Page 25 of Captured in Love
Nora is getting tired.
We’ve been swimming for maybe five minutes in the tunnel, plus the time we spent circling the location, which wouldn’t be a lot in normal circumstances, but the water is cold, and swimming with fins ishard work.
I feel like a tool for not waiting for her. She catches up, and I swim closer to peer through her mask. She gives me the ‘okay’ sign, but she’s breathing faster. First of all, that means I need to slow down. But there’s also the fact that her being winded means she’s using up her air supply faster than we’d calculated.
I take her wrist and peer on her monitor. She’s doing fine for now, but we’ll need to be careful. I have no idea how far this tunnel goes, and if we dive too deep, we might not have enough air to return. It would suck completely to give up halfway through the tunnel, but I’d rather not reach our destination than suffocate on the ascent, or surface too quickly and fuck up my pressure.
Nora motions for me to go on, and I reluctantly turn and start scanning the path forward. There aren’t many fish this deep anymore, and if I’m not mistaken, the water is becoming warmer as we go. Which is weird as fuck, but then Iceland is known for hot springs. Maybe there are underwater ones, too? What worries me more is that we haven’t reached a single booby trap or spell yet. The deeper we go, the more my shoulders tense. I’m expecting something to come at me at any moment, and all that adrenaline is making me jittery.
A flashlight beam flickers over me from behind, and I glance back to find Nora right behind me. She motions at Raphaël to come closer, then snags his writing tablet and scrawls something on it.
WHO MADE THIS TUNNEL
Yeah. I’ve been asking myself that, too. At first, it had seemed as though the opening might be natural, a long cave with a randomly circular opening, but the walls are still perfectly smooth, apart from the few barnacles that have attached themselves to the rock, and the tunnel hasn’t narrowed or become irregular at all.
HUMANS?
Raphaël’s shrug and grimace tell me he’s not at all sure of his answer, even if it’s the first one that comes to my mind as well. But when we researched this area online, there wasn’t anything in the local reports that might indicate an underwater drilling operation of this size. I don’t know if humans have the technology to drill this deep in the middle of the ocean floor.
Probably, though. They’re incredibly adept at surviving without magic.
I take the tablet from Raphaël and scribble, A MINE?
It’s not a great explanation but it’s all we have to go on for now. I have no idea where it’s taking us, nor how long it’ll take us to get there.
We swim forward, me in the front again. The darkness is starting to wear on me, the idea that we’re so far undergroundandunderwater that even the twisted, strange animals have disappeared, leaving us all alone down here.
My family doesn’t even know where I am.
I shake the thought from my mind as soon as it pops up. I’m doing this whole thing to forget about my relatives, and my father especially, not to be reminded of them. I have a good reason not to return any of his recent phone calls—he’s an asshole. But my mother and brother would wonder where I’d disappeared to, I guess.
My flashlight beam glints off something deeper in the tunnel, and I stop, throwing up a hand to signal Nora and Raphaël. We hover in the black water, our legs working incessantly—a slow current keeps dragging us back toward the opening of the tunnel.
I squint through my mask, unsure of what I saw. Slowly, we inch forward, and I reach for more of my magic to scan the walls of the tunnel. Nothing. But that metal reflection…
Nora points suddenly to the tunnel floor. She swims down, then picks something up and turns it over in her hand. Now that I know what to search for, I notice several more flat disks scattered around, silvery blue and glimmering in the dim light.
Then Nora approaches with the thing in her palm, and even behind her mask and breathing tube, I see the confusion plain on her face. Raphaël takes the disk and turns it over, his expression growing grim. He hands it to me and reaches for his tablet.
The disk isn’t perfectly circular but more diamond-shaped and slightly concave, about four inches in diameter. Its surface is dull on one side, dusty blue in color, and iridescent like mother of pearl on the other. The shiny side is perfectly smooth, and one of the tips of the diamond looks slightly jagged, as though it had been torn from somewhere.
But I can’t figure out what it is…
Raphaël shoves the tablet in my face.
SCALES
My stomach does a nasty lurch as the truth settles in my gut. I peer down at the disk again.Oh fuck. He’s right. It could definitely be a scale.
One glance at Nora tells me she’s freaking out. Her eyes are wide, her eyebrows lifted in clear shock. I grab her hand and squeeze. Raphaël shines his flashlight ahead again as though he expects the thing that lost these scales to come swimming up to us any second now.
Because whatever it is, I sure as hell don’t want to meet it.
The size of the scales can only mean one thing: the creature was absolutely massive.
I take the tablet from Raphaël and write: IT MIGHT BE GONE ALREADY
Okay, so maybe this is wishful thinking, but we don’t know when the scales were deposited here.
