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“The water?” he suggested.
Ellie froze as the demanding little itch in her brain grew stronger.
“The water,” she agreed thoughtfully as she moved another step farther into it. “The water is… clean,” she finished, startled at the word. She turned back to look at Adam in surprise. “It’sclean. If this was just rainwater, it would be thoroughly fetid by now at the end of the dry season. But it’s not. It seems relatively fresh, and…”
She trailed off as the itch turned into a buzz, rising in its nearness and urgency.
“Sinkholes,” she said as she turned around slowly. “Cenotes are sinkholes. Sinkholes result from cave systems. Cavesystems.”
She raised her head to Adam with a sudden and shocking hope.
“We need to find out if there’s a current!” she declared.
“That’d be easy if we had anything that floats,” Adam returned.
Ellie reached into her pockets, feeling through the assorted useful things she had collected. She pulled out the broken pencil.
“Aha!” she declared triumphantly.
She set the pencil down on the surface of the water. It bobbed there. The slightly chewed-upon yellow paint contrasted with the darker surface of the water.
Ellie held her arms out to warn Adam back as she stared down at the little sliver of wood.
“Stay perfectly still, Mr. Bates.”
“I’ve had my tongue in your ear,” Adam cheerfully reminded her. “Pretty sure we can drop the ‘mister.’”
Ellie shot him a glare.
“Be quiet!” she ordered.
“Me talking doesn’t do anything to the water.”
“You are distracting me,” Ellie grumbled with her eyes on the pencil.
“Not as much as I could be,” Adam returned with a wicked grin.
Ellie ignored him. It was more difficult than it should have been, since Adam’s threat had done exactly what it was supposed to do, filling her mind with all kinds of delicious notions of exactly how distracting he could be.
And then she saw it.
“Bates!” she whispered excitedly.
“How about Adam?” he countered.
She ignored him, her attention riveted on the pencil.
“It’s moving!” she exclaimed.
She pointed at where the slender yellow bit of wood was drifting ever so gently toward the wall as it passed between them.
Adam’s eyes narrowed. He zeroed in on the trajectory of the pencil, tracing the line of it back across the water until he locked onto a stretch of dark stone on the opposite side of the cenote.
“Stay here,” he ordered, and then dove.
Ellie hissed in protest, startled by his sudden disappearance.
He surfaced on the far side of the well. She could just make him out in the gloom.
