Her forward motion stopped; her right leg gained twenty pounds. She swiveled her head. Two long fronds had tangled and trapped her right fin. She bent in half, pulling on loose ends of green kelp that felt slimy even through her gloves.

Not enough give.

She reached for her belt knife, sawing, slowly, seeing Jonathan’s sullen face like a mirror in her faceplate, superimposed over the waving kelp and a school of silver fish.

It took ten minutes to get free.

She kept going. The freed fin had a broken spring, and her right leg had to work twice as hard as her left. The kelp suddenly gave way to open ocean. She grabbed the last stalk for balance, floating. Downbelow Dome glowed like a lamp against the darkness of the sea behind it, and the string of lights between the city and the kelp beds sent a line of comfort knifing through darker sea. Everything looked normal. But there had been no communications from the city since the first alarm. She let go of her breather and licked her lips. “Is anybody there?”

No response, until she heard a soft male voice. “Kitha?”

Her shift mate, Jai. A quiet man who’d grown up here. They’d never really connected, but he worked hard and seemed to trust her to do her part. Guilt pursued her lips. She hadn’t even thought of him, only of Jonathan. “It’s me. What happened?”

“Seaquake.”

“I figured that out. Is the city okay?”

Silence for a moment. Then, “It doesn’t look breached.”

Kitha swam away from her stabilizing kelp stem and looked back toward the wavy line of demarcation between crop and open ocean. Where was Jai?

“Look down.”

She did. Sure enough. He was even pretty close, maybe ten meters below her and a little right. She waved at the figure below her. “My son is in there.” She glanced at her readouts. “I don’t have enough air to swim the whole way. I’m going to head to the shift-break station and see if I can find some. Coming?”

Jai’s answer was to start off toward the station, just out of sight on the right. Kitha followed. “Have you been able to reach the dome?” Kitha asked.

“No. But there’s better com gear at the break-station than in our suits. Have you heard from anyone else?”

“No.” Jai’s huge yellow farm-fins were ahead of her now, at roughly the same depth. “Hey! Slow down. My right fin is zonked.”

“I’ll meet you there,” he said, although the angle made it tough to tell for sure. It looked like the wake behind Jai’s powerful stroked increased. Was he making sure he got the first access to resources if the city was dead? She shook her head. What was she thinking? Jai’d always seemed fair. The city couldn’t be dead, because Jonathan would be dead. Everything would be okay. Had her son gotten his cookies?

A swarm of symbiote-fish darted out, engulfing her.

She swam around a clump of misplaced kelp, and the shift-station hung in front of her: a teardrop caught on a long line festooned with swaying nets and protective glassoleum bubbles full of farming gear. It looked all right. A puff of tiny bubbles jetted down below the hatch, water being forced into the sea. Her body shivered, relieved. At least there was pressure and air. Safety.

In five minutes, she dangled outside the hatch, her right hand holding her in position as she thumped for it to open. She tumbled inside, waiting for the door to close behind her, then went through a second door and stood before a third. Bubbles surrounded her, pressing against each other and popping into bigger and bigger bubbles until she stood in plain air. The third door opened and she ducked through it, stripping her air bottles and fins and weights into a dripping pile by the door and gulping fresh, clean air. She kept the helmet with her, just in case the city called her name.

As she entered the common room, Jai stood by a computer terminal. He was tall and brown. Brown skin, brown hair, brown eyes. “I found a test-sequence.”

“To test what?”

“Well, for starters the shift-station is fine. It’s breathing.”

“But is the city breathing?” If the quake had damaged the dome’s six lungs, it wouldn’t be able to pull enough dissolved oxygen out of the surrounding seawater. Jonathan would run out of air, slowly, and fall asleep.

Jai pursed his lips. “I’m asking.”

Kitha took in a big breath of her own, as if it could feed Jonathan. The dome wasn’t breached. They’d have seen that right away; the gassoleum structure would have buckled and distorted. Maybe there was no immediate danger.

The tiny observation port closest to her looked out on the hundred-foot-tall beds of swaying kelp that fed thousands. She walked over to another port and stared at the dome. It looked fine. Something about it felt wrong. Nothing moved. “Do the transports work?” she asked. One was scheduled to pick them up at the end of the shift, but that was four and a half hours away. Normally, transports and bots and even swimmers came and went through the dome’s three-lock system doorways regularly, a stream of commerce and recreation.

Jai’s voice jolted her. “Three of the lungs are damaged. The city went into safety mode.”

So no one could get in or out. Including them. Half the lungs meant less air than the station needed. The lock-down would make it last longer. Not forever.

“Are there any transports available?”

Jai shook his head.

“Can we talk to the city?” she asked, knowing the answer was still no.

“I think the whole communications system is down. I just hope everyone inside is okay.”

She glanced at him, furrowing her brow. “Are there casualties?”

He turned to face her. “Probably. Look, this is a pretty simple interface, but I’m no communication tech. Can you just sit down?”

She must have stared at him in shock because he lowered his voice. “Please. Sit by the window and tell me if you see anything strange.”

She had no more than returned to her position at the porthole when the station silenced. The lights flicked off. An emergency tone screamed into the room, something automated. She grabbed for the wall, steadying herself. The string of lights between dome and pod had winked out. She looked behind her. The great kelp beds had faded into the dark sea.

Jai began pushing buttons. The tones silenced. Inside lights came back on, and the air circulators roared to life. The beds and the outside lights stayed off, so the dome sparkled even brighter and seemed further away. The outside path of lights between the city and the kelp farm had felt like an umbilical cord, and Kitha gasped at the loss.

“It must have been automatic. They must have needed to save power and kept everything off.”

“Look!” Kisha pointed. Three bright lights bobbed through the darkness, heading for the dome. “The whales!”

“Sure,” Jai said, “they always come back from their run about now.”

“But… but they won’t be able to drop their load. No one will come outside to unharness them if the dome’s locked down.”

He shrugged and turned back. “I’m more interested in getting there,” he said.

That suited her. She needed to find Jonathan. “Can you raise anybody yet?”

A high, tense laughter escaped his lips. “I was trying. All the systems just blinked out.” He must have heard the sharp tone in his voice. More calmly, he said, “They’re coming back.”

She frowned and returned to the porthole. The three bobbing lights were almost at the dome now. Surely they’d be confused. She racked her brain for an answer. Whale trainers and handlers talked to their charges via a translator that made haunting, high sounds audible from hundreds of feet away. The whales heard better than humans. Sonar. At harvest time, the whales came all the way up to the shift-station, bumping against the rope, while nervous humans tied cargo nets to specially made plastic harnesses. So surely there was a way to call the whales here.