Watching Nora fade into the shadows, I couldn’t muster the will to move. For those moments, it was as if the connections from my brain to my limbs had been severed. I almost abandoned myself. I almost pulled out my regulator and drank my fill. But I couldn’t. Didn’t.
The numbers on my dive watch pulsed nineteen minutes, eleven seconds of oxygen left—but that fact did not set me in motion. Above my listless body leered a pockmarked ice beast, its twisted spinal column spinning off into the gloom, its massive jawbone glittering with fantastical teeth. Beyond the monster, stretching out into eternity, the ice ceiling dripped with blue and green stalactites. Forget above the ice, this is the Enormity, the truth no one talks about, the other earth, the fifth dimension, the underbelly of dreams, the inverse mountain, all of it unbearably exquisite and strange.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it. This astonishing ice metropolis. In my head Nora’s voice came: The biggest danger is getting so blown away by the beauty or weirdness of everything down there you lose track of time…
A muffled explosion as a berg split and crashed nearby. My ears banged; water shuddered around me. I opened and closed my jaw. A ringing silence followed; had I lost my hearing? I kicked and waved my arms like a newborn, rotating my body in the murk until I had no idea which way was up.
Seven minutes, twenty-five seconds of oxygen left. I stopped struggling. Floated. Breathed my rubbery air. Found my way to up: the glowing ice; down was the shadowy seabed.
I couldn’t let go of the thought I have to swim after Nora.
Precious seconds passed, indecision paralyzing me.
Five minutes, twelve seconds.
But of course I knew: Nora was gone.
I had to get the eels, or Sigrid would be gone too.
I focused on the trap.
Kicked down to it. Trapped behind the slats of the box and fine red netting: a boiling knot of eels. The bone-white rope drifted in the current. I caught it, tied it around my waist as it had been around Nora’s. Avoiding the serrated rocks, I swam parallel to the seafloor. The trap jerked me backward as if it were nailed down. In despair, I circled back to it. Sand and grit had drifted into the trap, weighing it down. I clawed it loose from the seabed, momentarily lost in a cloud of swirling sand.
Two minutes, thirty-five seconds.
I charged upward, grabbing at the frigid water and dragging it behind me with frenzied strokes. Still roped to me, the trap popped free from the seafloor, its drag like a body chained behind me.
Frantically I flashed my dim headlight up toward the underbelly of the ice. Green rings glowed everywhere.
But which is the diving hole?
I pictured it: a long oval shape, like a bathtub. Caught sight of it. Clawing at the water, scissoring sluggish legs, I made slow progress toward the glimmering beacon. The trap jerked along beneath me, yanking me back down with every upward thrust, the rope cutting into my waist.
Finally, I reached the pale green pellucid circle. Thrust my red rubber hand up, expecting air. Solid mass greeted me. Eagerly I felt around the surface. Had it frozen over? Impossible… Eyes leaking tears inside my goggles, I balled my hands into fists and came up hard with my knuckles. Only ice, several inches thick.
This wasn’t the hole! Only a thinning of the ice where some light shone through. The trap bumped up against my back, then floated past my face, eels churning.
Fifty-nine seconds.
Pushing up against the solid ice, I sent myself back down a yard or so. Had to see the geography of my underworld. I twisted my neck, trying to comprehend what I was looking at.
There were dozens of these glowing circles, these false holes.
It was only then that it hit me. The ice sheet above me was slowly creeping along, like a sky full of clouds in a swift wind.
That explosion was no calving berg. The Dome had broken away on its own ice floe.
And it was moving.
I kicked myself down a few more feet, dragging the wretched crate behind me like everything I’d ever dragged in my life, the great weight of my fears and phobias and grief and all I could not solve.
Forty seconds.
What is special about the diving hole? What makes it different from all these other rings of thinning ice? For Christ’s sake, Val, what?
I craned my head back, knowing I couldn’t wish any of the green circles to be the hole; all I could do was scan the rippling ceiling of ice for some sort of clue. Shockingly far away, a faint lavender light blinked on and off, on and off.
The flashlight I’d abandoned near the edge of the hole.
I thought, It’s too far away.
I’m going to die down here.
I kicked off toward the smudge of winking purple, the horrendous trap jerking me back half a stroke for each one I took.