Then a voice I don’t recognize says, “I’ll come with you.”
It’s Jillian. A bright, cheerful Jillian. She pulls on the little fastener at the top of her clothes, like Beckett did, and the cloth splits in two. I wonder how they do that. Beneath the loose clothes, Jillian has on a tight-fitted kind of tunic, very short and of a thin, dark cloth, no sleeves, and leggings that don’t actually have legs. She’s small, and very curvy, and it’s not all that much to wear. I look back and see Beckett, who must have been lying full length on the flat stone, now sitting up on his elbows.
Jillian smiles, big and confident, and steps toward the water. I put out a hand.
“What?” she snaps, and I’m a little relieved. This tone seems more natural.
“Only walk in water when the rock is solid below your feet,” I tell her. “Never step in loose stones. Or sand.”
“Oh? And why not?” She’s back to cheerful.
“Because it could be sinking sand.”
“And what does sinking sand do?”
“Sucks you down and drowns you.”
She smiles again, puts a delicate toe into the water, and pushes. “Solid,” she declares, and goes in up to her knees. “And what about out here, where it’s deeper? How do you know what the bottom is like there?”
“I don’t,” I reply, kicking off my sandals. “So I think I’ll swim, instead of sinking to the bottom to find out.”
I wade out and dive beneath the surface. It’s not as warm as the baths in the city, but it’s not cold like bathing Outside, either. I let the water slide by in a vast, black dark, and it pushes back the memories.
When I come up for air, Jillian is treading water a few meters away, and Beckett is stepping out of his baggy clothes, the glasses already set aside. Coming in with us. I push back my hair. What he wears underneath is much like Jill’s, only a little longer. How do they manage to make cloth fit so snug against skin on Earth? I can’t imagine. But I Know he must have been doing more than learning history, because only the Outsiders of the fields look like that.
I duck back beneath the water again, before Jillian catches me looking, and wonder if I’ll be going back to this again, in my memory.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t.
I run my fingers through my hair, letting the water flow through, and when I come back up Jillian has moved near me, almost close enough to bump legs, and Beckett is swimming toward us, slow, with a glowing jar in one hand.
“Don’t drown our light!” Jillian warns. But he doesn’t seem worried. He’s grinning, huge, holding the jar half in the water.
“Try not to make any waves,” he says, “and look down.”
The jar sends a wide, circular beam of light through the water, which is not black after all. That was only a reflection of the darkness. The lake is clear, and when the surface stills, far below our kicking feet, I see a bottom made of crystals, hundreds, thousands of them in squares of varying heights, white and luminous. Every now and then a crystal that is more delicate, pale green and glittering, drifts up from the others, its ends splitting again and again, looking more plant than mineral. It makes me feel enormous, like I’m looking down at a planet from above.
Beckett moves the light this way and that, showing the different formations, and then he says to Jillian, very low, “What does it remind you of?”
“Los Angeles,” she breathes, and his smile gets bigger. I don’t Know what this means, but Beckett sighs and lies back in the water, one arm out, the other balancing the light jar on his stomach. A floating lamp. The light puts his body in stark relief, and I can see a bruise running the length of one arm and down his side. He looks chiseled out of stone. He closes his eyes.
Then Jillian says, “So, Samara, how long have you been training to be a physician?”
I tear my eyes away from Beckett, to Jillian’s big blue gaze. On guard. “I’ve finished my training.”
“Oh? How long did it take you?”
“One hundred and eighty-five days.”
“Really.”
Beckett’s eyes are open, his brows down. “Jill … ”
“So how many dislocated joints have you set before now?” she asks.
“None,” I reply. “Before his.”
“Oh!” she says, eyes wide. “I’m surprised, then, that you’d risk someone’s ability to walk, when you’ve never even practiced.”
I look her in the eye. “I heard the procedures and I have seen the drawings. That is training.”
“Without practicing.”
I’m not sure what I’m being accused of. But I am definitely being accused.
Then Beckett says, “What’s that?”
“What?” says Jillian, instantly distracted.
But he’s already swimming through the dark, away from the shore, the light held high, slowly revealing the cavern wall. Or what I thought was the wall, but it isn’t rock, or at least not that we can see. The wall is a tangle of roots, thick and twisting, reaching down from a ceiling that must be very close to the surface. Some of the roots have grown almost horizontal, seeking a clear path to water, others wending their way down to brush the surface. Drinking.
I swim into the range of Beckett’s light and touch the hanging wood, run a hand along the smooth skin, pull down and feel it bend. Fern. And I smile. At a memory. A good one, this time.
“Outside,” I say, “I’ve seen the children playing on fern roots, when they reach out like this for the water.”
“What do they do?” Beckett asks.
“Bounce on them, before they jump in.”
Now there’s nothing but mischief in the grin, and he’s already found an opening in the root tangle the right size to tuck in the jar. “Oh, Beckett,” Jillian sighs. But he’s pulling himself out of the water, up the jumble of roots until he finds one growing outward from the rest, about a third of the way up. He gets his hands on the root and hangs from it.
“Like this?” he calls. His body is stretched, long and sculpted, the root bending dangerously with his weight. He’s trying to pull on it, to make it bounce.
“No,” I say. “You should … ”
But there’s no need to finish the sentence. His wet hands slide off the end, and the splash when Beckett hits the pool seems disrespectful in the quiet. He comes back up, smiling and spluttering.
“So, not like that,” he says, hair in his eyes.
I shake my head. “I’ll show you.”