‘What the fuck was that!’ Triss’s thoughts came in loud and clear.
Odessa just kept looking at Rhys, floating there in the water without his head. Dead. And then she looked past him, down into the darkness. She could see something down there, something small, and greenish-grey, and slowly getting bigger. She felt nothing but a sense of complete awareness of her surroundings.
‘I think it’s coming back,’ she thought to Triss unemotionally.
Odessa did not immediately move. She kept looking at that spot, just past Rhys, her eyes no longer able to fixate on him. On his body.
Whatever it was, it was coming for them.
‘What’s going on?’ Nico thought at them.
‘There’s something... something...’ Triss trailed off. ‘We need to go up. We need to get help.’
But Odessa was still watching that circle. It would be here in less than a minute that was for sure. They didn’t have time to decompress.
‘No, we need to go down.’
‘What?’ Triss asked, her mind voice laden with confusion.
‘There’s nowhere to hide if we go up. We need to get in the tunnel.’
‘What?’ Triss looked rapid fire up towards the surface and then down to the tunnel they had first entered and then back again.
Odessa didn’t wait. ‘Come on.’ With that last thought she dove down toward the curving tunnel that would take them back into the other shaft, and she hoped that whatever this was, it wouldn’t be able to follow.
She didn’t look back but when she popped out the other side Triss was right behind her.
‘We need to get to the surface,’ Triss thought at her.
‘But not that way,’ Odessa thought back. ‘We need to find another way. Chaser found another way.’
‘Dess,’ Triss used her nickname, perhaps to soften the blow, ‘Chaser is... I don’t think Chaser...” But Triss couldn’t complete her thought.
Without consultation or consideration, Odessa took the tunnel that Hoots had said that Chaser had taken. Chaser was alive. She was sure of it. Chaser had been in worse scrapes than this. He’d once told her that the tattoos on his back were the number of times he’d escaped death, or in his words ‘found life.’ He was like a cat with nine... She paused as she relised how many marks he was up to. Okay so he wasn’t like a cat, but he was definitely alive. She was sure of it, just like she was sure there was another way out.
Triss was still following. Odessa didn’t think. She didn’t feel. She just moved on instinct.
She reached it, the cathedral Chaser had talked about. The room was large and there were several places where thin strips of rock connected the floor to the ceiling. She looked around the vast room So where would Chaser have gone from here?
The answer was obvious. The other side of course.
‘ODESSA!’
Odessa stopped and turned to look back at Triss. The dark opening they had come through loomed just behind her.
‘We need to go back and down.’
‘What?’ Odessa had expected her to say they needed to go back and up.
Triss explained. ‘We need to get back to the main shaft. There were other tunnels through to it from the side shaft. If we go down far enough, maybe if we come out in a different place and stick near the wall that thing won’t notice us. Maybe if we wait for it to go past and once it thinks...’
Did it think?
‘It was so fast,’ Odessa replied. ‘Can you use your telekinesis that fast?”
‘I don’t know, but we don’t have another option. We need to get out of here, notify the authorities, and get help for Nico. And I don’t have a lot of air. I’ve just blown through way more than I should have.’
Odessa hesitated. She knew Triss was right. She glanced in the direction she thought Chaser had probably gone. Then she looked around at the rest of the cave. She paused as her light grazed one area of the ceiling. There was a shimmer there, almost like... a surface!
‘Hey Triss!’ Odessa kicked up toward it.
A moment later she felt air on her face. She was in an underwater cave. It wasn’t large, and there weren’t any other exits that she could see, but there was a small rocky beach. She clambered up onto one end of it but she didn’t immediately remove her regulator. She needed to check the air was safe to breathe first. An air pocket was no good if all it contained was carbon dioxide, or worse.
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Usually Rhys carried a gas detector while Bob, with his firestarting, sort of counted as an emergency backup, but given the potential complexity of this cave system and the opportunity for free gear, Rhys had made them all carry one. Odessa had never been more glad for his tech obsessed preparation than she was right now.
Triss emerged from the water while Odessa checked the air content. She pulled herself right out of the water, sat down next to Odessa on the small rocky outcrop, and yanked her feet up close, well away from the edge of the water.
‘Are we good?’ Triss finally thought.
‘Yeah we’re good,’ Odessa replied in thought even though a second later she’d pulled her regulator out of her mouth and could have said it out loud.
Triss removed her own regulator.
For a full ten seconds each of them just sat there, side by side, breathing heavily and eyeing the water.
“Shit,” Triss remarked in a volume barely above a whisper.
“Yup,” Odessa agreed.
“What the fuck?”
“Yeah.” Odessa sighed. She still felt kind of numb.
“What the fuck do we do now? What the fuck was that thing? ... It ate Rhys.”
“...”
‘Nope,’ Odessa thought but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. It was true. She had seen it for herself. The image was seared into her retina. Every time she blinked she could see his body, just floating there without it’s head.
“Okay, we gotta relax. Don’t panic,” Triss said.
Odessa didn’t speak. She was too busy processing.
“We’ve got air. We’ve got time. Not a whole heap, but enough. We just have to think.”
Odessa nodded but she still couldn’t speak. Her brain felt stuck.
