Blue Field(13)
She took the hit like a dial-twist to static—atomized flight into silt, then full-stop in a grey fizz. No up, no down. She vibrated blindness. Took a moment to realize how hard she sucked her reg. So she knew—still breathing, still here.
Here but she wanted out. This instant. The urge struck to strip free from her gear. As if that was what trapped her here. Another instant and she regained some of her reason. The way in, the way out. Think, she thought from some pit deep in her brain. Think hard or die. Had any thought ever been clearer? Think and live.
For a second she relapsed, panted with want. Mom, Dad. But they were gone to pieces with nothing to put them together again.
Breath gurgling like something wounded, she fought her way back to that stone centre in her skull, its pure-cold imperatives. She willed herself to slow her breathing so that more thoughts could enter her head. They rooted there, enlarged her, pushing against the prison of her panic as her sense of possibilities grew. Will what you want to see, she told herself. Live! And so she groped at the hoses fastened to her chest, vented her wings— and with a bang discovered floor. And so knew up from down. A start. She stretched an arm. Nothing, and with it the sense she might thin herself like an ever-diminishing, unrecalled ghost. She smothered the thought. She located her belly—her body, still here—and crawled forward not knowing where forward might be, but searching at least, making a new starting point. So she inched along. Nothing and more nothing. Then wall. More wall. She nearly wept with wall. And when it disappeared she nearly cried in rage. Room? Stumble into one and increase the already frenzied silt and get more lost, breathe her tanks dry. And just thinking she choked again with fear, her mind a derangement of shrinking origami.
And so thinking she refused to think more. Just count, she urged herself. Breathe in three seconds. Three out. Here were her gut and arms and legs. She spanned both arms. Wall and then wall. Her chest vast as air. All she needed.
Then another topple through space, until a sliver of emerald stayed her.
12
Light. The above-world filtering dimly down through a crack in the wreck. She wallowed toward it. Only when she closed in did it register that the chink angled sharply, maybe a whole foot. Not much but she’d take it. Undo her harness, shed her gear. Reg gripped between her teeth, push her rig through and then squeeze herself after. Finally out, don her rig again for the swim back to the rope and make her ascent. She’d survive.
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.