Read Chapter 24: Paying the Debt

The water swallowed them whole, a black curtain dropping over the burning silhouette of the *Atalante*. Élise kicked hard against the drag of the equipment bag, her dive lamp cutting a weak cone through the murk. Lucas swam beside her, his fins moving in steady, practiced strokes, but she could feel his tension in the water like a trembling current.

They had two tanks each, three if the cache Sophie had marked was still intact. Below, the city waited—a sleeping giant on the seabed, its domes and colonnades etched against the deep. Somewhere inside that drowned masterpiece, the reactor hummed with a timer that would flood everything.

The first sign of trouble wasn't sound. Sound didn't travel the way people thought; it came as vibration, a pressure in her jaw. The dull thrum of boat engines overhead multiplied, then aligned. Search lights cut down from the surface far above, blades of white stabbing the blue. Then came the dark shapes—fin strokes pulling downward, fast and disciplined.

Elite divers. Not patrol. They moved like they knew exactly where she and Lucas would be.

Élise grabbed Lucas's arm and yanked him toward a limestone pillar, the remains of what had once been a temple portico. She pressed her back against the rough coral encrustation, motioned for silence. Lucas killed his lamp. She did the same.

Darkness slammed in. She could hear her own heartbeat through the neoprene hood, a loud, insistent drum. The vibration of approaching fins grew sharper, closer.

A flash of light, quick and targeted. They had torches too, but they were sweeping in a grid pattern, no wasted angle. Professional.

*Lefèvre.*

He'd sent his sharks.

They converged on the pillar. Élise counted four beams, maybe five, and something else—a glint of spear tips, the long, lethal lines of underwater rifles built for close-quarters work.

She unclipped her own spear gun, a single-shot model, loaded with a rusty but functional bolt. Lucas tapped her shoulder, signed *dive*—the old formation for breaking contact, going deep and fast, hoping the pressure differential lost them in the dark.

She shook her head. If they ran, the divers would radio the surface. The boats would drop charges. Any path to the reactor would become a killing field. Their only chance was to push through, to reach the sewer tunnel Sophie had described, the entrance they'd mapped from her memory.

The nearest diver broke from the formation, swimming straight along the pillar's face. His lamp swept right past Élise's shoulder, grazing her tank, and she found herself staring into the reflective visor of a dark mask.

*He saw her.*

He reached for his sidearm. She fired.

The spear flew in a lazy, fatal arc. It caught him in the shoulder—not a kill shot, but enough. He dropped his weapon, the rush of bubbles obscuring him as he clutched the wound.

Chaos.

Lucas moved first, kicking hard toward the seabed, pulling something from his belt—a small smoke flare they'd intended as a distraction. It hissed out a thick plume of ink-like dye, muddying the water and confusing the remaining lights.

Élise swam through the cloud, her lungs screaming as she counted the seconds. She could feel them closing behind her, the sweep of water as fins drove hard. She rounded a low archway, dark and treacherous, the silt of centuries drifting up at her touch.

A hand grabbed her ankle.

She twisted, breaking free with a sharp jerk, but the grip shifted, grabbing the strap of her harness. A face came into view, breaking through the dye cloud—*Lefèvre*. Not a shield, not an attack ship. The commander himself, in tactical dive gear, his silvering hair dark with water, his eyes as cold and hard as the abyssal silt.

He held a knife, not a gun. Close quarters. He wanted this personal.

He pulled her in, brought the knife up toward her regulator hose. Élise drove a knee into his gut, but the water stole half the impact. He grunted, bubbles escaping his regulator, but held firm.

Her other hand went to her utility belt. Her fingers brushed plastic housing, the cool face of metal—Marchand's watch. The one Petit had given her. The watch that had belonged to the man who'd died because of what they'd done.

She yanked it free, shoved it into the space between their masked faces.

"One-oh-four-four," she shouted, the words muffled and distorted through the water but clear enough in the enclosed space between them. "Grenoble, nineteen ninety-eight. 'To see the sunken city, one must be born with gills.' How did Marchand know you were afraid of drowning, Commander?"

His eyes changed. That was the only warning she got. Something flashed in them—not anger, not calculation, but *recognition*. A door swinging open somewhere deep inside him.

He knew that inscription. He knew whose hand had scratched those words into the brass.

The knife hand wavered.

Élise's spear gun was empty, but her other hand had already found what she'd stowed in the thigh pocket before the dive—a weighted lead maul, the kind meant for tapping core samples into place. Archaeological equipment. A tool for the work, as harmless as a spoon.

She brought it up in a tight, vicious arc. The metal connected with the side of his skull, and the water swallowed the sound of the impact.

Lefèvre went limp. His grip loosened; his body drifted backward, a slow, surreal ballet of defeat. Bubbles streamed from his regulator, still functioning, but his eyes closed and his limbs lost their purpose. He wasn't dead. She hadn't killed him.

But he would surface with an answer when they pulled him up. A headache the size of the sea.

Lucas swam to her side, faceplate tilted in question. She shook her head, pointed down. Into the dark. Toward everything that still needed to be saved and buried.

She let the watch drop from her fingers, watched it sink into the silt of the ancient street below, and kicked hard for the tunnel entrance.

Some debts collected themselves.