Five hundred miles off the southern coast of Western Australia, anchored within the wind-whipped expanse of the Great Australian Bight, sat the decommissioned limestone quarry of Eucla.
Before the deluge of Phase 1, the quarry had been a sunken amphitheater of pale calcarenite, yawning hundreds of feet into the subterranean crust. When the seas rose, the outer coastal shelves had submerged, but the geological accident of the Nullarbor karst plain had worked an engineering miracle: the inland quarry pit had flooded, forming an isolated, crystal-clear lagoon ringed by two-hundred-foot sheer white cliffs.
Tucked into a horizontal undercut seventy feet above the lagoon's waterline was an ancient, dry cavern system known only to speleologists before the world ended.
Inside the cavern's central gallery, the air was sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, completely dry, and carried the clean, powdery scent of calcium carbonate.
