Beneath These Waves

Chapter Six

The water isn't actually that cold.

It's not boiling or anything, but it's got a slight tinge of heat to it. So maybe the storms that wreak this area are tropical storms?

Still, the unease combats against my relief that the water isn't as cold as ice, it won't go away. It just keeps getting more intense. It's relentless.

Ser points towards the ship. It towers in the water, as if letting out one last scream.

Because the faceplates and the water interfere so much with sound, we've learned to speak in gestures, positioning of our fingers and flicks of our wrists. It's not sign language, far from it, just a sparse collection of motions that mean a specific word or phrase.

Right now, even if her movements is a little sloppy, Ser's saying: Let's go! Not one we use relatively often, because we're almost never in a rush. But now, we need to get this done as quickly as possible. I take a glance back at the submarine, the faded yellow body fills me with loss I didn't know I could experience.

Then I turn my head around and catch up the Ser and Cal, my arms gliding through the water. Swimming makes it a little easier to pretend, to pretend that things are okay. That this is something causal and relaxed, not my father's last dying wish.

Dad taught us to swim before we could walk, put us in tiny inner tubes and had us paddle around the puddle of a pond on the east side of the island. The pond was nothing like the ocean, our true love- it was stagnant and thick with algae, sickly green. But that's where we learned to make our motions fluid, where we learned to be like birds without breath.

If I close my eyes, it's easy to believe that I'm in a reef, somewhere peaceful, somewhere controlled. Somewhere that doesn't have a huge population of dead bodies, of the drowned.

We glide over to the ship, up to the mast, above the waving sail. It ripples slowly, guided by the current. I look down and assess the situation.

The deck is mostly bare, most of the cargo up here likely blown or knocked away, lost somewhere else. There's a trapdoor towards the front of the ship, where the figurehead sits.

A creak echoes through the water, remaining for too long. My hand flies to Ser's arm, and she shakes it off, even though I can see the fear in her own eyes.

I slowly drop down to the wood of the ship, to see if it'll hold. I tap my foot first, because usually if the wood is weak, it falls away the second it makes contact with something. But it holds, and soon I set about half my weight on it, still relying on the water to keep me semi-suspended.

I hold my index finger up and move my wrist in a circle, then lower my arm, meaning down here. Cal and Ser look like they're falling out of the sky, like oversized rain drops. I brace myself for their weight to be too much, but the deck still holds.

I take another scan, trying to calm my convulsing shoulders. The crow's nest looks like a spindly basket. I wonder if the person there was the first to go. A position that made you feel like you were on top of the world, ending up making you the first one to fall out of it.

There are a few splintery sections of the wood, vague but blatant once you spot them. Cal goes over to one of them, but doesn't step on it.

I point to the trap door, anointed with a rusty metal ring that was probably once gold or silver but is now a dull brown.

We haven't spotted any dead bodies yet. That's fortunate, but there's a thing about luck: the longer it lasts, the more likely the next moment will be your downfall, when something horrible strikes, undoing everything.