trees, dark needles heavy with water. There were maybe thirty, all hanging at different heights, like wind chimes.
“What,” Ines said, “the fuck.”
“That’s what I said,” Henderson replied. “Would you open the second one, Cho?”
Cho closed the first and clicked on the second, labeled 2ICI45G.
“Australia,” Cho said to introduce this one. The footage opened on a rocky beach with the sun just beginning to set over the water. The land around it, even the dry grasses that grew on the slopes, glowed orange.
“Are you sure?” a male voice asked from behind the camera.
“Yeah!” came the chirped reply. The camera swung to the side, showing a massive boulder as tall as a house with others leaned up against it, as if part of the slope had crumbled off at some point in history and the rubble had been left there. There were silhouettes of lithe bodies on the boulders, beer bottles balanced next to them. Sloane spotted the ties of bikinis, the frayed hems of jean shorts, the brim of a baseball cap.
The camera zoomed in on a girl no older than sixteen with a red-and-white-striped bikini top and a flat, tanned stomach. She wore her sun-streaked hair loose around her shoulders. She had turned toward the camera and was waving.
“If it doesn’t work this time, I’ll just fall in the water,” she said with a shrug. “You recording?”
“Yep!” the man with the camera replied. “Go on!”
“Okay, watch!”
The sun burned orange behind the girl as she lifted one foot, skinny arms held out from her sides, and stepped into the air next to the boulder, over the water. She then lifted up her other foot so she stood on nothing at all. Sloane could see the light of the sky beneath her heel—there was only emptiness beneath her, yet she wasn’t falling.
Half a dozen voices crowed with amazement, fists in the air, bottles clinking together, the camera shuddering as the one who held it gave a shout.
“I’m gonna take another step!” the girl called out, and before anyone could object, she did, leaning out, seemingly into the sky—
Her body tipped, not forward, but sideways, her feet ripped from beneath her. She screamed as her hair dropped toward the water in a sun-bleached curtain. She fell, but not toward the ocean—she fell up, toward the clouds, her arms flailing, her screeches echoing over the rocks. The camera followed her as she grew smaller and smaller, a tiny black shape against the clouds. And then she was gone, and the man with the camera was screaming. “Barbara! Barbara!”
The footage ended, leaving the screen blue again. They were all silent this time.
“The third, please, Cho,” Henderson said.
The file was 3ICI45G. And the footage had been filmed underwater; it was blue, cloudy, and dreamlike, the surface undulating with light. Sloane thought again about the Dive, her last trip to the ocean, the smell of salt and seaweed on the air—and she felt the tingling again, not just in her fingertips this time, but all the way up to her elbows, as if her arms were asleep. She shook them out, watching as a diver entered the camera’s line of sight, eyes shielded by the reflective mask. The figure jabbed a finger down, and the camera swung in that direction.
Sloane saw what she thought was a bunch of seaweed growing along the ocean floor; the person holding the camera swam closer, the movements smooth. Shafts of light shone through the surface, refracted by the waves, onto neat rows of plants, their long, sharp leaves shifting as the water did. The diver swam closer, and Sloane saw a large metal structure on wheels with a bar arching gently away.
She recognized it. It was an irrigation pivot, like the kind used to water the fields around her hometown.
Sloane leaned closer to the windows as she realized the neat rows of plants along the ocean floor were not seaweed, but stalks of corn. The shadow of a tractor loomed in the distance. The diver swam over the corn, zooming in on the intact husks among the leaves, then under the metal arch of the irrigation system, where the tractor was in full view. As was the man still sitting atop it, trapped there with his knees under the steering wheel, his arms floating toward the surface.
Cho stopped the footage so that image stayed frozen on the screen for a few seconds before she closed it.
“That was in Hawaii, three weeks ago,” she said. “We haven’t been able to identify the