how little of that light actually passed into the ship’s interior, where she could just barely make out Rachel and Alexander as phantom shapes beside her.
To be reassured it was them, she drew her flashlight away from her body and scanned the beam across their torsos, careful to keep it away from their eyes. Rachel gave the “okay” sign and signalled for a return to darkness. It was as if this room were Rachel’s gift and needed to be appreciated in natural light.
Profound gloom, Miranda thought. Still, she pressed the light beam into her stomach and was a little surprised when Rachel reached over and switched it off. She felt she had been admonished, until she saw her do the same with Alexander’s. Okay, she thought, it’s your show.
Miranda swung slowly on an imaginary axis below her rising column of bubbles and gazed around. The distorted angles of a room out of kilter sorted themselves out as her mind assimilated their defiance of logic. It was an oddly liberating experience and while her heart was slowly subsiding to no more than a murmur she looked for Rachel, wanting to signal her appreciation.
The other two had drifted to the lower side of the room. As Miranda peered at them through eddies of darkness, she was suddenly blinded by a flashlight flaring erratically, filling the chamber with shards of lightning before it went out. Miranda squeezed her eyes shut, veining the absolute blackness with strings of red, then opened them again to gaze through increasing swirls of silt at her friends hovering near the frame of what must have been a built-in bed. Miranda could see their bubbles intertwining in a weird configuration and, for an instant, she felt overwhelmingly lonely. She could hear voices through the water — that strange muffled parody of human speech when divers try to talk inside their mouthpieces. Then she saw one of them, the smaller, break free and move slowly toward her, coming up from beneath. Alexander on the far side was gesticulating in broad movements but the dark water, laden with particles of sediment, obscured whatever he was trying to express, and his voice seemed to come in disembodied fragments, almost like laughter.
Miranda’s renewed apprehension was immediately quelled when she felt Rachel’s touch on her ankle, then felt her hand slowly move along her leg as her friend rose up beside her. For a moment they were face to face but the dim opalescence from the portholes made mirrors of their masks and all Miranda could see was the reflection of her own mask, mirroring Rachel’s. Rachel pulled away, as if she were trying to find a better angle of light, then took one of Miranda’s arms in both hands and give it a reassuring squeeze as she drew closer again, until their merged air bubbles obscured their vision entirely.
Rachel slid her grip to Miranda’s wrist to stabilize herself while she adjusted her gear, reaching around and then straightening. To maintain equilibrium, Miranda pushed her friend gently away. She felt her wrist caught and tugged to break free. Whatever the entanglement, it was not an air hose or a BCD strap. She pulled hard and a narrow shackle of metal bit into her flesh through the shank of her glove and there was a slight give, as if she were pulling against a dead weight. She tried to turn on her flashlight but could not do it with only one hand; she tucked it into an armpit and managed to flick the switch so that the beam flared in a haphazard pattern across the upper reaches of the room.
Carefully retrieving the light with her free hand, she shone it down on the manacle around her wrist. She and Rachel were handcuffed together. Bewildered, Miranda followed the beam up Rachel’s arm to her face. Rachel’s face, even in the glare of Miranda’s light, revealed nothing. Miranda shone her light down and across at Alexander. He was handcuffed to a metal bed rail. He did not appear to be struggling, but clouds of bubbles surged from his mouthpiece, making it seem like his head was exploding in slow motion.
Miranda brought the light back to Rachel, tracing down her body until she saw that Rachel’s ankle was shackled to another iron rail, effectively enchaining them both to the ship. A series of throttled spasms caught at her throat, yet Miranda’s mind seemed clear, as if she were an observer, a sympathetic witness to her own imponderable predicament. She shook her manacled arm and felt a strange surge of affection as she realized Rachel was dying.
Suddenly, her gut seized in a series of lacerating convulsions; a maelstrom of razor-sharp images raked the inside of her head. She too was dying. Survival instinct kicked in and panic gave way to shock and then she felt almost disengaged, again, as if it were all happening to someone else. And again reality took hold and her blood turned to ice, a jagged shaft of pain fibrillated between her lungs and her throat, her jaw and teeth, behind her eyes and into her temples. The pain helped her focus. She let the light zigzag across the bulkhead beneath them and discovered, close together, the other two flashlights, both turned off. Rachel must have intentionally dropped hers, then borrowed Alexander’s to retrieve it and, instead, secured him to the wall in the darkness. Miranda had the only light. Clearly, whatever was happening, it was not important to Rachel that they see each other. If this was a tableau of death, it was to be enacted in murky obscurity.
