The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook by Lydia Millet (best beach reads .TXT) 📕

Jax was near her, a small, dark shape in the glowing green, moving downward. She saw his swim fins swishing.

She grabbed the rope and followed.

Eight

She concentrated on keeping a hand on the rope but pointing her head and shoulders downward. Curiously the water got warmer as she descended, or it felt that way to her, at least, which was the opposite of how she’d expected it to be.… There was so much color swirling around her that she couldn’t see anything else at first—a lovely bright aqua color. She saw why the verse had called it fire, the night of fires beneath the sea.

The salt load made the seawater hard to see through, though: it was a mist of fine particles, glowing and swirling around her. Not like the clear water in a turquoise swimming pool; more like blooms and currents of light.

She and Jax had wikied the plankton, microscopic pictures that showed their shapes. They were beautiful, even the poisonous ones—lacy and delicate, shaped like acorns in some cases or diamonds or stars. Of course you could never see that unless you were looking at them under a microscope, she thought, but it was strange to think of those all around in the water, minuscule organisms, life-forms entering her body and Jax’s along with the water molecules—tiny beings like whole worlds, sculpted and fragile-looking though in fact they were powerful enough to give out this amazing glow. …

And to make her and Jax pretty sick, possibly. If they were the toxic kind.

Hopefully they weren’t.

She felt pressure on her head as she descended, but then it seemed to subside. Jax was ahead of her, farther down; she could just make out the wake that rose from his kicking fins. Down farther they swam, and she found she was thinking of her mother—would her mother somehow appear down here, gliding out of the dim fathoms like a mermaid? The dream had put the notion in her head—her mother swimming up through the turquoise water, reaching for them through the luminous particles.

Then she realized the thought was actually more alarming than comforting. She wanted the same mother back she’d always had—the real mother she’d always known, exactly the same as the day she vanished, not one iota different.

In the dream her mother’s long hair had floated around her as though it was submerged … almost as though her mother, it occurred to her suddenly, had drowned.

No. Just because her mother had called her a visionary didn’t mean that anything she thought of had to have some kind of deep meaning.

A dark mass loomed up: kelp, or seaweed that looked a lot like kelp, curling out of the depths. It had pods, rubbery pods on the end of stalks that were like long tentacles, waving beneath. The algae all around them lit up the underwater world, and she could see the bottom—sand littered with dark debris, with unfamiliar shapes.

Jax grabbed onto something at the bottom and looked up at her—a hard object, partially beneath the sand. He motioned for her to come over, too, and she grabbed it, her feet above her head, looking down and around, her free hand pushing the water. It was a piece of wood, maybe a rib of the boat.

They were floating in a half-illuminated country, dim in some places and then shining from the phosphorescence. The brightness receded into a murkier distance if she tried to fix her eyes on something far away, but the foreground was clear. Around them were the ship ruins—pieces of wood and metal, she thought, though she didn’t know how the wood could be anything but rotten after three centuries underwater. A few small, dull-colored fish swam in and out and around.

There were rocks, too, piles of boulder-size rocks like small stone mountains on the sandy floor. From their cracks rose twisting columns of seaweed, stems emerging from the outcroppings where they were anchored and flowing overhead into a dark-green canopy. Their stems and leaves swayed gracefully with the slow currents near the bottom of the ocean. They were like forests.

The strangest thing about this kingdom of the sea, she thought, was how it was silent and loud at once.

Then, with the toes of his swim fins touching the sand, Jax unclipped the anchor weight from the guide rope and re-clipped the rope to his weight belt. There was enough slack for them to swim quite far without pulling the rope taut, which they had to in case they needed to signal Hayley.

So here they were, she thought: thirty feet under the surface of the endless Atlantic, no adults knowing where she was, no safety net, and who knew what strange thing would come shooting out of the dark…. There had been great white sharks sighted, recently, in the waters off Chatham. Not only that, but—she’d heard it said—they were actually hunting people now. Their usual food was getting harder to find….

Chatham was fifteen miles away. Great whites, Jax told her once, could swim forty miles in an hour. When they were hungry.

She wished Max were here.

Jax was swimming among the fragments of the wreck. She moved more hesitantly than he did, touching the rope. She wished they’d brought a tool to communicate with—boards they could write on or something. She should have made an agreement with Jax, she realized, that he could ping her down here, that they could make an exception to his promise.

She was surprised she wasn’t freezing. Maybe that was a bad sign—maybe when you didn’t feel cold anymore that meant you had, what did they call it, frostbite? Or hypothermia?—and were about to go unconscious. …

Of course. Jax was holding his waterproof watch up to her face, its digital readout lit up. He could actually type on the thing, which was blocky and huge over the arm of his wet suit. For all she knew he could watch YouTube videos on it.