You. "A gin and tonic, tall, lots of tonic. I'm feeling very malarial." Well, like I have a fever, anyway.

"You don't have mosquitoes out here."

"No. All our bloodsuckers walk around on two feet."

Becket went away and after a moment came back followed by a barefoot waiter carrying two tall drinks.

"Which one is mine?" she asked.

"They're the same. I decided I'm feeling malarial, too."

She took a healthy gulp and held it in her mouth-three shocks-cold, bitter, sweet. Finally she swallowed. "Tell me about Terminal Lorraine." At his blank look she added, "My boat."

"Ah. It's at BBINS. They've impounded it, but the charge of record is smuggling."

"Smuggling! Smuggling what?"

"Whatever you took off with you in your submersible... in other words, the charge has no substance, but it's also hard to disprove. How do you prove a negative after all?"

"Are they going to keep it?" Are you going to keep it?"We're working on it. If worst comes to worst, I'll requisition it as evidence in my investigation and transfer it back to you, but it would be better if they released it directly. I don't suppose your mother might be willing to put some pressure on them?"

Patricia choked on her drink, coughing violently and nearly spilling the glass. Her mother had left another message on Patricia's phone, but Patricia hadn't acquired the nerve to call her back.

Becket was looking concerned.

Patricia used a napkin to wipe her lips. "My mother. Well, it's an idea. Or, perhaps I could just scrape my skin raw and roll in lemon juice."

Becket laughed. "Like that, is it?"

Patricia glared. "If you think it's so funny, you ask her."

Becket held up his hands. "I certainly didn't mean to offend, Ms. Beenan."

"Then stop calling me Ms. Beenan. It's Patricia."

He became very still. "Thomas."

She nodded. "I didn't think you were a Tom. What about Tommy?"

He made a face.

"Tomas?"

"Acceptable. Not Patty? Not Pat?"

"Not if you want me to answer."

He nodded, suddenly serious. "Patricia."

"Yes?"

"Just trying it. Sorry."

She grinned. "Don't be."

They had two more rounds and a basket of fried shrimp.

In the west a sliver of red marked the memory of the sun's passage. Above it the canopy darkened quickly to star-specked royal blue, then washed out again, behind them, as the city lights came on.

A waiter brought a glass-englobed candle and took away empty glasses and a neat pile of shrimp tails.

Thomas leaned back and sighed. "I still mean to buy dinner, too, but after the shrimp, it would be better to wait a bit."Patricia, warming her hands on the candle, said, "We could walk. I know a nice restaurant in Playa del Mar. It would take us about thirty minutes down the seawall if we walked slowly."

"Are you cold?"

Yes. You better hold me. "Not really. There's just something about the flame-heat. When you lock out at twelve hundred feet and the water temperature is fifty-five Fahrenheit and you're breathing ninety-five percent helium... then you get cold. But you gain a real appreciation for heat-even when you're not cold."

"You work that deep?"

Patricia shrugged. "I've worked twenty-two hundred feet. Once. Not sure I'd do it again. The job took twenty minutes, but I was in decompression for four days. I prefer to work at that depth in SubLorraine-at surface pressure, dry. Inspection work, like I do for the Strand, is best."

He shook his head. "Walking is good, but both ways?"

She looked at her watch. "On the way back, a water taxi. Perhaps a gondola.

Some of the gondoliers really came from Venice, you know, but I like the ones who are in the New Galveston Opera chorus. They have better voices."

He put some bills on the table weighed down by the candle globe and stood suddenly, moving to her chair before she knew he was ready to stand. She stood carefully as he pulled the chair back, steadying herself with a hand on the table.

Three drinks is too many. "Bathroom break, first?"

"Good idea."

They met again outside the restroom doors. She pointed out the path, barely lit by low, solar-charged safety lights, following the outer edges of the hexes and zigzagging every time they met another hex. There was nobody else on the walk, and the low lighting and the persistent drumming of the surf increased the sense of isolation.

"I'm surprised there aren't people living out here," Thomas said. "It's nice."

"Oh, it's nice now," Patricia answered. "But when you get a cat five hurricane plowing through, the waves break well over our heads. All those tables and chairs back at Puesta del Sol have to be carted into the bunker and, though they hermetically seal the building, there's always some water damage."

"What about these crops?"

"Oh, you can write off the crops if we get one of those."

"I guess I meant, what about the soil? Doesn't it get too salty?"

She shook her head. "These are tailored crops-high salt tolerance. There's substantial salt uptake into the stalks and leaves and even a bit in the grain and beans,but the salt is continually removed from the soil just by the process of growing these crops." She pointed east, toward the inner edge of the seawall, 450 feet in. A lighted window gleamed on a raised structure. "There. Some people do live on the seawall.

Just not on the outer edge."

The moon had risen in the east, nearly full, and so close to the horizon it appeared improbably huge, like a special effect from a movie.

Ahead of them the glow from Playa del Mar grew and began to resolve itself into individual lights. Patricia stopped for a moment and swung to face Thomas. "Feel like getting your feet wet?"

He shrugged. "Aren't there barnacles?"

"Not here. There's a stretch of beach matting." She stepped over the edge of the seawall and saw Thomas reach involuntarily for her. "It's okay. See?"

Thomas stepped forward and saw the narrow stair built into the outer wall of the hex, no railing, barely visible in the low light. She moved down it to give him room, watching to make sure he found the handrail built into the inner wall.

At the bottom she sat on a step and pulled off her sandals. "You better roll up your pants," she suggested.