“Dess?” Triss put a gentle hand on her knee. “You alright?”
Odessa nodded. It was a very over-exaggerated nod. But Triss’s touch had brought her back to her senses. She picked up a small, loose rock from beside her. It was smooth and round and cold. It was what she often did if she ever found the world too much. Whenever she’d overcommited to things and felt like she was in danger of drowning, she’d grab an object and she’d focus on it, put all her attention into that one little stationary thing. She let her senses fixate on it completely.
Smooth.
Round.
Cold.
And kind of slimy. Slimy in a marvelous kind of way. In a ‘I can’t believe this thing exists’ kind of way. That was real. And feeling it meant she was alive and if she wanted to feel more things like that then she needed to stay alive.
She nodded. “I’m alright,” she told Triss.
“Okay. Good. We just have to focus on what comes next.”
Triss’s voice was cool and calm. She sounded so level-headed. Odessa was glad she was here.
“I’m sorry,” Odessa told her.
“For what?”
“I think I was kind of an arse to you when we first met.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t like you much at first either. I think I was kind of jealous actually.”
“What?”
“I’d seen your videos. Seen all the crazy shit you’ve done. Stupid crazy shit. Risk your life kind of shit. I thought you were an idiot.”
“Mmm.” Odessa frowned.
“But you’ve also done things I could only dream of. You push boundaries you know and inspire people. I’ve been diving my whole life. I mean, I still think some of the shit you do is stupid but it’s also brave, and in a way I think that’s true of anyone who's ever done anything worthwhile. You have to be fucking stupid to do something no one else has done, at least a little bit.”
“Well, thanks, I think.”
Triss nodded. With another glance at Odessa she remarked, “So you like my brother huh?”
Odessa groaned.
Triss gave a soft laugh. “Well, what say we get him and us out of here?”
“I think, that sounds like a plan,” Odessa agreed.
“Okay, so how do we do it then?”
“This is going to sound like a weird question, but what’s a goblin? Was that a goblin?”
Triss looked momentarily taken aback. “Uh, I don’t know. I missed that lesson in bio class. Sometimes dad would take me out to go diving during school hours, if the weather was good, which it often was.”
Odessa started laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’m stuck in an underwater cave with like the world’s best diver and the one thing that would be really useful to know is what that thing that just tried to kill us was and you don’t know because you skipped school that day to go diving.”
Odessa kept laughing for another whole minute while Triss just looked at her with a baffled half-smile.
Finally she regained her breath. “Sorry, maybe that wasn’t that funny, but if we’re about to die I think I’d rather spend my last breaths laughing than crying you know?”
Triss smiled. “You’re a funny girl. And not the worst person in the world to be stuck in a cave with. And I’m not the best diver in the world by the way. You might be the best free-diver though, at least out of the humans, and maybe the girl witches too.”
Odessa took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said more seriously. “We’ve got our dive knives, and you’ve got telekinesis, and it hasn’t found us here yet, so it probably doesn’t know where we are. Maybe if we do what you said and go out through one of the other tunnels and keep our backs to the wall and our knives out then we’ll be alright. Gods, I wish I had Rhys’s watch. We’ve been up and down and my watch gives an okay decompression estimate but I’m sure a more accurate one would save us a couple of minutes of sitting like ducks in the water.”
Triss nodded. She checked her own watch. “How long is yours giving you?”
“20 minutes, and then some. Not counting the swim back through we need need to sit for 4 minutes 48 seconds at 6 metres, and 16 minutes at 3 metres.”
“And nowhere to hide.”
“Worst comes to worst, decompression sickness is probably better than being eaten alive,” Odessa remarked.
Triss nodded slowly.
“The sooner we go the better,” Odessa reminded her. “The less time we have to wait.”
“What’s the plan for the surface? Let’s say we get up there and we get up there too fast, what do we do first? No wasting time.”
“Hoots will be there.”
“What if she isn’t? What if she’s gone back to her tent or to the bathroom or she’s gone off somewhere with her grandson. Worst case, no one’s there, what’s our plan?”
“The satellite phone. It’s still set up, mostly.”
“How do I use it. Explain it to me now, in case you’re unconscious.”
“It’s easy. You turn it on, the button’s obvious. Adjust the antenna until you have a signal. It might take a few minutes-”
“There’s got to be a faster way.”
“It might be instant. There’s no cell signals though so our only other option would be driving all the way into Riftgate.”
“How do I know if there’s a signal?”
“There’s a strength indicator on the screen, like a cellphone has. Then you just dial a number and press ‘send.’ After that it’s just like a normal phone. You should hear ringing, and there’s volume controls. Easy.”
“Okay.”
“What if... what if that thing can walk on land?”
“Then we’re fucked. I don’t know. Get in the car and drive. Worst case. I’ll fight it, you go for the phone.”
“Okay, sure.”
“Ready?”
“Read-”
Odessa cut herself as a familiar white-haired head emerged from the surface of the water. At first, Odessa was relieved but her relief quickly turned to confusion as she realised the the old grandma wore no dive gear, no tanks, no regulator, not even a swim suit. Her skin was a strange pale green-grey under the light of their headlamps.
“Hoots? How did you get in here?”