Eight men wake up to find themselves on a life raft in the middle of an ocean. They are stranded and alone, with no memory of how they got there, and no idea if help is coming. But they are not completely alone. As hours become days, as water rations dwindle and tempers fray, there stirs a threat more deadly than either sharks or each other.There is a shadow in the abyss beneath their feet. Watching. Waiting. Stalking eight men lost and adrift above the deepest trench in the world… Excerpt: It took too many attempts to grab hold of the sinking pack. And he looked too far down into what was beneath it. There were fish: hundreds of them. Thousands of them. And where the depths grew too dark, there was only the vertiginous threat of the unknown. He couldn’t see the bottom. What might have been worse was that he had expected to. And then suddenly there was something else: some terrible tremble in his mind. A black plain that moved across it—through it. Beside him. A keening scream that wormed loose of its restraints, opening his throat to the viscous dark even as it propelled him upwards. Back toward the sun-dappled surface. He broke through with a gargled cry that swiftly became a hacking cough. The safety pack dragging hard at his aching arm, he saw thrashing bodies and the black underbelly of the raft. While some pulled and pushed at it, most flailed in shouted panic. He saw one of them dive down and surface perhaps as many as a dozen times. Only when the raft righted itself with an almighty slap did he recognise the diver as Donnie, his shaven head swallowed by the raft’s belly before he was able to swim backwards out of its reach. Pete struggled back to the raft in an ungainly crawl, hauling pack and lifejacket behind, trying to forget what his mind had seen. Trying to forget the sucking black that had tried to split it apart. He managed to clamber back into his pocket on the third attempt. By then, he had already forgotten. The worst of it, at least, and that was all that mattered.