Plus she’d lost sight of Rand.
She directed her beam toward her chest. Darkness exploded. She gazed further down the inky well and picked out the faint gleam of a beacon fading fast. Thirty feet below her? Rand, breathing air at the limits of where air should be breathed—and here her mind dismounted. Not here. In white veils trailing hidden streams, where a gondola floated beneath crumbling aqueducts, a barrel-chested boar sang, striped boater at a rakish angle. From a nearby tavern thrilled a wolf-whistle coloratura. She disembarked here and entered through a thick oak door. A colony of grey cats with cricket tongues greeted her, chirping notes like chipped tesserae in an ancient mosaic. She tried to swallow but her throat was a dry bone no drink could help. What could? Hurry, she thought.
She again cast her light. The aureate slope was like an old painting fading around its edges. She stroked her beam up and down. Urgent. Please respond. Zip.
Options, please.
Please?
She could still figure that Leo was somewhere above. She’d last seen him bailing on his dive in the vicinity of a hundred-seventy feet. The boat meanwhile had been left unattended, an illegal move in any book—no one to make sure the anchor didn’t break free, no one to prevent the former fishing tug from surging away and capsizing, from colliding with other night-plying vessels. No one on board to radio for help in case of an emergency. No one left. No help.
Rand’s light expired.
She gorged, fattened on fog. Blood sirened through her veins. Her heartbeats a sortie of hobgoblins. Down she went after him. Two-thirty, god-forty. Special delivery. She no longer shivered in her golden cocoon. No longer anything but a delivering machine.
She called it at two-fifty-seven. She felt the decision as physical, neural-glandular, pineal as a third eye. Pure primitive. She turned and faced the broken slope and commenced her ascent. It took forever. She saw it could be her unstinting present, that it pre-existed her, like a mold she would pour herself into for the rest of her life. So she would live after all. Some weepie. As she went she periodically scanned behind. No sign. Her head slowly cleared but she mostly ignored it though she continued to understand the need to attend her gages, her pace. She noted a tickle in her left eye. It hung in her sight like a sac of hope and she cursed it. Why hope now? She shuddered, clinging for a moment to the rock face, and then relief hatched in her belly and swarmed her chest.
She waited. Eventually Rand passed her with no notice and she climbed again until, somewhere in his vicinity, she made her first decompression stop for a minute at a hundred feet. She continued trailing, switching to her decom gases from extra tanks slung at her sides. By the time she reached thirty feet she and Rand hung together in a balmy fifty degrees, having risen through several thermoclines. She had to pee. Otherwise with little sense of urgency she prayed that the boat and Leo waited on the surface to ferry them back. That they’d all gotten away with something.
At twenty feet she and Rand rested against a massive limestone outcropping riddled with holes the size of quarters. Hang time, major deco. They turned off their beams to conserve the batteries and lay in darkness to avoid attracting swarms of the underwater life that existed at these warmer, shallower depths, the tiny pale freshwater shrimps and nits that already fashioned a twittering corona around her and Rand—the two of them larger bugs sparking in a dark field. Occasionally they plied a small backup light and checked their instruments and when they did the illuminated limestone became a crayfish condo—at each of the thousand windows, antennae pricked, the crustaceans waved at visitors once giants but now nearly fish food. How close they’d come.
Part Six
38
She woke drenched and threw off the spread.
Bright spring flowed in the open window—finally. Spring, or something like it.