The Fires Beneath the Sea (A Novel)

Chapter 8

8.

She concentrated on keeping a hand on the rope but pointing her head and shoulders downward. Curiously the water got warmer as she descended, or it felt that way to her, at least, which was the opposite of how she’d expected it to be…there was so much color swirling around her that she couldn’t see anything else at first—a lovely bright aqua color. She saw why the verse had called it fire, the night of fires beneath the sea.

The salt load made the seawater hard to see through, though: it was a mist of fine particles, glowing and swirling around her. Not like the clear water in a turquoise swimming pool; more like blooms and currents of light.

She and Jax had wikied the plankton, microscopic pictures that showed their shapes. They were beautiful, even the poisonous ones—lacy and delicate, shaped like acorns in some cases or diamonds or stars. Of course you could never see that unless you were looking at them under a microscope, she thought, but it was strange to think of those all around in the water, minuscule organisms, life forms entering her body and Jax’s along with the water molecules—tiny beings like whole worlds, sculpted and fragile-looking though in fact they were powerful enough to give out this amazing glow…

And to make her and Jax pretty sick, possibly. If they were the toxic kind.

Hopefully they weren’t.

She felt pressure on her head as she went down, but then it seemed to subside. Jax was ahead of her, further down; she could just make out the wake that rose from his kicking fins. Down further they swam, and she found she was thinking of her mother—would her mother somehow appear down here, gliding out of the dim fathoms like a mermaid? The dream had put the notion in her head—her mother swimming up through the turquoise water, reaching for them through the luminous particles.

Then she realized the thought was actually more alarming than comforting. She wanted the same mother back she’d always had—the real mother she’d always known, exactly the same as the day she vanished, not one iota different.

In the dream her mother’s long hair had floated around her as though it was submerged…almost as though her mother, it occurred to her suddenly, had drowned.

No. Just because her mother had called her a visionary didn’t mean that anything she thought of had to have some kind of deep meaning.

A dark mass loomed up: kelp, or seaweed that looked a lot like kelp, curling out of the depths. It had pods, rubbery pods on the end of stalks that were like long tentacles, waving beneath. The algae all around them lit up the underwater world, and she could see the bottom—sand littered with dark debris, with unfamiliar shapes.

Jax grabbed onto something at the bottom and looked up at her—a hard object, partially beneath the sand. He motioned for her to come over too, and she grabbed it, her feet above her head, looking down and around, her free hand pushing the water. It was a piece of wood, maybe a rib of the boat.

They were floating in a half-illuminated country, dim in some places and then shining from the phosphorescence. The brightness receded into a murkier distance if she tried to fix her eyes on something far away, but the foreground was clear. Around them were the ship ruins—pieces of wood and metal, she thought, though she didn’t know how the wood could be anything but rotten after three centuries underwater. A few small, dull-colored fish swam in and out and around.

There were rocks, too, piles of boulder-size rocks like small stone mountains on the sandy floor. From their cracks rose twisting columns of seaweed, stems emerging from the outcroppings where they were anchored and flowing overhead into a dark-green canopy. Their stems and leaves swayed gracefully with the slow currents near the bottom of the ocean. They were like forests.