INFINITE: Island of the Immortals

12. Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus

Michael's main job with Boogie and Cheech was searching for abandoned carts from around the island, mostly out of battery or lost over the last year. But that morning he knew exactly where they could look.

"There's one on the hill right now. I think it crashed into a lamppost." Michael did not tell them it was Nan.

"You gotta be kiddin' me."

Cheech surveyed the crash site with exclamations of awe – the tyre marks, the debris field – trying to piece it together. He shook his head, mystified. In the end, it took all three of them to prise the cart off the post in a brittle crackling of plastic. Cheech had gone silent, could only mutter under his breath. The mood was turning sour. Luckily Uncle Michael came to the rescue.

"Come on mate, Troy's teaching scuba."

The swimming pool dazzled the eye – people in dive gear churned the sparkling water, bobbing around Troy. Michael sighed.

"What's up?" Uncle Michael leant on the fence. "I thought you'd be happy?"

"I don't think Troy likes me."

"What makes you think that?"

"I don't know, he just doesn't."

"Troy's like that with everybody, especially someone new. He's had a rough life, nothing nice about it. So he's a bit rusty at being nice himself."

Michael nodded, unconvinced.

"What happened to his arm? The scars."

"Let's save that one for another day."

The group clambered from the pool weighed-down by the gear.

"If he's giving you any sort of attention, even if it's not that nice, it means he cares in some way." He slapped Michael on the back. "And that's more than he gives most."

Michael learnt SCUBA in the pool and off the beach. The real dive was on a reef called The Beyond. A coral atoll around a tiny island that dropped off into open ocean. A place littered with shipwrecks and sharks, Troy told them.

The darkest blue of the deep was cut by a hard stripe of bright turquoise shallows. Beyond that lay coral gardens and a tiny patch of white sand and a lone palm tree. Aboard the large motorboat, Troy and Nikolila rigged equipment on the divers. By the time the shark was spotted many of them were already in the water.

"He's only a reef shark. Just curious," said Troy as he climbed to the top level where Uncle Michael stood by the helm. The shark swam closer, attracted by the commotion. Uncle Michael raised an eyebrow.

"Alrighty then. Poor little sharky." Troy bombed into the water, right on the creature's nose and the shark darted away.

Michael's pulse raced as he plunged in. He could feel the pull of the deep as it fell away below. Coral escarpment dropped in a great wall beside them, no bottom in sight. They followed the living wall, writhing and rippling with swarms of colour flocking over the iridescent underwater forest. An eel wormed through the shadows. Delicate ferny growths and little nests of tentacles swayed in the current. Michael's heart tripped over itself as a Groper fish the size of a small car emerged from a dark cavern. The massive lump of a forehead came nose to nose with him. He tried not to panic, edged himself backwards with little flurries of his hands. The green brow pushed past and dived down the wall. A sea turtle laboured down the line of divers. Michael ran his fingers across the leathery skin, the mossy weed on its shell.

The group paused at a break in the wall. Further on, the hull of a wreck lay bent over the reef. The ancient structure was covered in coral, fusing it to the escarpment. The rotting bow jutted over the wall, sagged toward the drop. Great shadows drifted out of the fog on long wing beats – Manta rays circling each other in a dogfight, feeding on a cloud of tiny fish hiding under the wreck. Each pass of a winged giant pushed the school out into the path of the next.