“Lamps,” Yuna repeats, like she’s tasting a lemon. “In the vent field.”

The killer-whale sticker on Jax’s laptop does not exist here. There is a tiny paper squid taped to Yuna’s mug instead, grinning in ballpoint. “Water eats light,” she says. “Red first, then the rest. At nine hundred meters we are in the aphotic zone even without a storm of silt. A vent plume is worse. It’s glitter and ash. Your lamp becomes a glowing soup, and soup is not a map.”

Vargas will not mock you. Vargas will also not pretend a wrong map is a brave map.

“If we throw Minnow at the glow, we spend battery going somewhere cameras go blind. Some jobs, you want a lamp for a bolt two meters away. This job? A missing hull in black water. Sound first.”

The pale wedges on the screen have edges like teeth.

“You can still insist,” Yuna says quietly. “You’re crew, not cargo. But insist with your eyes open. Eyes are not the tool.”

You feel your ears get hot. Wanting to see danger is older than habitats. Physics is older than that feeling, and it does not flinch.