Watermind (11 page)

She flopped on his bed and kicked at the loose covers. The room felt muggy and close—why couldn't Max install an air conditioner? Her lower back burned with dull pain. She wanted her damn period to start.

“Madam Yue went ecstatic over a few silly nanoparticles,” she said, thinking of the sample. “Half-organic, half-synthetic. She thought she'd found a new branch in evolution. But I looked them up on the Net, and they're just a manmade chemotherapy virus that targets a certain
kind of tumor. They probably rotted out of the gut of some cancer patient who suicided in the river.”

Max winced at the image. CJ was twitching, kicking her heels into the mattress. He tried to distract her. “Girl, help me cook this dinner. Ol' Max teach you a skill. You ever use this tool before?” He held a can opener.

She got up and absentmindedly ran her finger along the cans of tomatoes and sweet corn he'd arranged on the counter. “What if the colloid dissipates, and we never find it again? It can purify water, Max. If we could mass produce that process, think what it could mean.”

Max opened the can of tomatoes. “This stew taste better with fresh vegetables, but the season's too early.”

“We have to look for it.” She reached across the counter and squeezed his arm. “Now, Max. Tonight. We have to borrow your uncle's canoe.”

She peered up at him with all that crazy eager shine in her eyes, that shine he could never resist. She witched him, that's the excuse Max wanted. But he knew it wasn't true. Everything he did for her, he did with open eyes. The swamp was dangerous, and she was likely to be rash. He knew better than to yield, but when she said his name that way and beguiled him with those eyes, he suffered.

A few weeks ago, he had taken her fishing in Bayou Grosse Tete using his Uncle Nebulon's pirogue. That was a good day, just the two of them off away from other people. He taught her to bait the hook and watch the current. As a courting gift, he gave her a pair of castanets. She loved them, she said. He showed her how to hold the wooded shells in her palm, hook the cord over her thumb, and clap a zydeco rhythm. They laughed a lot that day, and he never once got the feeling she was sizing him up.

“Please help me find it, Max. I need you.”

He dumped the tomatoes into the pot, and the oil spattered. Before he could answer, she said, “I rented a dive suit.”

He dropped his spoon. “You rented what?”

“I can't find the EM field anymore. I think it may be lying on the bottom of the canal.”

Max turned off the stove and faced her. “You not going in that evil water again.”

She set her mouth in the way he'd come to recognize, and he groaned softly. “
Lamie,
it kill once. It'll kill a second time, I promise you.”

For an instant, her hazel eyes went dark. She remembered the pond, the panicked suffocation, the fear that moved up her spine like a cold hand. But next, she saw only the pixelating fan of rainbows. Those
layers.
She had to know what made them. Her face flushed with adrenaline. “Are you saying I have to do this alone?”

 

Friday, March 11

10:09
PM

 

The canoe paddle dipped in a steady plash and trickle as Max eased his uncle's pirogue through the barge canal. Fog blanketed the water, and Quimicron's mercury floodlights cast a violet sheen through the mist. After moonset, the night had turned damp and chilly. CJ couldn't get used to how fast the weather changed in Louisiana.

Max sat in the stern, powering them forward with smooth strong jay strokes, while she wrestled into her scuba gear.

“If you see any sign of ice—” he said.

“I promise, Max, I'll surface immediately.”

“Immediately,” he repeated, giving her a stern look, though she couldn't see him in the dark.

She'd rented the commercial drysuit from a mom-and-pop outfit in Port Allen. When they asked for her scuba certification card, she'd flashed her Quimicron badge, spun a quick tale about a rush project, and promised to
fax her credentials later. It was her Quimicron badge that convinced the owners. The hope of getting more work from one of the largest corporations in the parish made them willing to bend the rules.

HAZMAT
blazed in orange letters across the dingy black drysuit. Made of vulcanized rubber and nylon layered with chemical-resistant coatings, the suit crackled and squeaked as she tugged it on. Compared to its bulky squeeze, her coverall had been a light summer dress.

