“We will,” I said then and thought about Miri once with a sharp stabbing pain, and Matteo looked at me.
“Buddy—”
“I promise you,” and I was moving toward the main panel, my body little enough my own at this point that I barely felt aware of it. “I promise you we will before the power goes.”
And Matteo was moving now, breaking out of his temporary freeze to come toward me. “Buddy, please,” he said, and his hand moved across the outer edge of the border made by the torch circle to take hold of my arm. “We can go,” he said, and I looked at his fingers, the blistered black skin that bubbled up toward the nails and the blank space toward the outermost point of the fist where nothing remained. I looked at his fingers and I said, “But you have to understand this, don’t you? When you went ice fishing with your dad and you knew what was happening and you ignored it. When you told me you said you didn’t want to ruin it, you didn’t want to go just yet.”
He held on to my arm, worked his mouth without producing a sound. Out of the silence there rose once again the voice I knew Jelka had been hearing, the voice I hadn’t let her explain.
“I promise you,” I said again. “We won’t lose power. I promise. I just want to know,” I said, without really meaning to say this part aloud, “I just want to know that it wasn’t for nothing. I just want to know what’s here.”
He didn’t release his grip on my arm, though he allowed me to move one step toward the panel and then another, his fingers loosening in the manner of someone dazed or briefly distracted, his face now turned toward the glass.
“I don’t see anything different,” he said, “even with the lights on. It doesn’t look like anywhere at all.”
I didn’t follow his gaze, thought instead about the slow deep salt of the ocean and all I knew about it, thought instead about the lights of the craft and moving away from where we were into something new.
“It’ll be OK,” I said, and tugged my wrist gently away from his grasp. He appeared to let me go for a moment before blinking, grabbing once again for my arm and pulling it back as his eyes moved down from the windows and back to me.
“No—” he said, his voice falling downward from his mouth like something dropped. He tightened his grip on my arm, pulled me back with a force that should have been painful but left me strangely blank. “We’re going to—” he started and paused again, his jaw working, raised his other hand in a gesture that might have meant anything.
“Are you going to slap me,” I said, and he stopped, dropped my arm, and looked at his fingers, and I felt my unkindness in the twist of his mouth but found there was nothing I could say to make it better. “I don’t—” I started, and then abandoned the thought, felt it slip from the upper drift of my mind to somewhere lower. Sunken thoughts, said a voice in my head that was not mine, and then I moved toward the main panel, ignoring the place where someone had smashed a segment of keyboard with a torch, preparing to wake up the main engine and pilot the craft across the ocean floor.
After this, Matteo did very little of anything, sat dumb as though unable to believe what I had said to him or what I was choosing to do. The craft responded to my controls with the ease of something that had never been out of commission, and I wondered with a semihysterical pinch of amusement whether we might simply have misunderstood the situation all along, taken a broken light for a craft that could not be moved. We slid through the water, the darkness opening out only into further darkness, the lights from the front of the craft and the sensors picking up a geography of irregular basalt, wide-open crags of rock that spoke to a broad crevasse—something deep and narrow into which we had fallen—and yet not one living thing. I’m not sure how long I moved us forward through this darkness, the strange emptiness opening up before us the farther we went. I remember now that I caught that smell again— the burning flesh, the rendering of something too hot to keep its form—though I am not sure if that is something I really registered or something I superimposed over the memory at some later point.
Come on, I found myself thinking, as I had while staring out into the blank wide blackness of the window and longing only for some struggle of life. Come on, I found myself thinking, give.
And movement, then, as if in acknowledgment. At last, a movement in the dark.
MIRI
When Leah came back, they called me at an odd time to let me know—three o’clock, too late for lunch, my gaze trained on a patch of carpet that seemed slightly lighter than the space around it. I didn’t realize at the time, but she had actually been back for two weeks when the Centre got in touch. We have been operating a cautionary quarantine, the woman on the phone explained to me, as I’m sure you would expect. I remember her tone as conversational yet curiously distant—distant in a literal sense, as though she was holding the phone away from her. The background noise was difficult to parse: a shuttling sound, a succession of jerkings and shudderings, as though someone was moving large pieces of furniture across the floor. You’re welcome to come and pick her up, the woman on the phone informed me. I had to ask her for an address and then to wait while I fetched a pen.