The Last Abyss Book 1 – Paperback

Vance has run cold-water tech dives for ten years without losing a man. The anchor over the Blue Hole reads one hundred and ten metres to the shelf and nothing on the return past that. The brief is a single descent to recover a sealed logbook left in a 1984 camp that nobody has visited since.

By the second shaft he knows the survey is wrong. By the fifth chapter one of them is dead. By the time the four who are left reach the camp bench and open the log, they have already been read by something below them that was not supposed to be in the water any more.

The log says the resident fauna speciated in a sealed basin for millions of years. The log says the eyes went first because the eyes were useless. The log says the animal will come to the beat of a loop under exertion from a long way off, and the writer stopped recording morale on the day he stopped lifting his pen between words.

Vance has sixty-four chapters of gas, cold, and limestone to decide what he does with the men who are left and the one page that was folded into the back of the cover.