Seven days of mind-numbing monotony on the relatively calm sea, and we had fourteen possible wreck sites.

"See these?" Eva asked, pointing to the sonar map. "They can be anything from a shipwreck to a bunch of boulders. Right now, only these four sites are below the acceptable risk profile for divers working for the company. Come on; we're going to the deck—the guys are preparing to dive down to the first spot."

Excitement tinged the air and bubbled through my blood in a heady elixir, and I loved it.

To a mermaid, a little dive like this was nothing, but I had a role to play and shimmied into my blue and black wetsuit. Cap checked my bottles, Eve helped me with my gear, and with every mile, we got closer to our destination, and the excitement hitched up another notch.

Despite not expecting to find anything on this first foray into the deep blue, the crew seemed in high spirits. The possibilities and the thought of doing something, anything after all that nothing, was like a high. I glanced at Cap under my lashes. When I took off my overalls earlier to put on my wetsuit over my bikini, I had caught him frowning at me. Was it because he liked what he saw or didn't, and why did it bother me?

The men jostled each other, acting a little silly, their jokes ranging from hilarious to borderline inappropriate, but nobody minded.

"Lower the rubber duck," Cap ordered, and we climbed down the side to reach it. It took mere minutes to get to our destination, and the two dive teams were ready to drop into the ocean within minutes. I couldn't deny my eagerness, but it was less the thought of treasure and more the need to be in the water that drove me.

Staring out over the gentle swell, this was literally the middle of nowhere, and Cap teamed me with Norman.

"Are you ready?" Norman asked, helping me with my bottles and weights.

"Yes," I said, smiling at the sandy-haired, middle-aged man with his dark brown eyes and Mocha skin.

"Have you dived in open water before?" He asked, sitting down on the side.

"A few times," I said, and he nodded, pulling his goggles on and falling over the side. I sat down and was about to follow when Cap spoke.

"Don't do anything stupid down there; this is not the kiddies pool," he warned.

"Yes, sir," I said, letting myself drop over the side and biting down on my urge to say something I would regret.

I fixed my vapored-up goggles, and with a nod at Norman, we dove. The visibility sucked, and we had to stay close together while making our way into the murky depths.

Finding the exact spot we were looking for took a while, but it happened much sooner than I had hoped. But being in the water was glorious, even with the wet suit keeping most of it from my skin. I felt as if I wanted to rip it off to be free of it but contained myself.

It was just a load of ballast rocks discarded by some ancient ship in a storm. It didn't negate the possibility that our missing galleon might have dumped it to lighten the load and save the ship.

Eva and Shaun, another crew member, approached us. She indicated that I should use my camera to document the area while she and the others took a closer look. They might have cast overboard more than the ballast, and we had time to play.

They poked around for as long as we had air, picking up a cannonball and a few odds and ends. The rest of us could not determine what they found, and soon we had to go up again; the slow ascent would take a while. We finally broke the surface, and Cap helped us climb back into the rubber duck. His hand touched mine, and electricity sparked between us, but he seemed unaffected.

I thought the miss would dampen the crew's spirits, but not at all. They poked around the few small items we recovered. After an hour of using our new equipment to clean off what we found, we determined that we had a cannonball of indeterminate origin, a couple of ancient nails from the correct period, a shard from a dagger, and a couple of pottery bits. Eva and Cap logged, tagged, and bagged them, giving them the same barcode marker as the area.

We were soon back on board the big ship and going out to the second marker. We dove again and found a wooden boat, not much larger than a life raft. It had degraded almost entirely, and nothing much remained. A storm might have knocked it off a ship, but there was nothing of interest.

We returned and were on our way to the third marker, and it was near dusk when we got to the right.

"Okay, guys, it's a little late, and we won't have time to explore properly, so let's call it a day. Square everything away, get cleaned up, and grab some grub," Cap decided, and no one complained.

When the sun rose, we were all in the galley, having breakfast and working out our plans for the day when Norman came running down the stairs.

"There's someone on our spot," he said out of breath, and we were all up the stairs in a minute.

We stared at a boat, not much bigger than ours, but with a lot of equipment on board, including a small submersible craft.

The look on Cap's face needed no translation, nor did anyone have to clue me in to the fact that he knew whoever was on that other boat.

"It's the Crucible," Norman said the name like a swear word, and one of the deckhands spat in the water. Their strong feelings made me frown.

"It was only a matter of time. They're following our electronic signal and must have noticed we didn't do the dive and got a head start on us. Get us up and running; we're jumping ahead to the fourth location. They've tainted this site," Cap said with barely controlled fury, and we were moving off within minutes.

"How did they get the exact coordinates? We were three hundred feet off the marker," Eva muttered, and I frowned as an idea occurred to me.

"Maybe they hacked your computers," I suggested, and Callum turned to look at me as if I had spat in his face.

Callum ran past us and down the stairs to his laptop in the galley with all of us in tow. He shifted onto the bench so fast that he almost toppled and started furiously typing. It didn't take long, and he didn't have to say anything.

"May I see?" I asked, and he scowled at me. He was the tech guy and trained at this, but I had a few tricks up my sleeve that even got me in trouble a few times. Twice with my father and once with the law.

My computer skills were not on file, only because my father shelled out a lot of money to keep it that way. He enjoyed sicking me on his new techs to test their skills, and, more often than not, I took them by surprise because no one knew of my hidden talents.

"Trust me?" I asked, and he shifted aside reluctantly.