instead rose and fell craggily, a kind of volcanic rock sharp enough to cut him to ribbons should he slip. Muted colours dotted the shelves and crannies, while a school of spotted eels, each over a fathom’s length, slithered up from a crevice and shot away from the bell’s descent.
The scale of this prehistoric underwater world dawned on him in blunt jabs to his sense of the absurd. He recalled the startling creatures young Billy had described from his book-leviathans with names he couldn’t remember, didn’t want to remember. Their measurements were enough.
Verity sat on the moon pool’s brass rim and tapped his shoulder. “Embrey, before we go…” her unblinking gaze appeared softer somehow, more exposed, “…I’d like to thank you for volunteering. Very brave.”
Well, well.
“Be careful down there. I…we’d all be glad if you made it back in one piece,” she added hurriedly.
“So would I.” He rested his shivering hand on hers. So cold. So soft. So…unexpected. A thrilling wave curled through him. He felt he could shrug his gear off with a single breath if he should see her in peril, as though it were no more than a rain cloak. He’d never thought of her as vulnerable before. On the contrary, she was the flintiest woman he’d ever met. Where had this sudden urge to throw himself in harm’s way for her come from?
“ Enda nawa, Djimon,” she said.
The cool African handed her a helmet. “Hurry back, Eembu.”
“Drinks are on me later,” Embrey said feebly.
Djimon clanked Embrey’s helmet into place and knocked on the dome to signify it was ready. The sudden isolation slivered, as though his brain were physically imbibing a new experience. He’d skin dived in the Mediterranean before, even sat in a prototype moon rocket in its hangar as a youngster, but he’d never felt quite so…encapsulated. As Djimon helped him slide into the moon pool, the quickening whuh, whuh of his breaths seemed as alien to him as the seascape below.
The cold hit. He clenched from head to toe, but the fear of where he was going to land held his eyes wide open. He watched the sharp terrain as he sank. A few feet that way, no that way… Being lowered like a worm on a hook wasn’t quite how he’d imagined it beforehand.
His boots settled on a solid ledge. He stumbled forward but remembered to hold his head upright. Verity landed several yards to his left and immediately pointed him toward an hourglass-shaped crevasse ahead. The Empress’s spotters had glimpsed something resembling a wingtip on the other side of that gap. It might be a long shot-the lake bed was murky at best, tough to discern when viewed from the surface-but he was certain the Hatzegopteryx had sunk in this vicinity.
He overstepped his first stride and ended up hopping sideways to keep balance. Verity wagged her finger at him, then demonstrated the correct walking posture-to lean forward, head ever-so-slightly bowed, and take unambitious, almost shuffling steps. He copied and gained proficiency in no time.
They leapt across the neck of the hourglass and, barely lit by the bell’s lights, pressed on across a flat ledge. Towering stalks appeared on the edges of darkness, their bulbous fronds wavering as though to some ancient aquatic rhythm. Embrey’s pulse hammered when he realized his own shadow was blackening his path. He tapped Verity on the shoulder, then pointed to the pack of flares in her belt. She lit one and tossed it at the forest.
A colossal form blazed into view among the shoots less than thirty feet ahead. Embrey saw its sharp teeth first-big and curved as Persian daggers. Endless rows of them. He recoiled too quickly and head butted the back of his helmet. Shock, not pain pulsed wetly through his skull. The creature didn’t move from its place of ambush and neither he nor Verity shifted a step to encourage it. Christ, it’s crocodilian jaws alone, partially agape and waiting, had to be well over ten feet long. Resembling a shorter-and-thicker-necked plesiosaur, it had four large paddle-like limbs and a short tail. But that mouth-unhinged-appeared ready to swallow the flare’s light entirely.
Who moves first? Who dares?
Billy would have a name for this leviathan. Billy had the dinosaur bible. Well, Embrey had a name for it too. Several unrepeatable names hurtling around with hot gasps inside his helmet.
The cold seeped into him anew while they stood. A school of small fish flittered close, swirling twice around the flare before they seemed to sense danger and dashed for the cover of darkness. Still the dinosaur waited, its tail wafting gently. Several tiny fish picked at its giant teeth and gums-the brashest scavengers Embrey had ever witnessed. But the predator didn’t seem to mind…rather, it appeared to enjoy the attention, its paddles twitching as though it were ticklish.
Its tail swatted to one side and he flinched, fearing the giant was about to rouse. He spied a metallic glint on the rock behind it instead.
Reardon’s clock!
He nudged Verity and she acknowledged the discovery with a scowl and a nod.
Your move, Captain.
The flare faded and died before Embrey had a chance to swallow. A net of nightmares descended upon the lake bed. He tried to make out the monster’s shape but couldn’t. Through the blackness, dread in the deep grew both infinite and intimately close.
Verity?
Suddenly, their dilemma intensified tenfold. If they retreated now, the waiting giant might change its mind and kill them. If they stayed put, hoping it would leave, they may not see it come or go, and the wait might be indefinite. Would that he could hear Verity’s thoughts right now. This was her domain after all.
She lit a second flare and tossed it away to their right. Heart in mouth, he watched her creep in the opposite direction, over twenty feet to one of the massive stalks. Thereon she flanked the leviathan under cover, inching toward the mechanism from shoot to shoot. But her oxygen hose pulled tight against the stalks. It scraped away a lather of green mulch, and he feared either the monster would react or the action might saw through the delicate plants, toppling them onto the beast.
Still the predator didn’t move. Embrey ducked under Verity’s hose as it pulled tight across him. She was at the end of its tether. Had she reached the clock mechanism in time? Indeed, could she even see it?
Another flare blazed inside the forest, near the dinosaur’s hind paddle. Please know what you’re doing, Verity. She tossed it away from the monster.
Before it landed, the lake burst to life. Dozens of large coin-shaped fish, each almost ten feet long, wrenched the stalks apart, barely avoiding Verity’s taut hose. Embrey kept low but found himself wheeling backward in the wake of a stupendous current.
The leviathan shot out after the coin fish and vanished.
He pressed his hand to the iron weight over his heart. “Verity, where are you? What have you done?” A part of him knew it hadn’t been an accident-she had to have tossed the flare deliberately at the fish, to incite this chase-but it was no less reckless, and he would give her a piece of his mind when they returned to the bell. “Whatever happens, follow my lead”, she’d told him. Bloody stupid.
He took her advice and guided himself using her line. She almost bumped into him carrying Reardon’s kaleidoscope, her blase wink reminding him that while he was out of his depth, Verity Champlain most assuredly wasn’t.
Thank you, God, on all counts.
To his surprise, she tugged him back into the forest and bade him follow her to a small glade where the latest flare had landed. She lit another.
As it fell, a flat rectangular shape glimmered on the jagged rock. Overgrown and a little discoloured, it appeared to be made of…but no, that was impossible.
He looked at Verity. She gazed back with no answer. But there had to be an answer.
Where the deuce had a metal panel that big come from?
“Another six! Luck smiles on me today.” Reardon moved his counter up the Snakes and Ladders board, barely missing the head of a big serpent that would have taken him back to square one.
“Bloody rigged, I reckon,” groaned Billy-the poor lad hadn’t reached past the second row. He rolled a two, which got him nowhere. “So how’s about your machine, Cecil?”
“What’s that? You want to know how my machine’s doing?” Cecil had grown extremely fond of the boy, but sometimes his regional brogue was hard to decipher, especially for a man who’d never even visited northern England.
“Yeah. I mean apart from t’ missin’ piece, have you figured it out yet? Why it brung us so far from ’ome. ’Ave you fixed it?”
