Never Have I Ever(90)

“Where’s Roux?” he asked me, quiet, as I came up.

I dropped my regulator out of my mouth.

“She’s with the Babbages,” I told him, but as I climbed aboard, I saw that all three Babbages were already sitting in the shade of the canopy, eating oranges.

“They came up fifteen minutes ago,” Winslow said. I hadn’t seen them pass us. All my focus had been on the kids, plus they could have come up the other side. Winslow was still talking. “Mark got low on air, but she had more than half her tank. He said she joined your group?” Mark had a good seventy pounds on her; he would have used his air up much faster.

“We didn’t see her at all,” I told Winslow.

Captain Jay was scanning the water. I turned, still in my gear to help Jay look, and so did Winslow. My mind was racing. The sea was relatively calm. If there were bubbles, they would not be hard to find. But there was nothing.

“Hey, where’s Roux?” Mark called behind us.

“What?” Maddy said. She’d just finished helping Luca out of his BCD.

I ignored them, looking over the site, still bubble hunting. My heart was pounding. A thousand different things were happening in my head, too fast to catalog or even comprehend. I could see only one thing true and clear: No bubbles meant no breath. No breath meant—

“She was with you,” Luca said. His voice had gone high, edged in hysteria.

Mark was talking, fast and defensive. “No, she went to join your group. You guys were right there. We saw you.”

“You left her?” Luca said, the pitch of his voice going higher.

“You were twenty feet away,” Mark almost sounded pleading, but I kept my eyes on the water, seeking.

No bubbles. No breath.

No Roux. I felt sweat break out all over my body, inside my wet suit. I’d dreamed of this, a world with no Roux. In my dream it had made everything so easy, but now her son was standing right behind me.

Mark was still babbling. “I swear, she was heading right to you when I went up.” His brother put a steadying hand on his shoulder.

“Stop,” Captain Jay said, firm and calm. “Everyone, put your head over the sides, all the way around the boat. Look for her bubbles.”

They hurried to obey, but the pros all knew that it was busywork. I checked my air gauge. Half empty, but changing tanks would cost me precious minutes.

“Since they came up, I’ve only seen one patch of bubbles,” Winslow told me on the quiet. I let that sink in, my emotions too mixed and loud to read. “We assumed it was all four of you. I’m going to gear up.” He headed for the cabin, moving fast.

I called, “Mads, get me a full tank from that rack,” then opened the storage chest to dig out one of Winslow’s wreck reels.

“I don’t see any bubbles?” Luca said, almost a howl.

“Monster, oh, my God,” Maddy said, hurrying to me with the tank, tears standing in her eyes.

“What does it mean?” Luca said, following her to me. Maddy turned to put her hand on his shoulder, and he shook her off, like an angry horse touched by flies. “What does it mean? We don’t see bubbles.”

Mark looked sick and stricken. We all knew what it meant. I was already sliding my fins on again. Winslow was back on deck, attaching his BCD to a fresh nitrox tank.

“If there’s not bubbles, how’s she breathing? Is she down there? Not breathing?” Luca said. His eyes, wide and terrified, streamed tears.

Either every minute counted, or I had all the time in the world. I took thirty seconds.

“There’s a chance she’s in the wreck,” I told Luca. “If she is, her bubbles are trapped inside the hull, okay?” He nodded, a little calmer. Calm enough to let us all do what we had to do. “Anyone here trained on penetrating wrecks?”

“None of us,” Leslie said, speaking for her group.

I said, “Then keep your asses on the boat.”

If Roux was alive, she had to be in the wreck. The last thing I needed was a herd of Babbages going in and getting stuck and lost and churning up the silt.

“You said not to go in there,” Luca said, as I shuffle-walked to the back.

Winslow was still gearing up.

I called to him, “I’ll take the east side, you go west,” and then put my regulator in.

“Got it,” Winslow said.

I could hear Maddy saying all the right things now to Luca, like a pro. “Because you’re not even open-water-certified yet. Monster’s penetrated wrecks a hundred times. Winslow, too. They know how to—”

Then I was splashing in, the extra air tank dragging me down. I gave myself more buoyancy and started a controlled descent, horror and a strange, giddy hysteria at war inside me. I breathed, tried to let the chaos and fear clogging the boat stay on it, high above me. I equalized, calmer and sharper with every foot I dropped. I left the spare tank clipped to the anchor line, then kicked away, heading down the east side of the English Freighter.

If Roux was dead, my heart did ache for Luca. That was a real, true feeling, and I clung to it. Luca’s father, the man he didn’t speak of, could well be the same man Roux was running from, violent and dangerous. If Roux was dead, that man would come for Luca. It would be awful for Jay and Winslow, too. They could lose their business, though they had done nothing wrong. I could lose my job as well, all because Roux had been reckless. I could not let any of this happen, if I could help it. I would not. But another thought slipped through, bubbling up unstoppably.