The drainage chimney pipe rose at a sharp sixty-degree incline through the dark rock roots of the seamount.
For three hundred yards, they swam against an outflow of warm, rotten-egg water that tasted of hardened shale and dissolved iron. Then, the ceiling arched upward into a jagged fiery dome, and the water suddenly ended.
An inverted air pocket.
Trapped beneath the underground dark rock cap, sealed off from the deep-sea ocean by pure water-pressure balance, hung a vast cave of dry, earth-heat air. The air was high-pressure by the surrounding sea, hot and stale. He smelled of fiery ash, dry sulfur, and ancient dark rock dust. Around the outer edge of the cave, glowing red veins of cooling magma cast a bruised, vermilion twilight across shelves of fiery glass.
Deep-Diver Ren breached the surface first. He didn’t remove his copper collar, but he shook the salt water from his shaved head, his green slit pupils scanning the rocky shores of the chamber.
Ren followed, kicking upward through the knee pad of the water.
The moment his head cleared the surface—the heartbeat his lips parted from the vulcanized gum mouthpiece and the dry, surrounding fiery air touched his throat—the Exclusion Axiom struck him with the fury of a headsman’s axe.
