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The pilot.
Nothing about him suggested that he might be alive. He was floating face up, arms motionless, legs submerged, and I’d seen that crash. No one could have survived that. But the second I saw him, my exhaustion, my emptiness, my complete and utter depletion were forgotten, replenished with fresh energy and pulsing with purpose.
I felt that same pull—that urgent, desperate, unexplainable need—that I’d felt on the cliff.
Jump, it commanded again.
And just like before, my body responded without question.
Compared to the thirty-meter plunge I’d just made, the leap off the cave’s entrance felt like nothing. I was already freezing, so my muscles and lungs didn’t even seize from the cold. And I wasn’t running for my life this time.
I was swimming toward his.
The waves were relentless, but so was I, diving under the surface between breaths where the water was easier to cut through. Even though it felt like I was swimming in place, for every meter of progress I fought to make, the current carried him three meters closer to me.
The need to wrap my arms around him propelled me. I pictured myself embracing him as I hauled him to safety. Anticipated the moment when my chest would be pressed against his, when his body would be draped over mine. I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t know this person. I didn’t even know if he was still alive.
In fact, I was so focused on reaching him that when I came up for my next breath, I didn’t notice the massive swell of water surging toward me until it was almost too late. Diving beneath the surface just before it crashed over my head, I felt the weight of the churning water shove me violently into the deep. It tossed my body like a rag doll, rolling and spinning me toward the rocky sea floor, but when it finally passed, I somehow found my way back to the surface.
The pilot did not. I knew it before my head even breached the water.
The ship was now completely engulfed in flames, illuminating the choppy black sea and airplane wreckage floating around me, so it only took a split second for my eyes to verify what my gut already knew. Then, with a deep breath and a renewed sense of determination, I dived back under.
He was down there somewhere, and I was going to find him. His presence was a warm breeze on my skin—I could tell which direction it was coming from even though I couldn’t see it. Chasing that sensation, I drove myself deeper, muscles pumping, lungs burning. And with every passing second, I felt less and less in control of my actions.
After everything I’d survived that day, everything I’d already lost, I was going to drown in the sea, trying to rescue a stranger who was probably already dead. And there was nothing I could do to stop myself.
I’d barely had a single conscious thought since I’d jumped off that cliff. My heart and mind were a pair of traumatized voids, vacant hostages inside a body that was propelling them straight toward the ocean floor.
My lungs begged for air, and my nerves twitched with frantic commands that my muscles ignored, but a spark of blue light behind my closed eyelids distracted me from the fear. Again and again, it flashed, like lightning during a storm, and in those split-second illuminations, it was as if it was showing me a parallel universe.
Flash.
Blue light spilled over the sea floor, revealing a treasure trove of trinkets and jewelry rather than seashells and starfish.
Flash.
I was standing on the bottom instead of swimming toward it, weighed down by some invisible force.
Flash.
The blue glow surrounded me in this alternate reality, pulsing and surging, taunting and teasing. It was the force holding me captive, and it was enjoying itself immensely.
Flash.
I was going to inhale. I could feel it. At any second, I was going to lose the battle between my need to breathe and my will to live.
Flash.
With my jaw clenched shut, my muscles jerking violently from the cold, and every cell in my body screaming in panic, I pulled a ring off my finger and held it out to the greedy blue glow. An offering, a plea, in exchange for my life.
Flash.
With a swirl of bubbles, the ring disappeared. The light disappeared. The invisible weights around my feet disappeared. And when I reached into the void it’d left behind …
He was there.
Even with my eyes closed and the sea blacker than midnight, my arms slipped around his waist as if I could see him in the dark. The size and shape of his body felt perfect and familiar against mine, and I pushed off the sea floor without realizing that I was even close to it. The pilot and I shot up effortlessly, as if propelled by another invisible force, but the moment our heads broke through the surface, only one of us gasped in relief.
