Martinez pushes through the gelatinous wall and feels it seal up behind her, jams her filtration mouthpiece into the bubble over her lips, and one dive later she’s plowing through a blue-black world. The Fishbelly Slick hews warm and tight to her skin, and its hydrophobic surface makes her dolphin stroke feel like a skid on buttered tracks.

Martinez goes down and down. The schools barely bother to explode at her passage, and she thinks about the drawings from a childhood magazine, primeval whales with hands. Slicked and insulated, she imagines herself another curve back into evolution: swimming, walking, swimming again.