The suit's baggy legs ended in watertight drysocks, reminding her of the awful bunny feet in her childhood pajamas. She despised the clammy drysocks, almost as much as she hated the locking ring system that connected her gloves to her sleeves. The drysuit felt like a straightjacket. She squeezed into the neck yoke that would connect her integrated dryhood and breathing mask. Once locked into the suit, no part of her skin would be left exposed. That offered some comfort.

Owls cooed as she yanked the shoulder zipper closed, then examined the dryhood, pretending a confidence she wished was real. The guy at Port Allen had showed her how to rig the complicated regulator, and CJ had a quick memory, but it was hard to do everything in the dark. A cold rain had been spitting off and on, pinging their boat with a sharp pecking sound. When she lifted the air tank, it slipped and crashed against the bottom of the pirogue.

Max whispered, “Go easy, child.”

“Don't call me child.” She was afraid to tell him she'd never dived before. The closest she'd come was snorkeling in the Bahamas. “It's only forty-five feet deep,” she said in a fake casual tone.

She'd already raked the Internet for every available fact about the barge canal. She knew the Corps of Engineers maintained its depth at forty-five feet to accommodate ocean-going freighters. And according to an online scuba manual, she could stay at that depth for up to eighty minutes—if her air lasted. CJ had no idea how long a tank of air would last. Her pressure gauge read three thousand
pounds per square inch. Three thousand sounded like a lot.

Always keep breathing, the scuba Web site cautioned, and ascend slowly to avoid decompression sickness. The site offered pages of verbiage about the importance of training and certification, but CJ assumed that was propaganda. After all, people did this for fun.

Cool fog seeped around her ears and made her shiver.
R-r-r-r-rip!
Max yanked a length of duct tape from the roll. In the distance, a night bird screeched, and nearby, something large plopped into the water. CJ could hear it swimming. She assured herself it was a bullfrog.

Max taped the field finder to her left forearm, wrapping the duct tape around and around. To her thigh, he affixed the submersible electric current sensor. She'd rented the instrument to look for electricity trickling through the water. If she found it, that would explain the EM field. Then she'd simply have to track down the source, maybe a faulty connection at one of the nearby factories, loose cable, ungrounded generator, something like that.

Max clicked her submersible flashlight to check the battery. “Ceegie . . .”

She kissed him. “You're too good to me.”

When she drew away, he touched her cheek, and on impulse, she fell toward him again. They kissed longer, and as their salivas merged, his musky scent brought a flush to her skin. He seemed to be radiating waves of attraction like a hot dark lodestone. Without conscious will, their bodies aligned. As she pressed her mouth against the soft thudding artery in his neck, her air tank smacked the gunwale.

He kissed her ear and laughed. “You want to make love in this pirogue?”

Her hazel eyes glittered. “We did it before.”

He embraced her, but the clumsy tank and scuba gear got in their way. They grappled and bumped awkwardly. “Let's go back to my room,” he whispered.

His words broke the spell, and she drew away. “Later. After we're done.”

Where the unnamed creek drained into the canal, Max set their anchor, and CJ fumbled with her flashlight. Fog gathered around them. She sprinkled Listerine over the latex mouthpiece inside the breathing mask. It looked chewed and dented by a hundred sets of teeth. With a grimace, she tugged on the hood and stuck the nasty thing in her mouth. It tasted like an old tire. Max helped her seal the neck yoke.

She found herself panting. The mask obscured her vision, and the circus-clown flippers tripped her up when she tried to move in the pirogue. The tank felt like an anvil strapped to her back. Finally, she swung her flippered feet over the gunwale, sucked a deep breath through the mouthpiece and mentally reviewed the rental guy's instructions. Had she attached everything properly? Was the air turned on? She lashed her sample jar with a lanyard around her wrist, then rolled over the gunwale and fell in.

 

Friday, March 11

11:37
PM

 

Swirling darkness. A roar of bubbles. The cold penetrated her suit.

Her flashlight splintered through turbid green murk, and the mask narrowed her view like side-blinders. Filaments of algae floated in front of her, and through the watery roof above, Quimicron's floodlights wavered like agitated ghosts. She was sinking.

Where was her depth gauge? Her ears began to ache. She batted through the water searching for the long snaking hose that held her console of gauges, but she couldn't find them.

