A strange transformation overtook her. Every part of her contracted. She became a dark lens with the slit of light as her iris.
She reached it. She felt irradiated by warmth. And then—as if her mind had suddenly fused and she’d rotated into another, gleaming dimension—the cleft yawned. Not a cleft. The narrowest side of a fully propped-open hatchway. Dear lord. So frozen with fear her peripheral vision had narrowed to a shred, she’d nearly missed her escape. She swam for it now.
She lay on the aft deck as if gutted, feeling loosened inside, depleted as if she’d just given birth to herself. Bubbles poured off the hull from hairline fractures—her recently spent breath still seeking an exit, as if another her were left behind. But some of the bubbles gained force and shifted. They travelled in a straight line along the corridor toward the bow. Faint light flickered the same course. Jesus god. She rose to her knees. Silt catacombed up from the door below the deck. She crawled again and when she reached the side of the wreck dropped back down. In between the cascading waves of muck she found Rand’s line now tied to the outside railing and threading inside. Where he swam, seeking her out and using his line in a basic safety protocol—don’t get lost in attempting a rescue, don’t end with two deaths instead of one. The realization fanged in her—she should have run her own line before entering the corridor, and not gotten lost to begin with. At the very least, once lost she should have used her reel—attached by a clip to one of the stainless rings on her harness—to tie to something inside before searching for the exit. That way she wouldn’t have risked getting more lost. With an effort now she tacked her mind back to the main fact of the moment—her husband. Still inside, still probing the darkness for her.
She forced herself to make touch-contact with the filament. She needed to re-enter, locate and retrieve him. But debris continued to billow around her and, fighting the irrational urge to hold her breath, she froze. And then the line between her nearly frigid thumb and index finger suddenly jerked violently and she let go and crabbed back.
He exited, silt steaming from him. They ogled each other as if they’d each stuck their heads in a massive socket. She lost all sense of where she ended and he began.
The feeling quickly passed. His features contorted behind his mask and his bulk seemed to gain mass. She stuck out a paw and, heaving into her reg, launched off the hull and soon passed the wheelhouse, the mainmast. She barely startled when he overtook her near the forecabins, no comment. Gone.
She reached the rope. Like an oversized umbilicus, it led to the surface—to the buoy, the boat. She extinguished her main light. Instead of ascending she lurked in the semi-dark, oddly here, she thought, as if she were still trapped. As if part of her were still deep down, inside the wreck. What if she stayed down? What if the part of her that was here re-entered the wreck? She could join her other half, nestle into some forgotten closet and curl in for the count. Suckle her tanks dry while drowsing thanks to late-stage hypothermia’s illusion of warmth. Worse ways to go, she thought, shaking so hard now from the cold she thought her bones might break. She listened to the wreck creak—it seemed as if it were chirruping toward her. Nothing else was, at least. Probably the other divers had long ago made their way to the boat. Rand wouldn’t be there yet though, not with his long decompression deficit, a lengthy one like hers. But if she waited here long enough, adding to her deco, with any luck she’d miss him.
She checked and rechecked her gas supply and then, little option left, finally began her ascent. No rapture, no glory. Just ninety and then seventy and sixty feet. At fifty she reached her first decompression stop according to the display on her computer. She held onto the rope, hovering face first and parallel to the now-invisible bottom, while she off-gassed some of the surfeit of nitrogen in her bloodstream. No getting bent. At least there was that. A few dazed minutes and she continued to her next stops, resting in ten-foot increments for increasingly longer periods. At twenty she swapped her air for the O2 reg the crew had run out from the boat and clipped to the line to aid in swabbing the unwanted gas from her circulation. She performed her air breaks at fifteen-minute intervals, changing from one reg back to the other. Her computer cleared her for ten feet. Last stop, more than an hour’s worth. Hang time. She jiggered unthinkingly in the eerily glowing water, vacantly observed sunlight spindle down. So the weather had improved though rumbles and slaps echoed from the tug as steel battered waves. She needed to pee, badly. She switched gases like clockwork. Finally her computer cleared her. Open wide, she thought as she broke the surface and entered the burning sky.
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