The woman chased after her, indignant. “Where are you going? They need medicine?”
“I don’t have anything that can help them,” she answered truthfully. “But I am only going to the nearest telephone. Then I will return.”
She decided not to use the word quarantine. That would only frighten the woman. The truth was, until the disease — whatever it was — ran its course, none of them, not even Maria herself, could be allowed to leave.
Chances were, they were all dead already.
CHAPTER 3
Fighting back her panic, Miranda groped for the supply line for the small pony bottle attached to her main tank. The pony bottle was her emergency reserve — her “seatbelt,” she called it, because like the seat belt in a car, it was something she used even though she truly believed she would never need it. And like a seat belt, she knew there was no guarantee it would save her life. The bottle held only a few minutes of air, and if she didn’t choose a passage — and choose right on the first try — all it would do for her was prolong the experience of dying.
She let the regulator mouthpiece fall away, replacing it with the one from the “octopus” regulator attached to the pony bottle. This time, she did not indulge her desire for a deep, calming breath, but merely drew in enough to quiet the burn of excess carbon dioxide in her bloodstream.
Think, Miranda.
She closed her eyes, trying to remember exactly what the cavern had looked like when she had emerged from the passage.
The altar, she thought. The golden disk had been on the opposite site.
Miranda opened her eyes again and saw the settling cloud of silt at the base of the carved stone altar. She swam over it, positioning herself against the wall of the cavern, and turned around, trying to match what she now saw with what she remembered. When she thought she was correctly positioned, she turned to the wall and was confronted by three possibilities.
Her first impulse was to pick the center passage, but something about it looked wrong. It was narrower than the passage she remembered, barely wide enough to pass through without scraping her shoulders. She took another breath from the octopus and contemplated the remaining choices, searching her memory for other details about the passage that had brought her here.
She remembered that the passage had sloped down at the end, but unfortunately, so did both of these, the one to the left at a steeper angle. She swept both openings with her light, kicking herself for not leaving marks on the limestone walls or stringing a guide wire.
I screwed up, she told herself. Rookie mistakes. I knew better.
Her lungs started to burn again. She blew out the breath she had been holding and took another, deeper this time. There was no point in rationing her air now, and maybe a clear head would increase her chances of making the right choice.
Get over it. Make a choice. Trust your instincts. She almost laughed at the thought. Trusting her instincts had gotten her in this mess.
The light revealed nothing to uncomplicate her decision. She was wasting time and wasting air.
At least conserving battery life in the flashlight wasn’t something she would have to worry about.
The answer came to her. Light!
She switched the dive light off and closed her eyes.
True darkness was a rare thing in the modern world. Even on the darkest night there was always some source of artificial illumination close by — light pollution from distant cities and street lamps, the faint glow of electronic devices in sleep mode. It was palpable, something that could be felt even blindfolded. True darkness, the kind of darkness that inspired absolute terror, was reserved for places like this. Underground. Underwater.
But not completely sealed off.
Miranda opened her eyes to the blackness and waited.
A faint blue glow was visible in the passage to the right. Daylight, filtering down through the entrance to the cenote, reflected by the dull white limestone and refracted through the water to reach her here.
The darkness wasn’t absolute after all.
She triggered the light switch again and kicked forward into the passage, taking steady breaths from the pony bottle. It seemed to take forever, and for a few seconds, she almost thought she had misread the signs, chosen the wrong passage despite the glow of distant daylight, but then she rounded a bend and saw the roots partially barricading the mouth of the tunnel.
She wriggled through and saw the shimmering blue circle of light fifteen feet away and just a few feet above her head.
She disconnected her buoyancy compensator from the main line and attached the octopus to it, filling it up so there would be nothing dragging her down, and then kicked out for the center, but something held her fast. Her flipper was caught in the tangle of roots.
Miranda felt like screaming. She thrashed for a moment, trying to tear her foot loose, but then stopped herself. Maybe she didn’t need the flipper to reach the surface, but then again, maybe she would.
She willed herself to a calm state once more and used her arms to propel herself backward, until the pressure on her ankle lessened. A slight twist of the foot was all it took to slip free, allowing her to kick herself away, shooting through the water like a torpedo.
As she neared the shimmering plane that marked the transition from one environment to another, the image of the surface world came clearly into view. She could see her father, leaning out over the edge, staring anxiously into the depths, even though he surely must have seen her.
Miranda broke through the surface and spit out the mouthpiece of the octopus, sucking in fresh air greedily, even though the pony bottle wasn’t empty.
“Dad,” she gasped. “I’m okay.” She pushed the mask up onto her forehead and gasped down another breath. “You won’t believe what I found.”
His expression did not change, and as she gazed up at him, she could tell from the set of his jaw that he was not merely worried, but in pain. “That’s great, honey,” he said, his voice barely a whisper, as if merely speaking intensified his agony.
“Dad, what’s wrong? Is it your lungs?”
Despite being a non-smoker and leading a healthy active life, Charles Bell had been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which was why Miranda, and not Bell himself, had made the dive into the cenote. She felt a pang of guilt at the thought that her solo dive and the fact that she had clearly pushed well beyond the limits of safety might have induced a stress-related flare-up.
He was breathing fast, breathing hard, but without difficulty. Whatever was causing him distress, it wasn’t his COPD.
“Dad?”
Another face came into view, a man with a swarthy weathered complexion and the distinctive broad facial features of someone of Maya ancestry. “Si, señorita,” the man said, and then continued in broken English. “Come up out of there and show us what you found.”
And then he pushed Charles Bell forward, just enough to show Miranda the knife pressed to her father’s throat.
Miranda’s blood froze in her veins. She took a deep breath, and raised her hands out of the water. Her buoyancy compensator kept her from sinking. “Hey, take it easy. Don’t hurt him.”
“Come out of there,” the man said again, giving Bell an emphatic shake.
Miranda lowered her hands into the water and dog-paddled over to the rope ladder hanging down from the edge of the cenote. She held herself in place with one hand, and with the other reached down to remove her flippers. Her plan was to also draw the knife sheathed to her right calf, but before she could do this, the man with the knife leaned out to keep an eye on her. She decided to leave the knife where it was. With one thumb hooked around the ankle straps of the fins, she began pulling herself up the ladder.