"Why do I think I'm going to regret this?" Thomas sat and removed his shoes and socks, then rolled up his pants. He stuffed his socks in his shoes and, tying the laces together, slung his shoes over one shoulder.

The upper beach plate, where the stair ended, was a bare concrete surface mechanically pitted for traction. "We must be above the high tidemark."

Patricia laughed. "What's wrong with that statement?"

Thomas paused before saying, "Floating cities don't have high tidemarks. If the tide goes up, so do they."

"Right. He can be trained."

"And I work and play well with others, too."

She led him away from the wall, down the sloping plate. Before they got to the water, she reached the fibrous matting designed to keep the plate barnacle- and limpet-free.

Thomas grunted when his feet ran into it. "Ah. I've seen barnacles grow on everything up to and including floating feces-why don't they just attach to this stuff?"

"They do but their adhesive activates a reaction in the fiber, and it becomes brittle and breaks away before they can grow."

They reached the wet matting and Patricia began walking parallel to the wall. Awave broke and the foam lapped their feet. It was skin temperature, and Patricia wanted to rip her clothes off and plunge in. She contented herself with kicking flecks of foam before her.

Thomas said, "I guess you don't walk down a beach like this and look for seashells."

"Does anybody? Those kinds of beaches are mostly gone, aren't they?

Drowned. I remember doing it in Galveston when I was a little girl, and on South Padre Island."

"I did it on Mustang Island, near Port Aransas." Another wave sloshed over their feet. "They have some good sand beaches in North Africa, I understand. The Sahara was good for something."

Patricia nodded in the dark. "Beaches are geologic constructs made over geologic time. I guess that's what I hate most about the new Texas coast. It's all breakwaters or mudflats. It's not like we had a lot of rocky cliffs, like Maine or California. They've still got some great shorelines. We do have a sand beach here.

It's another quarter mile that way." She pointed toward Playa del Mar.

"I've seen pictures, but I didn't realize it was real sand. Does it go on into the water?"

"Yeah. They put in a long stretch of submerged hexes and covered them with dredged sand. There's a submerged wall on the outer edge that keeps most of it in, but they lose tons every storm. They just keep bringing it in, barge after barge.

There's even seashells."

Patricia's eyes were adjusting to the deep shadow cast by the rising moon, and phosphorescent phytoplankton gleamed faintly in the water. Occasionally the water would recede leaving tinafores caught in the matting, bright spots of glowing green jelly the size of her thumb.

"How far out do the beach plates extend? Here, that is. How far until you've got a mile of water under your feet?"

"It extends about sixty feet out from the outer corners." She pointed ahead where a hex corner extended toward the water.

They were even with the juncture between two hexes, and the meeting point was farther back from the water, a minicove almost. When they reached the corner, a few moments later, the water washed all the way up to the wall and Patricia held up her skirts to avoid getting them wet.

Behind her Thomas swore softly. "Well, I hope they'll let me in this restaurant of yours with wet cuffs."

Around the corner they moved back up the plate, where the waves were less threatening. Patricia bundled the loose edges of her skirt to one side and tied them ina knot, keeping her hem above her knees. Thomas took the higher ground and she wondered if it was to keep dry or to walk by her side.

"Do you swim much?" she asked him.

"Once upon a time." He looked down for a moment, at the foam around his feet.

"I did water polo in college. I've got these long gorilla arms for blocking and I tread water well."

She took his right wrist and held his arm out horizontally. "My. Those are long.

Do you brachiate?" They'd wrap clean around me.

He took his arm back. "Might as well check my knuckles for calluses while you're at it."

She thought his voice cooled a bit and she winced. "I just wondered if you'd be comfortable swimming without a lifeguard."

He stopped walking and looked at her. "The lifeguard isn't a problem. No swimsuit might be."

She shrugged. "It's dark." Thank god. She could feel her ears burning and knew she was probably blushing to her waist.

"Sharks?"

"We eat a lot of shark around here. Probability is low but even less if you don't do the wounded-fish routine. Don't flop around on the surface splashing."

He was still for a moment. "If you like," he said lightly.

She walked up the plate until she was above the beach matting, where another access stair clung to the wall. She dropped her sandals and untied the knot in her skirt, then shucked it and her underpants in one movement before pulling her tank top over her head and adding it to the pile.

Thomas was standing off to the side, turned slightly away, undressing just as quickly. It was dark, yes, but Patricia's eyes had adjusted quite a bit and the lines of his back and butt made her ache. She waited until he'd finished folding his pants and boxer shorts, then walked down to the water, ahead of him. It might have been her imagination, but she felt his eyes upon her.

She sliced into a low wave cleanly and stayed under, suspended in a warm liquid embrace. The receding water tugged at her, pulling her farther out before another wave came in. She felt the eddies stream over her body, between her legs, over her breasts.

What a week to choose to come back to life! She arched her back and raised her head out of the water, turning to locate Thomas, and found herself in the moonlight, far enough out from the wall that the rising moon shone full upon her.

Thomas followed, a shallow dive through a wave and up on the other side.Patricia released worries about him cracking his head on the plate and stayed where she was, her feet touching the matting when in the troughs and floating up on the crests of waves. He located her and swam near, but stopped when he was about two meters away.

"That does feel good," he said, his voice slightly hoarse. A deeper than usual trough passed and she found herself standing, for an instant, waist deep in water, facing him. His eyes, half in moonlight, half in shadow, watched her and he licked his lips. He didn't stand when the trough passed but dropped with it, his shoulders barely above water. Cheat.