“It’s a cocoon,” Luke said. “Except these ones are hard—a prison. The Fig Men will never be able to escape. Put them on display as a warning to any other monster that might wander along. It’s not every day that you can hold a monster in your palm.”
Zach set them on his nightstand. They were still there, in the room Luke had left untouched since the day his son had gone missing—
A shadow fell over Luke’s shoulder, snapping him back to reality. The minipiranhas scattered, zipping under the Hesperus in a silvery flashing of scales.
“You about ready?” Al asked.
Spider legs scuttled up the lining of Luke’s stomach.
2.
CHALLENGER 5 WAS SUSPENDED from a miniature sky crane. Its hatch hung open like a hungry mouth.
Luke carried only a duffel bag with a change of clothes and a cable knit sweater. Plus a toiletry kit with a toothbrush, toothpaste, a stick of deodorant.
Where will I spit my toothpaste? he wondered. There couldn’t be a drainage system. No conventional toilets, either—one flush and the pressure would probably cave in the Trieste.
I’ll swallow my toothpaste, he thought. And pee in a bottle.
“I’ll get in first and take the cockpit. You’ll sit a little lower.” Al smiled. “It’s a good news, bad news scenario. Good news is, you get the better view. Bad news is, your head’s going to be parallel with my behind.”
Luke grinned despite the quivers that kept rippling through his belly. Al ducked through the hatch. Luke realized for the first time that the vessel was designed to dive vertically: they’d be arrowing straight down into the black.
Luke ducked and stuck his head inside the sub. The sight reminded him of the cockpit of a commercial jetliner, only much more cramped.
“Hop in,” Al said from inside, already flicking switches. “You’ll have to tuck your knees, and be careful not to touch anything unless I ask you to.”
The webbing of Luke’s seat sagged like a hammock; Luke sank into it so deeply that his chin nearly touched his knees. Instrumentation panels sat a few inches off each shoulder, their uncomfortable electrical warmth bathing his face. His body tightened instinctually, his muscles and posture contracting; it felt a little like being trapped at the bottom of a village well, except there wasn’t even a view of the sky. Al sat a few feet above with her back to Luke. She craned her head down.
“Comfy, uh? Wish I could let you pop an Ambien and sleep through the descent, but that shit does a number on your blood—added pressure, yeah?”
Luke had never considered how it might feel to be buried alive in a buzzing, blinking, high-tech coffin, but he had a good sense of it now.
The hatch closed with a satisfying thunk—the sound of a luxury car door slamming shut. A gassy hiss was followed by a volley of pressurized tinks!
Al said: “It’s a high-pressure vacuum, drawing out every bit of excess air. Then the seal will engage.”
A workman appeared in the porthole window. Luke couldn’t hear anything outside now. The sub must be noise-proof. The man’s hands clutched one of those high-tech caulking guns; a puffy crust of foam began to encircle the window.
“They’re foaming the seals,” said Al. “The entire vessel will get a coating, except for the bank of high-intensity spotlights running down each side. You okay?”
“Yeah,” Luke said. “Just… this is really happening.”
“Try to relax. I’m kicking on the air recycler.”
Cool air pumped around Luke’s feet from pinhole vents. It had the same chemical tang that puffed from the vault containing Westlake. Luke was worried that his lungs would lock up, refusing to inhale the foul stuff.
The crane lifted the sub and pinioned it over the water.
“Buckle up,” Al said. “The crane operator’s got a heavy hand.”
As soon as Luke’s belt clicked, they dropped. His stomach leapt as it would on a roller coaster. They hammered the sea’s surface. Water climbed the porthole. Luke’s breath came in shallow gulps.
Breathe, he chided himself. You’re safe, totally safe.
His final surface sight was of a new moon hovering in its eastern orbit: a waxen ball whose light plated the slack darkness of the sea.
Then they slipped under and were gone.
3.
AL FLICKED SWITCHES and twisted knobs. Her hand entered Luke’s peripheral vision, toggling a joystick near his ear.
“This tub’s got three motors, but they’re strictly for stabilization and maneuvering,” she said. “We’re carrying three thousand pounds of lead weights. We just drop. When we want to surface, we’ll start shedding those lead plates bit by bit.”
“How fast are we falling?”
“About thirteen hundred meters per hour. I’ll increase that as the currents subside. Once we enter the Mariana Trench, three miles down, there’s no current at all. Then we’ll go faster—the proverbial hot knife through butter.”
Some part of the vessel whined. Al made a minute adjustment, and the unpleasant noise stopped. Air bubbles scrolled around the window, delicate as those in a glass of champagne. The darkness was as absolute as the bottom of a mine shaft.
Luke said, “Christ, that’s desolate.”
“That’s the sea at night,” Al said, laughing a little uneasily. “Don’t you worry, it’ll get even darker. You’ve never seen the kind of dark we’re gonna encounter.”
They were already beyond the point of the deepest free-dive; Luke figured it wouldn’t be long before they passed the point of the deepest scuba dive. After that they’d reach the depth where oxygen toxicity set in: the nitrogen levels change and the air in a scuba diver’s tank turns poisonous. Finally, they’d enter the lung-splintering depths where humans simply didn’t belong.
A fizzy pop shot through Luke’s veins. He felt a subtle expansion between his joints. It wasn’t painful—more like being tickled inside his bones.
Al modified their trajectory. The submarine stabilized.
“Nitrogen buildup. You feel it? We’ll hang out here a minute,” she said. “We’re in the ‘Midnight Zone,’ by the way. Complete darkness. We’ll stop again at twenty-five hundred meters—the ‘Abyssal Zone.’”
The tickle subsided. The sea was a solid wall of black through the porthole. There was nothing out there. The bleakness crawled inside Luke’s skull.
“Check it out,” Al said. “Light show coming off your starboard side in five, four, three, two—”
It started as tiny, vibrantly glowing specks. They accumulated slowly, drifting on the current. A hundred became a thousand became a numberless quantity. A swarm of neon creatures a hundred feet wide, giving a sense of depth to the ocean in the same way the sweep of a flashlight will reveal a huge cave.
Some were small as grains of sand; others were the size of no-see-ums; a precious few were the size of summer fireflies. They glowed warmest amber. Their bodies brightened and dimmed like embers in a fire.
“Phytoplankton,” Al said. “They’re bioluminescent. You’ll see more of this kind of thing the deeper we go. Until we get too deep… then you won’t see a damn thing.”
The plankton flurried like flakes of snow. Just like the night Luke met Abby.
In that moment, Luke was back in Iowa City with his ex-wife—except she wasn’t even his wife then. She was twenty-two-year-old Abigail Jeffries of Chicago, Illinois. He met her at an intra-faculty mixer for seniors at the U of I. It happened that very night. Luke fell madly in love with Abby Jeffries. All parts of her, even the parts that remained unknown to him then.