Page 6 of Cerban
Another surge rolled through, carrying with it another thin string of bubbles. They spiralled upward, tingling when they hit my greenskin. Something bugged me about those bubbles. There were too many of them. I turned, following them against the current.
And then, finally, the faint outline of a cave mouth emerged, half-choked with rubble. Algae streamed from its edges like torn banners. Around one jagged rock, a rope had been knotted, its length disappearing beneath a large boulder blocking the entrance. I pressed close, laying my ear against the cold stone. The vibrations were there, erratic and sharp.
A faint heartbeat.
Hers.
Trapped.
Fuck. This was what I had dreaded. Was she injured? Her heartbeat was fast and erratic. It could be because of an injury – or pure, primal fear.
I pushed my hands against the biggest of the rocks. It didn’t budge at all. Not that I had expected it to. I had simply hoped against reality.
“Maelis!” I shouted at the top of my voice. “Can you hear me?”
Silence. Of course, she wouldn’t be able to respond while using her breathing apparatus. But did I imagine it or did her heart beat even faster?
Thump.
Rock hitting rock.
Thump. Thump.
Then silence. It had to be her. A signal.
“I will get you out of there!” I yelled.
Three more thumps. She was alive and she was conscious. I had to focus on that. I would deal with everything else once I’d broken through the blockage.
I was tempted to call for my brother and other finmen to help, but that would mean swimming back to the island. I couldn’t waste time on that, not when I didn’t know how much air Maelis had left. No, I was on my own.
"Can you see another exit? One knock for yes, three for no!"
For a moment, silence. I dreaded the answer. Then, thump, thump, thump. No other exit. That meant I had no other choice but to remove the rocks if I wanted to save her.
It seemed liked an impossible task. The cave mouth was completely blocked. I would need a lever to move some of the boulders, and even that was unlikely to succeed.
I could feel the storm raging far above us as I pulled rock after rock from the rubble, letting them drop into the abyss. I worked as fast as I could, but even that didn't seem fast enough. Occasionally, I would shout, asking whether she could still hear me. Maybe I was imagining it, but I felt like her thumps were getting weaker.
How long would her oxygen last?
5
Maelis
The silt hung so thick around me it felt like swimming inside a dust storm. My torch barely cut through the haze; the beam bounced back at me, scattering into useless white glare.
I forced myself to close my eyes and count. One… two… three… Slow breaths, steady breaths. My regulator hissed in, hissed out. Each bubble tickled my face before racing upward, desperate to reach the surface I couldn’t get to.
The pressure gauge on my cylinder mocked me. The needle had slid deep into the red. Not empty yet, but close. I did the maths automatically – depth, stress consumption, tank size. Ten minutes if I stayed calm. Half that if I didn’t.
The wall where the entrance had been loomed like a tombstone. My lifeline – the guideline – vanished beneath a slab of rock as though it had never existed. I tugged once more out of sheer desperation, but it stayed buried. My pulse thudded harder, too fast, stealing air I couldn’t spare.
I clenched my fists. Stop. Think. That was what every instructor drilled into us. Panicked divers died. Calm divers sometimes lived.
But calm was a joke in a sealed cave with only a handful of breaths left.
The vibrations reached me then. A faint tremor in the rock that brushed against my mask. I froze, straining to listen. Not stone this time. Not collapse. A voice, faint but unmistakable, distorted by water.
