‘When have I ever done anything stupid?’ she asked, her voice sounding strange in the confines of the face mask. ‘That’s your job.’
Jason shook his head. ‘There’s a first time for everything, kiddo. Let’s not make this it, OK?’
She gave him the trademark Walker reckless grin and adjusted the dive weight to take her under the surface of the Mer d’Iroise and into the world of lost Ys.
CHAPTERTWENTY
Ari took the descent as slowly as possible to keep an eye on Rafael and ensure he wasn’t in any distress, but he just patiently followed her lead. She didn’t know what she had expected really. Some sort of bravado, or for him to attempt to take charge. But he didn’t. He swam where she directed, waited when she told him to, and let her check equipment, air and coms until she was content.
‘OK to continue?’ she asked.
He held up his hand in the universal ‘OK’ symbol and grinned at her. Well, she had insisted he know the hand signals too.
‘Very funny,’ she told him.
‘I thought so. Shall we?’
‘When you’re finished flirting?’ Jason’s voice cut in. They’d lowered a transponder from the boat to pick up Ari and Rafael’s voice signals and complete the underwater communication network.
Ari winced. Jason needed to shut the hell up, but Rafael just gave that now familiar shrug as if to say it was up to her.
What was? Up to her if they had finished flirting? No, she was leading this expedition, so she had better get on with it.
Down they went again, into the sea-glass water. She could feel the current shifting around her, the way it seemed to be pulling them in to shore. The mass of Îlot d’Or rose to their right, a great crack running down the middle at an angle. And now…now when she looked at the formation, it really did look like a pair of great stone gates fallen on top of each other.
And in the space between the islet and the cliffs, the fine sand spread out between a scattering of fallen boulders and outcrops. Beyond it, the great sea cave opened up, like the mouth of a leviathan.
‘Is that it?’ Rafael asked, his voice like a whisper in her ear.
‘I think so.’
It shouldn’t be there, this impossible opening. It looked so fragile in one sense and in another, it looked ready to swallow them whole.
Time to update Jason. She turned on the mic. ‘We’re heading down to the bed first. Rafael has the camera. I’m going to try to clear some of the sand and see what’s there.’
If Simon was right…
The local stories, the oldest stories, the ones passed down through families by word of mouth said there was a pathway to Ys,le chemin de l’eau, like the causeway leading to Île Tristan. Simon had found it. Fabien had found it.
We swam down to the pathway and followed it, surrendering to her, just as Blanche said. We let the tide take us.
The sand was fine and light. It didn’t take much work to fan it away. For a moment, Ari could see nothing, but then she caught a glimpse of a strangely shaped stone, unnaturally round, like an egg. Or a cobble. It was the wrong colour too, pale and gleaming like marble. She hurriedly shifted more sand aside to reveal more stones, different colours, laid out in a pattern. It couldn’t be random.
‘Are you getting this?’ she gasped.
‘Yes,’ Rafael replied. ‘Yes, definitely. This is it, Ari.’
‘What do you see?’ Jason cut in, his voice desperate. It was killing him, she realised, that he wasn’t able to see this.
‘It looks like a cobbled path, Jason. Some kind of plaza maybe? We’re documenting as much as we can, but it will have to be fully excavated by professionals. But it’s evidence. Real evidence.’
There was a long pause, longer than she would have expected. When his voice came through again, it sounded like he was in tears. For a moment, she could picture him and Nico, dancing around on the deck of Yana’s boat while she looked on in disgust.
‘I knew it. I bloody knew it. And we were just on the wrong side of the little island. Bloody hell.’
Something glinted in the sand and she pulled it out. Another coin, much like the last. She bagged it and moved on.
‘We’re going to approach the cave mouth now,’ she told him. ‘The path leads in there.’
