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“Ready, diver?” Marcus asked on my intercom.
“Ready,” I announced, then started walking toward the wall.
“Have you ever done this before?” Cepharius asked before I breached it, with a note of concern.
I was glad he was asking me, though, rather than rifling for the answer inside my mind.
“No,” I answered him—and Marcus came on my intercom instantly.
“Are we aborting this mission?”
I groaned inside the suit. It was going to take more practice to not say thinking-things out loud. “Sorry, I was talking to the kraken.”
“And that’s a sentence I’ve never heard before,” Donna chimed in.
Great, now everyone was in my head.
I felt a wave of Cepharius’s forbearance. “I will be nearby but quiet until you get your bearings.”
“Thank you,” I managed to solely think, and reached the water’s edge.
I willed myself not to hesitate as I crossed the line—but I couldn’t help but hold my breath as I passed through.
It was like stepping out onto the moon.
I stood there for a moment, letting all the silt my boots had kicked up die back down.
I was at the bottom of a shadowed plain. The lights on my suit turned on like headlights in a tunnel, but they only penetrated five feet of water in front of me, and my first two steps had already sent up obscuring clouds of dust. I took a few more, careful not to shuffle my feet, following the map the station was projecting onto my helmet’s internal screen, and left the clouds behind.
And now I could see I wasn’t entirely alone. I couldn’t have named any of the fish that crept up to inspect the umbra of my lights, or the snot-like slugs floating by. I wasn’t that kind of scientist, but it was amazing—magical, even.
And everything that was terrible?
I’d left all of it behind.
Half of the reason anyone did free dives was to feel like you were in another world, or outer space maybe, just away, away, away.
This feeling was like that, on steroids.
“All suit systems stable,” Marcus said in my helmet. “Including the diver.”
“Gee, thanks,” I snarked, but I was smiling—a real smile—so hard I could feel it, because I hadn’t had one in months.
“I am glad you like it here,” Cepharius’s thoughts rang out.
I’d almost forgotten about him. “Where are you?” I asked, and then tried to look around, swiveling my helmet from left to right.
“Your lights blind me. I am off to your side.”
“Oh!” I gasped, and moved to tap my suit’s controls, which were a line of sensitive buttons on my left forearm. A tentacle reached out to stop me, and I only barely bit back a shriek of surprise at seeing it.
“I will be fine. You need to see.” His tentacle paused before wrapping me again, and I viscerally felt the memory of his touch at my wrists and ankles. I wondered if it would always be like that, for as long as we were connected, but then tried to push that thought from my mind.
Small white dogs.
“Keep following the map, diver. Twenty meters forward, and ten to the right. You’ll have to go around a corner, there’s a rock formation between here and your destination,” Marcus announced, and I made my way carefully.
As much as I wanted to get to my discovery, I knew it was unsafe to rush under the sea.
