I had left them on, thinking that something to protect my feet and give me extra purchase on the glass would be no bad thing, but as my weight swung out over the water, I felt the sole of my supporting foot slip against the sharp edge.
I gasped, and my fingers tightened desperately on the glass in front of me. If sheer willpower could have held me steady, I would have made it. I felt one nail break, then two—and then the glass seemed to be pulled out from between my scrabbling hands with a suddenness that left me unable to do anything—even scream.
I felt the wind against my cheek for a brief, terrifying instant, my hair flapping in the darkness, my hands still clutching at the air—I was falling, falling backwards towards the fathomless waters of the fjord.
I hit the blackness of the sea with a sound like a gunshot, a fierce, smacking blow that knocked all the breath from my lungs.
I felt the air bubbling from my lungs as I plummeted through the stone-cold chill, I felt the icy water strike through to my bones, and as I plunged deeper into fathomless black, I felt a silky current rise from far below me, grip my feet, and pull.
- CHAPTER 33 -
I didn’t scream. I didn’t have time. I was twenty, thirty, forty feet down in icy black water before I had time to draw a breath.
I don’t remember what I felt as I fell—only the bone-cracking smack as I hit the sea, and the paralyzing cold of the water. But I do remember the gut-churning panic as the current seized me, deep, deep below.
Kick, I told my legs, feeling the breath sob in my throat. And I kicked. In the black and the cold, I kicked, first because I didn’t want to die, and then as the black cold began to grip, because there was nothing else I could do, because my lungs were screaming and I knew that if I didn’t break the surface soon, I would be dead.
The current pulled and tugged at my legs with slippery fingers, trying to drag me deep into the darkness of the fjord, and I kicked and kicked with increasing desperation and despair. In the dark, with the swirling currents of the fjord all around, it was almost impossible to tell which way was up. What if I was driving myself further into the depths? And yet, I didn’t dare stop. The instinct to survive was too strong. You’re dying! shouted a voice in the back of my head. And my legs had no other response except to kick, and kick, and kick.
I shut my eyes against the salt sting, and against my closed lids lights began to spark and shimmer, terrifyingly close to the shards of light and dark that fragmented my vision when I had a panic attack. But amazingly, unbelievably, when I opened my eyes again, I could see something. A pale, luminous shimmer of the moonlight on water.
For a second I almost didn’t believe it, but it was coming closer . . . and closer, and the tug of the current on my body was loosening, and then I broke the surface with a breath that sounded closer to a scream, water streaming down my face, coughing and sobbing, and coughing again.
I was very close to the hull of the ship, close enough to feel the throb of the engines like a pulse through the water, and I knew that I had to start swimming. Not just because it was totally possible to die of hypothermia in really not-very-cold seas, but more urgently because if the ship started moving while I was this close, nothing short of divine intervention would save me, and I’d had bad luck enough these past few days to make me think that if there was a God up there, he didn’t like me very much.
Shivering, I trod water and tried to get my bearings. I had surfaced at the front of the boat, and I could see the string of lights at the quayside and what I thought might be the dark shape of a ladder, although my streaming eyes made it hard to be sure.
It was hard to make my body obey; I was shaking so convulsively that I could barely control my limbs, but I forced my arms and legs to start moving, and gradually I began to swim towards the lights, coughing against the waves that slapped my face, feeling the chill of the water striking through to my bones, forcing myself to breathe slowly and deeply, though every part of my body wanted to gasp and pant at the physical assault of the cold. Something soft and yet solid bumped against my face as I swam, and I shuddered, but it was more with cold than revulsion. I could worry about dead rats and decaying fish when I got to shore. Right now, the only thing I cared about was surviving.
I could not have fallen in more than twenty or thirty yards from the quay, but now it seemed to be much farther. I swam and swam, and at times I could swear the lights of the shore were getting farther away, and other times they seemed almost close enough to grasp—but at last I felt the rusted iron of the ladder bang against my numb fingers, and I was climbing and slipping and slipping and climbing up the ladder, trying not to shiver loose my grip as I hauled my wet and shuddering bones up the rungs.