Mac had been so relieved to see Jason alive and well that he hadn't given any thought to the vessel that had carried him beneath the waves. Now however he was occupied with the search for the missing submarine, since that Jason had been able to tell him only that it seemed to have vanished. That couldn't be possible, so Mac had gone back out to sea in the hope of locating it, if not recovering it. It was an expensive piece of equipment to lose – a regrettable loss, even if it hadn't been preventable.

He leaned out over the railings, over the sea, which was significantly more turbulent today as the autumn storms set in. They were scanning the sea bed, searching for traces, anything that might give them a clue as to what had really happened the previous day after Jason had gone to look for his father.

His father! Jason had said yesterday that his father had been a consort of one of the queens of Atlantis... that he had died at the hands of her men. So he had found him, only to lose him again. What he had been through in Atlantis, if his story had any truth in it...

But of course it didn't have any truth in it.

So where had the other four come from?

His thoughts, which were becoming increasingly nonsensical, were interrupted by a shout from the other side of the ship. 'We've got something!...'

Mac hurried to the radar screen; a young sailor – Harry, Mac thought he was called – was watching it intently.

'What is it?' asked Mac, scrutinising the little screen.

'I don't know; there was something –' Harry shrugged. 'It's gone... Probably a fish,' he said, laughing, but uncertainly. 'Quite big though. Not far beneath us.'

Mac raised one eyebrow. They were at pretty much the exact spot where they had found Jason and the others yesterday. He might have said that it was the submarine, except for... Well, the submarine would be further down, and wouldn't vanish like that.

'Tell me if you spot anything else,' Mac said, and went back up onto the deck.

'Does nobody wear any decent clothes in the future?'

Hercules, talking a little too loudly, studied the rail with something akin to disgust.

'Well, we're in a charity-shop, so the clothes won't be...' Jason trailed off. The clothes represented in the little charity-shop were in fact fairly normal specimens. 'But please, please stop calling it the future. People are looking at us strangely.'

'People have been permanently looking at us strangely,' said Pythagoras, rather too cheerfully. 'I would not let it bother you.'

Ariadne brought over a long blue dress that was in fact very pretty and shyly showed it to Jason. He nodded and said that she would look lovely in it – which she would, but he didn't have the heart to tell her that it was more of a party-dress, and not much different from the one she was already wearing. 'You can try it on if you want,' he said, pointing towards the changing-room at the back of the shop.

Meanwhile Icarus was looking at the jeans on one rail. 'These are like the ones you wear,' he said to Jason. 'Aren't they?'

'Well, those are women's jeans, actually,' said Jason lamely, casting a glance towards the girl at the till, who was pretending to ignore them. 'The men's trousers are over here...'

His friends had accepted a good deal of futuristic things much better than Jason thought they would. The food they weren't especially fond of, except for potatoes and chocolate (the latter had been praised by all of them), but they didn't mind it; the style of houses they rather admired, and Jason had refrained from telling them that actually, this was an unusually pretty fishing-village and that most places weren't quite as nice; and they had even got used to the idea of everything working by electricity, which wasn't, admittedly, as strange to them as the use of magic in their own time. But clothes...

Eventually each of Jason's companions had tried on and bought clothes that they could put up with, and Pythagoras had also managed to persuade Jason to let him get an old maths revision guide. They left the shop then and headed for the little supermarket, which was tucked behind the row of seafront shops so as not to spoil the idyllic view. The others had not yet been to the supermarket, and Jason was slightly worried that he might end up spending more money than usual, but luckily they kept mostly silent, for they did not know most of the foods. They ended up buying quite a lot of fruit, though, because they recognised and liked quite a lot of it.

After that they walked along the seafront back to the house; Jason, seeing that the Scapha was not in the harbour, looked out to sea, but could not see the ship. They stopped briefly then, all of them staring out over the waves, feeling a little more at home, for much the same view could be had standing on the walls that surrounded Atlantis.

'But will we ever see that view again, I wonder?' asked Ariadne, her voice tinged with the heartache that all of them, even Jason, felt but hid.

'At least we're all here,' Jason said. 'It would have been much worse if we had all been separated.' He smiled bravely round at his friends; Ariadne and Hercules smiled back, understanding, but Icarus's eyebrows furrowed and his face seemed to fall dramatically. He turned so that they wouldn't see the tears that threatened to spill from his eyes.

Jason looked quizzically at Pythagoras, who merely mouthed the name Daedalus. Jason's eyes widened slightly and he found himself regretting his comment.

'Come on; we'd better be getting back,' he said simply; and all of them, their mood dampened rather, followed him up the hill.

That evening Icarus found Pythagoras in the tiny living-room, curled up by the fire with his maths textbook; and the room was filled with music that sounded bizarre to his ears.

'What is that?' he asked, trying to find the source of the noise; his eyes eventually settled on Mac's old record-player, which stood on top of Jason's rather newer CD player.

'Jason calls it a record-player,' Pythagoras explained, looking up from the book with a smile. 'It plays music.'

'That much was obvious,' said Icarus chuckling. 'But I've never heard music like that before.'

'Jason said it was classical music or something. He says we might like it more than modern music. It is rather nice.'

Icarus could not help but agree: the rich textures of the music were interesting and unusual, quite unlike anything he knew. Then he sat by Pythagoras and put his arm awkwardly around him, reading over his shoulder.

'You will probably find this dull,' laughed Pythagoras, closing the book.

'Perhaps.' Icarus leaned against Pythagoras's shoulder. 'Could you stay here, Pythagoras? For the rest of your life, I mean?'

'Only if you were here.'

Icarus smiled vaguely. 'But could you? Do you like it here? Don't you miss Atlantis too much?'

Pythagoras could sense where this was going. 'Probably not as much as you do.'

'My father...' The lump in his throat choked him for a moment. 'I want to go back, Pythagoras. I really want to go back.'

'I know...' Pythagoras embraced him with both arms, and they sat there in silence for a bit, finding solace in each other's company. 'There must be a way. I am sure of it. I shall find one.'

'And I presume it will involve triangles,' said Icarus, managing to laugh despite the tears that fell at last from his eyes.