Rachel hovered beside her, very still. Miranda looked again at her face through her mask. There was a flicker of recognition, but neither terror nor pleasure. When Rachel turned to spill the glare from the glass, Miranda could see what might have been tears, and yet her features appeared oddly serene, as if her face were slowly turning into a death mask, changing from flesh into sculptured stone.
Miranda reached for the hose with her gauges attached. Their dive had been almost thirty minutes to this point. More than half her air was gone. She would breathe slowly and eke out the rest as best she could. Then she would die. She was surprised by her own composure. There was nothing to do, there were no options. She was cold. The icy tremor along her spine was a reassuring reminder that she was still alive. She breathed slowly, inhaling long deep drafts, releasing short bursts, a bit at a time until she was depleted, and then again, slowly, and again, and again. She turned out her light. To save the batteries. She thought she would like to have light at the end.
Morgan and Peter Singh stormed into the dive shop. A chill ran through Morgan’s entire body when the young man told them three cops had gone out on their own. Grave doubts about Miranda’s safety turned to gut-wrenching fear. Without understanding the urgency, the young man scrambled to get Morgan outfitted with dive gear, not even bothering to ask for his certification, while Peter Singh, flashing his Owen Sound Police identification, commandeered a boat from a couple of startled American tourists setting out to go fishing.
“You want me to come with you?” the young diver offered, excited by the prospect.
“No,” said Morgan. “Call the OPP, tell them what’s happening. Come after us pronto.”
“I don’t really know what’s happening. Is the Coast Guard okay?”
“Do it!” said Officer Singh. “Come out in their boat. We’ll need underwater backup. Morgan, do you know what Miranda’s boat looks like?”
“Yeah, and what direction it went. Let’s go!”
They skimmed over the water in the direction they had been told. There were a number of boats in the offing. They scanned for the trawler, then Morgan realized they might easily have set out in one direction and switched course out of sight of the harbour. He gazed along the coast and in the distance could make out a boat on its own. It was a gamble. If it wasn’t them, they would waste precious time, perhaps the minutes of struggle before death. He was certain, now, that Miranda would die if they did not get to her soon. chapter eighteen
The Wreck
Miranda could feel Rachel floating in limbo at the end of their tether beneath them. She switched on her light and checked her gauges. The pressure-gauge needle was grazing the red zone. She had fewer than fifteen minutes left. She sighed into her mask. The depth gauge remained constant. She was hovering at forty-five feet, fifteen metres; the higher the better, the less air consumed. She smiled to herself, despite shivering from the cold. She struggled to remain fully aware, keeping a delicate balance between panic and shock. She gazed about in the shadowy chambers of her mind but found nothing of interest. Her life didn’t flash before her eyes. She felt cheated. She wanted to be solemn, to die with grace and dignity, but small jokes kept intruding.
She lifted her manacled wrist into the murky light in front of her mask. When she turned the flashlight beam toward herself, it was Rachel’s hand that dangled lifelessly in front of her eyes. My God, she thought, she’s dead! But she could hear the echoing rumble of her breathing beside her. She would finish her air soon. Miranda worked their joined arms around and contemplated chewing through her wrist. Better yet, chewing through Rachel’s. Is it cannibalism if you chew and don’t swallow? And what if the flesh is your own? She realized that she had not thought about why Rachel was doing this. Rachel was her friend. She couldn’t bite Rachel.
Miranda reached about, inside her skull, looking for clarity. It hadn’t occurred to her before. There was a dive knife attached to her BCD. She withdrew the knife. It was titanium with a serrated edge. She could saw off her hand. She held the knife out in front of her, then extended her wrist. She would have to cut close to the joint and pry through the cartilage and ligaments. There was no way bone would yield in the time remaining. She tried to
