The Diver’s Map
Petra has been keeping secrets of her own.
Petra || Revelation || Map || Trust
Petra came to the precinct voluntarily, which surprised Mara, because Petra’s relationship with official buildings was historically one of strategic avoidance. She sat down without being invited and placed a rolled tube of paper on the desk. “I should have shown you this earlier,” she said. Not an apology. A statement of fact. The real map. Larger than the waterproof-cased one Mara had seen her wear — built up over years of dives, covered in small precise markings in four ink colors: depth, current direction, structural integrity, and a fourth category: small red crosses distributed with the regularity of something methodically documented. “Items I found and did not retrieve,” Petra said. “In seven years of salvage work, I found things I photographed and marked and left, because I didn’t know what I was looking at but I knew it was significant.” Monitoring devices, each one. Instruments placed on the canal bed at regular intervals, connected by cables to junction boxes set into the tunnel’s ceramic casing, part of an environmental monitoring network tracking water quality, temperature, the electromagnetic field output of the Golden Chamber in real time. The canal had been a laboratory. The eleven-year flood had been a controlled environment for measuring the effect of the field on water chemistry.
There was one more thing. She pointed to a cross at the far eastern edge of the district, in the deepest section. “I found it three years ago and I’ve been back four times. Each time it’s moved. Not far — a meter, two. But moved.” A case. Metal, sealed, shoebox-sized. And every time Petra returned, it was in a slightly different position. Someone else was diving this section. Someone who kept coming back. “We need to get to it,” Mara said, “before whoever is checking on it realizes we know it’s there.”