Page 118 of The Rising Tide

‘I’m losing him!’ Bee screams. ‘Help me, I’mlosinghim!’

She’s sinking again, too exhausted to keep herself afloat. Lucy scythes closer, but she’s still so far away. And now the water’s over Bee’s mouth, her nose. If she tries to take a breath, she’ll fill her lungs with the sea.

Abruptly, she sinks out of sight completely. Lucy takes a huge gulp of air – her ninth – and then she dives.

4

Silent cold.

The transition from sound to soundlessness is shocking, but the change from light to dark is worse. A few feet from the surface, the murk is so absent of definition it might as well be full dark. An ocean of water is beneath her and yet the claustrophobia is absolute.

She reaches out, touches Bee’s shoulder. But her friend is battling so violently that Lucy’s hand is knocked free.

An instant later she regains contact. Two hands this time – one on Bee’s bicep, the other on her elbow. And then she’s touching Fin. Lucy can feel her boy beginning to slip loose. She swims deeper, grabs his arm and snags a fistful of his top.

Bee loses her grip completely.

Fin sinks with an abruptness that catches Lucy off guard, nearly wrenching him loose of her grip. She kicks her legs hard but she’s upside down in the water. The movement merely accelerates their descent.

If she lets go now, even for an instant, it’s the last time she’ll touch him in this life. And yet by holding him from above, she’s merely following him into oblivion. Already, that vague grey smear has faded to black. They’re sinking into a void that grows colder with every metre.

The urge to fight her way to the surface is overwhelming. But if she abandons Fin to this, there’s no more life to live. Nine breaths she’s already taken to his one. She feels him bucking, tiny thrashing moments – knows that he’s drowning, that the process is almost complete. She folds her knees into her chest, curls her spine, nearly screams outher air at the agony from her broken ribs. Somehow, she wraps her legs around Fin’s torso. Once he’s secure, she releases his T-shirt and hugs him under his arms.

Pressure is building in her chest. Her ears fizz and pop. She straightens her arms, forcing herself lower, her legs no longer wrapped around Fin’s torso but the weighted line beneath him. Locked on, she feels in her back pocket for the filleting knife.

It’s gone.

Maybe it slipped out when she dived into the sea.

Fin is loose against her now. She knows his lungs have filled with water.

Down they sink.

A memory flares in Lucy’s head. Back onHuntsman’s Daughter, she’d cut strips of duct tape with the Stanley knife. Afterwards she’d tucked the blade into her top pocket.

In an instant, it’s in her hand. She saws at the binding around Fin’s ankle, but there’s so much of it and her panic is so great – and her oxygen so depleted – that she can hardly operate. Another thought pushes through the chaos. Why cut through the multiple layers around his ankle when only a single length attaches him to the weights?

Her blade doesn’t sever it on her first attempt, but two hard slices and she’s through. Detached, their descent is arrested. Lucy abandons the knife, feels herself rolling in the water. She clutches Fin close. Can’t work out which way is up or down.

Lucy kicks hard, propelling herself forwards, but a panicked part of her brain rebels, convinced she’s plunging deeper. It tries to communicate a thought.

Last of her air now. She knows she’s too far from the surface to reach it before she’s forced to breathe.

Katharsis, she thinks.Purification through tragedy.

If she surrenders and takes a breath, her purification will be complete.

Instead she reaches out, not with her hands but with her mind. She seizes that earlier thought fragment and examines it.

The flotation belt.

Teeth clenched, Lucy feels for the activation cord and yanks it. Even this far below the surface she hears the CO2cartridge fire. She senses something burst loose from the belt, inflating like a car’s airbag. It drags her sideways – except sideways, it seems, is actually up. Pain explodes along her right side, a thousand impaling spears. Lucy feels her head rolling. Knows she’s about to pass out. Hugs her boy even tighter.

Within seconds, the darkness yields to a little light. How fast they’re rising she can’t tell. She’s on molecules of oxygen now, fighting her diaphragm, fighting her lungs, fighting the instinct to breathe. At last she can fight no longer. The breath spools from her lips in a greedy gush of bubbles, seawater floods her mouth—

Fin, at the breakfast table, his bare legs swinging

—and suddenly the world returns in a paroxysm of sound and light. She’s drawing down air, half a lungful, before she sinks beneath the ocean once more. But it’s enough, just enough, and with a surge of fresh energy she launches herself back above the surface.

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