The tank-top-wearing engineer stood for a moment, one hand playing with the stiff fingertips of the welder’s glove on the other hand, waiting for the doctor to acknowledge her. When he didn’t, she sat next to him in Vitaly’s seat, staring at him until he looked up at her.
“I need to talk to you.” Her voice was serious, halting. “About Fatima.”
“You needn’t say anything. Everyone’s been very kind.”
“It’s important.”
“Alexis, there’s nothing—”
“Could you shut up for a minute?” She leaned forward cupped his chin, forcing him to look at her.
Hassan nodded, silenced by her outburst.
“I know your mother didn’t exactly take to me during the short time we knew each other,” she began. “She knew somehow that I… I could feel her watching me. Knew she didn’t approve. But she was your mother. When we were being hit with those depth charges, there was smoke and fire and electrical discharge. Things were going very wrong in the engine room. Worse than you knew. Your mother came in to help. She said Jonah sent her. Hassan, she was incredibly brave, did everything I asked, but then, we got hit hard and lost computer control. I needed to bypass the control system to switch to manual mode. I thought the electrical panel was dead. I told her to open it for me.”
Hassan squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. If couldn’t see her talking, maybe the words wouldn’t matter.
“I should have known it was still electrified.” Alexis looked down at her lap. “I didn’t check first. She didn’t know what she was doing. She wouldn’t have known the risks. I’m just so sorry.” She put her face in her hands and sobbed quietly.
After a moment, Hassan put his hand on her knee. “She was a scientist. She was not inexperienced with dangerous equipment.”
Alexis wiped the tears from her cheek and choked back another sob. “But… I can’t stop thinking about it, can’t stop seeing her face. Hassan, it’s my fault. It should have been—”
“Don’t you dare say it,” he whispered, his voice rough-edged with grief and anger and… and he didn’t know what else. “Don’t you dare say it should have been you.”
She looked up at him, her eyes brimming with tears.
“But it’s my fault—”
Overwhelmed with conflicting emotions, he sprang to his feet and towered over her, his face crimson with rage. “Why are you even still here?” he demanded.
Alexis stared up at him, eyes wide.
“I all but kidnapped you!” His voice got louder with every word. “Every second you are in my presence, your life is at risk. You have no business here. None! Go home, go back to your real life.”
Without thinking, Alexis jumped up, whipped off the welder’s glove, and slapped him hard across the face.
“Nobody talks to me like that!” She gripped the glove like a vise in one hand and pointed at his chest with the other. “You don’t get to yell at me. Ever. Or make decisions on my behalf. I got left on the Conqueror by accident. So what? You were just as surprised as I was. You’re not a mystery, Hassan. I could tell instantly that you were doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. So maybe I wanted to tag along at first, have myself a little adventure. Run away with a beautiful doctor on a stolen yacht, and go home with, I don’t know, a story none of my friends could beat when we talked shit at the hometown bars. But I’m not fucking stupid, no matter what you think.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid.” His voice dropped as his hand unconsciously touched the bright red mark on his face.
“But that was before Charles Bettencourt nearly succeeded in murdering all of us. And you want me to leave? Now?”
“I don’t want you to end up like—”
“You know the second I get off this submarine he’s going to come looking for me. None of us are safe while he’s still out there. You just don’t want me to be your fucking burden anymore.”
Hassan threw his hands up in frustration and turned his back to Alexis, unwilling to trust himself to say anything more.
“Fine,” she said. “Screw you, too. I’m sorry about your mother, whether or not she thought much of me. But next time you talk to me like that, we are done.”
The doctor didn’t sit back down again until the sounds of Alexis stomping away long since subsided.
“Ouch,” said Vitaly, interrupting the silence. “That was brutal.”
“Don’t pile on,” Hassan mumbled.
“She care about you,” said Vitaly, ignoring the doctor’s command.
“She’s just trying to stay alive like the rest of us.” Hassan’s whole body felt hollowed out, arms and legs like empty appendages. Despite Jonah’s courageous words, everything seemed so doomed. Maybe it was a fool’s errand after all, and he the fool. People like him and Alexis didn’t get happy endings, not with a man like Bettencourt chomping at their heels.
Avoiding Alexis would be difficult given the small size of the submarine, but becoming further entangled was not a good idea. He shook his head and started to walk away.
“Wait,” said Vitaly. “Don’t leave. I must show you important thing. Dive chamber has video feed, recorded to central computer. I think you should see this.”
“There’s a video recording of my swim outside of the sub?” asked Hassan. “When I disabled the transmitter?”
“No, no,” said Vitaly. “There is video of when you return to diver chamber. Is very important you see.”
Hassan didn’t want to see and said so. He was still acutely aware of the aftereffects — sore rib cage, lingering cough, the awful sensation that he hadn’t quite expelled the last of the seawater from his lungs. Regardless of his feelings, Vitaly cued up the video feed on his terminal screen.
The single screen held two feeds. Fatima swayed from side to side, staring at the flooded, open lockout chamber. Bright white inside, it was open to the complete darkness of the abyss. Hassan registered a pang of shock and hurt seeing the images of his mother.
Out of the darkness, he saw himself swimming towards the light, convulsing, the autonomic response of his lungs forcing his abdomen to violently contract and spasm. The doctor wasn’t swimming so much as he was crawling through the water, ineffectually flailing his hands, reaching for anything to drag himself inside. The lack of sound in the video served only to make the events more horrifying. He wanted to look away but couldn’t. He watched the tears stream down his mother’s face. She’d seen the convulsions, the missing pony bottle, the broken flashlight dangling from his wrist.
In the video, the doctor found a handhold on the outer rim of the chamber, dragged himself inside and struggled to close the outer door. He watched himself take a massive lungful of air, his mouth sucking in seawater, eyes rolling back into his head as he seized up. The exterior slammed shut but did not lock. His mother struggled to reverse the sequence, failing. She tried again and again, hands shaking, tears flowing like a burst pipe.
Then Fatima screamed, silent over the pre-recorded video feed.
Alexis scrambled up the interior boarding ladder to the chamber behind Fatima and shoved the older woman out of her way. The engineer ran through the same sequence. When it failed, Alexis ripped off the panel cover. Sparking wires dangling, she touched leads against each other until water expelled from the chamber, draining into unseen vents in a massive, foamy whirlpool. On the screen, Hassan lay dead on the deck.
So this is what it’s like to have an out-of-body experience, he thought as he stared at his own drowned corpse.