Deeper darkness. She felt tipsy, disoriented. When she kicked her ill-fitting flippers, her left calf cramped, and she had to stop. She kept sinking.

Idiot, don't panic. You can do this.

At last, she remembered the trick of clearing her ears. She squeezed her nose through the latex mask and tried to sneeze. Abruptly the air trapped in her ear canals evacuated with a painful, screeching hiss. Above, the wavering floodlights faded to black.

Weights. The rental guy had stuffed her pockets with lead weights to help her descend. The guy had showed her the quick-release tabs in case she needed to dump the weights. And there was a vest to inflate, to compensate for the weights. The buoyancy compensator, that's right, the BC. She found the BC pull cord and yanked hard. But instead of inflating, the BC released a fountain of air bubbles, and she sank even faster.

A low raspy wail echoed inside her mask, and she realized it was her own shriek muffled by the mouthpiece. She couldn't remember what to do. Then Harry's snide laugh resounded in her memory. “You overestimate your intelligence, Carolyn, as your mother did.”

“No,” she said aloud, biting the mouthpiece. Slowly and deliberately, she reached behind her hood and located the hoses connected to her tank regulator. As she continued to fall steadily into the murk, her glove slid along the left hose and followed it to the end, where the console of gauges dangled. Illuminated by her flashlight, the depth gauge read thirty-four feet. Not so deep. Relax.

The empty sample jar floated above her arm on its lanyard, exercising a gentle upward tug. She felt along the front of her suit for the release tabs to dump her weights, and her hands closed on a pair of large cylindrical handles. “Yank 'em hard,” the guy had told her. Okay.

But not yet. Not until she found the colloid and took a better sample. She directed her flashlight beam onto the field finder. Oh yes. The EM field was pulsing. She bent to read the sensor taped to her thigh. The sensor showed weak electrical current zipping through the cold water.

“I was right,” she gurgled aloud through the mouthpiece. “You're down here on the bottom.”

As she watched the sensor, the electric current alternated rhythmically to and fro, as steady as surf. Then a strange sensation enveloped her—a premonition—so slight at first that she didn't understand what caused it. But as she continued to fall, its origin became obvious. The water below was glowing.

She sank into a region of a million tiny flashes. Each infinitesimal wink flared almost too swiftly for her eye to register, but together they gave the water a faint milky light. Deeper still, the flashes came thicker and faster, and soon she was surrounded by luminous agitation, like snowy static on a TV screen. Her current sensor went wild, and she laughed. “You!”

The display made her forget how cold the beautiful liquid was growing. She felt like an astronomer sighting a new galaxy. It was just at that moment that her flippers touched down on the bottom and her tank struck a rock.

Metal on stone, the loud
clang
echoed through the water, and at once, the flickers vanished. As she plunged into the silty bottom, her flashlight showed nothing but muddy clouds stirring up from the canal bed. She came to rest sprawled on her side, and she held still, breathing in shallow pants, hoping the flickers would return. When she switched off her flashlight, chilling darkness closed in.

Minutes passed. She began to shudder with cold. The thought of checking her air gauge weighed on her mind, but she didn't dare turn on her light and frighten away the flickers.

Frighten them?
CJ, you're an idiot. They don't have feelings.

Yet she couldn't shake the sense of a presence in the water. She felt it sucking the heat from her body. You. What are you?
You killed once.
She took fast shallow breaths.

“Use your logic,” Harry's voice punched through the cold. “Every phenomenon has a scientific explanation.”

She longed to turn on her flashlight to get a better view of her sensor screen, though the small unit couldn't give her much data. Damn, she needed better equipment.

So, okay, maybe the flashes came from foxfire. Or maybe from light-emitting diodes like the ones she found in the sample. But why had the flashes stopped?

She chewed the old mouthpiece. It happened when her tank struck the stone.

She had no idea how long she'd been underwater, but her teeth were chattering. She couldn't lie in the frigid mud forever. She was on the point of pushing up, but her mind kept circling on the flashes. Somehow, the sound of her metal tank hitting the rock had stopped the flashes. Could this extraordinary liquid
respond to sound
?