boat.
    Something was wrong. The reef itself was all wrong. Though the coral looked familiar enough, and the creatures that crawled over it, and the fish that swam among it, somehow it did not feel right, did not feel natural. Had she been down longer than she thought? Or deeper, and having come up too fast, was now suffering from the hallucinations that could be caused by nitrogen narcosis? She glanced at her left wrist. Though her dive computer appeared to be functioning normally, there were worse things than a complete failure of the vital device. Defective instrumentation supplying faulty information could be more dangerous than one that had gone dead and displayed no information at all.
    Of one thing she was now certain: it was time to terminate the dive. Once on the surface, even if she did not see the dive boat, she could utilize everything from the blare of her dive alert horn to a bright orange safety sausage to a dark emergency slick contained in the breakable tube in her buoyancy compensator pocket. Ascending slowly, careful to rise no faster than the bubbles from the regulator in her mouth, she paused at ten feet for a four-minute safety stop before kicking the rest of the way to the surface.
    Once her head was clear of the water she let the regulator fall from her mouth, inflated the BC, and sucked in fresh air. Turning a slow circle, she scanned the sun-filled horizon for the friendly silhouette of the dive boat. There was no sign of it. Its absence was no immediate cause for panic. Searching for her, it might have gone first around the other side of the island where she and the other divers had been dropped off.
    Except there was no island.
    She blinked. Everything was far, far more wrong than she had initially thought. Uninhabited and fringed with coconut palms, the island had been there, several hundred meters of solid ground extending to north and south. As she stared, the sun blazed down, heating the synthetic material of her black and blue diveskin. She spun wildly in the water, looking frantically to left and right.
    Where was the island? Where was the dive boat? In every direction, on every horizon, there was nothing to be seen but flat blue-green sea.
    Impossible , she thought as a fearful panic began to take hold. It was impossible. How could she have drifted so far? She had kept the reef on her left or right at all times. Could she have swam, underwater, from the island where the dive had commenced to a shallow reef so far distant that the first could no longer be seen? If that was the case, how could she be sure of finding her way back? If she descended and tried to retrace her route along the submerged reef, how could she be certain it would lead her in the right direction? For the first time in hundreds of dives, she found herself wishing she had carried a compass. But who needed a compass when one always dove with a group?
    Now almost directly overhead following the late morning dive, the sun was no help in determining direction. She tried to stay calm. Keep your BC inflated, she told herself firmly. Deploy your safety sausage, crack the emergency vial and spread the surface slick, and wait for someone to find you. Let off periodic blasts from your dive alert horn. Don’t waste energy swimming to nowhere. Taking deliberate, deep breaths, she initiated the relevant emergency procedures. All the while, she fought not to think of sharks. As an avid diver, she loved being around sharks. But not like this. Not alone and trapped at the surface.
    Of course, she wasn’t trapped. She still had a fair amount of air in her tank. But going down would solve nothing. Assuming her absence had been noted on the boat and they were now looking for her, it was imperative that she remain on the surface where she could be seen.
    Current, she told herself. Maybe she had been caught up in some kind of unusual and powerful inshore current and it had swept her far from where she and her fellow divers had entered