*
She waddled into the shallows. A kingfisher buzzed the low bank and crows pecked pebbles beneath him. Rand was already waist deep and bent over in the swift current, doubles riding huge on his back, stage bottles like torpedoes under his arm. He horked—a protracted gargling sound. Fuck, he yelled. Fuck, I’m strangling—and she removed the reg from her mouth and called, Wait, her voice rusty, but he gave a push toward the middle of the river and dropped from view. Bubbles from his breath-exhaust flurried on the surface for a second or two until the racing water annealed any evidence of him. She waded further in. Her ears whistled and popped and she felt thirsty as crestlets curled around her calves. She wanted to drink then shed her gear and sleep tight as an egg high out of the river, but what would she do with herself then? She passed deeper still into the river until she could no longer touch bottom, then she vented her wings and banged to the river’s floor where she hauled hand over hand along the rocks, mindful of the surge that might sweep her miles downstream. The tips of his fins emerged and disappeared from time to time. Finally she came upon him, a curiously again-hulking figure, wreathed in a clump of streaming water-weeds. Okay? Okay. Rock-rubble and bloated forest debris materialized in the gloom. He tied off to a log and turned on his main light. Then he disappeared limb by limb through a narrow slit at the base of the pile.
A rise, a fall. Dark and then bright. Inside, water so clear. And a violence of esses and zees and blade-sharp rock-shelves. False ingresses, she knew from having memorized the map. Fly-trap tunnels suddenly closing thirty feet or so in. Time wasters, potential victimizers depending on how stuck one got—but here, tied to his line-reel-line, was the permanent one he and Jane had reliably placed low along the middle of the main passage. For now, Rand himself nowhere in sight. He’d already moved on ahead.
She dragged herself in against the heavy outflow. Decent viz—rough gravel and coarse sand comprised the cave floor, a layer that settled quickly when disturbed. She arrived at the first of his staging tanks and hooked hers next to his. She passed a tee—another line, which veered into a decent-sized secondary passage. Past this, she passed his second-stage bottle, where she dropped hers. Then another tee slipped into view. Her lungs concussed and her head drummed in the current and now and then, when she stopped to check her gages, the current waved her back ten, twelve feet. Still she kept on, in and in. She drew alongside a young sturgeon, roughly three of its potential six adult feet. It lay wan and motionless on the bottom. Fearful, certain the eyes would be nibbled on and the anus and guts deconstructed—sucked how much she could just see it! the body loosening, breaking up—but unable to resist the temptation, she reached her hand to the creature’s bony plates, a design unaltered, aside from death’s untidying ministrations, since the Upper Cretaceous. No change for some, she thought. At her touch the fish twitched its barbels and roused sluggishly, only to resettle a few feet away. So sorry! her brain sang. Sorry to disturb.
On and on! At some point she’d cross paths with her husband but for now she enjoyed her own pace. Despite the current she felt unencumbered, a thing that counterbalanced the water pressing out—her own force an equal pressing. And so on, and when an hour and change passed, at a depth of fifty-one feet, she reached the wall collapse that marked the end of the line. Made it. Time to turn.
But somehow she’d missed him—and suddenly felt as if she’d swallowed some of the gravel bottom. She clutched an outcropping of sharp rock to steady herself. She reasoned that he must have taken one of the teed lines. Except she hadn’t noticed a marker at either line junction to indicate he’d done so, in accordance with safety protocols.
She waited for him to show. Shit, shit. Every dark scudding thing flew in her head.
And then there he was in front of her, or behind, depending. He seemed suddenly enormous, too large for the rock to hold him. Or for her to slip by. A paroxysm of sound exploded from his regulator, as if he were spewing crab shells, and he thrust his small underwater writing slate at her—identical to the one she carried, grease pencil attached, in a small pouch on her harness waist. The words took her long seconds to make out.
YOU ARE TO
FUCKING SLOW
TO EXIT