In Search Of ...
Fifteen-year-old Tay lives on Rannoch, a distant planet covered with water, where undersea pods or living chambers provide life support for up to three people—usually two adults and one child. Tay learns that her parents are expecting another child and that she must marry and move into a pod of her own. Upset, she thrusts her portable breathing tube into her throat vent and slams out of the pod.
Swimming past the school, she remembers learning about the history of Planet Rannoch. One day the class viewed an ancient Video that showed the Survey Starship Macmillan arriving from Planet Earth. The starship smashed into a shock wave of radiation from the solar system’s sun and disintegrated. The lucky ones whose escape pods landed on the planet engineered underwater homes and genetically adapted their bodies so they could live in the sea.
Suddenly it all comes flooding back to Tay—what she is swimming away from, the future that she can’t escape—marriage to one of three available pod mates: Forth, Eden, or Esk. She powers off, kicking hard, her strokes fueled by anger and frustration. Swimming through the electrical barrier that marks the Perimeter, she finds herself outside the community’s protective Enclosure. Suddenly, a net wraps itself around her. Terrified, she feels herself being hauled up to the Surface. .
