Nicola smiled at her. “Back to school this week,” she reminded Raia with a mix of anticipation and longing. It wasn’t lost on Nicola that if she were back in LA right now—back in her old, normal life before it all went crazy—she would be welcoming her first-grade class to their first day of school today. The memory of the children she’d been forced to leave behind two months before the end of the school year still stung.
After Zach and her students had piled onto the boat, Nicola stepped onto the boat herself and started to mentally prepare for the upcoming dive. The fact that she’d been scuba diving since she was thirteen and instructing since she was nineteen, when she’d used it as a part-time job to put herself through college, did nothing to make her take the sport less seriously. It only served to heighten her awareness of its dangers, because with the rising popularity of scuba diving, people tended to lose sight that it was an extreme sport. If done properly it was almost always safe, but there were many things that could potentially go catastrophically wrong.
She ran the upcoming dive through her head, planning the traverse around the reef she would lead her students on. Then she ran through her four students’ abilities, assessing each one for potential weaknesses or panic triggers. By the time the boat geared down, pulled up alongside another dive boat and dropped anchor at Sinkhole Reef, Nicola was feeling ready.
“Okay, everyone,” she said, pulling her mask and snorkel over her head and letting it rest around her neck. “This will be an easy one. We should have excellent visibility, and we’re going for a max depth of seventy feet. You’ll see lobsters, stingrays, moray eels, possibly a few nurse or reef sharks. Lobsters hang out in pods, so don’t be freaked out if you come across a den of fifty or so. Just keep your fingers to yourselves! Remember to practice neutral buoyancy and keep your fins off the reef. Stay with your buddy at all times, and ascend—slowly, remember—before you have no less than 200 PSI left in your tank.”
She walked around to her students to be sure their tanks had been turned to the open position, getting each of them to test their regulators in turn. Then she put on her fins, weight belt and buoyancy control device. Shuffling backward on her fins toward the edge of the boat, she put her regulator in her mouth. Then she held her mask on her face and fell backward to demonstrate a back fall-in. “Now your turn. One at a time,” she called to her students once she’d resurfaced.
Focused solely on the safety of the four people under her charge, Nicola was barely aware of the sound of bodies splashing into the water as divers from the neighboring boat began to drop in at the same time.
Alex had thought he was doing okay. On the boat ride he’d run through his entire lesson book in his head, followed by everything he’d learned on the eight pool dives he’d completed back in LA.
He could do this. People did it every day. Hell, there were teenagers on his boat who didn’t look the least bit concerned that they may very well be taking their last-ever breaths.
Quit it. Not every kid who goes into the ocean has a near-death experience.
After he’d talked himself somewhat off the ledge, he took a deep, calming breath and followed his instructor’s orders—tank open, regulator in, mask on. He was standing up, ready to walk backward to the edge of the boat when his instructor pointed at his waist. “Forgot your weight belt,” Rusty said. “You won’t get far down without that.”
Alex groaned. His weight belt—of course. Shit, he was a mess, and his persisting thoughts of that Sienna Miller look-alike on the road this morning weren’t helping matters.
Focus.
As he sat down again and unfastened his BCD, Rusty walked over to inspect Alex’s belt. The man was huge, which gave Alex a small measure of reassurance—even though his brain told him he’d be practically weightless underwater, if anything went wrong it was comforting to know this guy could probably carry him to the surface on one finger.
Rusty picked his belt up and gave it a heft. “Twenty-two pounds? You’re a big guy. I think you’ll want another fiver on there.”
“You sure?” Alex asked as a vision of himself sinking to the ocean floor like a rock flashed through his head.
“Yep.” The instructor grabbed a weight from the crate near his feet and handed it to Alex. “Just thread it through your belt and you’re good to go.”
Alex did so, then hefted the belt around his waist and fastened the airline-seatbelt-like closing. It slipped down a little when he stood up, so he tightened it. It slipped down again. Was it supposed to feel this loose? Probably—what the hell did he know? All he was certain of was that he was used to being in control, being the one to show others how things were done, and he was tired of looking like a rookie fool. It was this departure from his comfort zone as much as the ocean he was about to jump into that was causing his anxiety.
In any case, it was go-time. There was no backing out now. Alex got himself ready and fell backward into the open water.
The surface was crowded, as it looked like another group of divers had just dropped in at the same time. It took Alex a minute to locate his buddy, because everyone was unrecognizable to him with their masks and snorkels on. After they inserted their regulators into their mouths, his buddy counted down with his fingers. Holding their inflator controls above their heads, they slowly released air from their BCDs to start the descent to the reef. Alex felt the water close over his head, and then he saw bubbles rise in front of his mask as he exhaled.
He was doing it! He was under the surface of the ocean, and he was okay! Ridiculously, he felt an urge to let out a whoop, then quickly reminded himself of how stupid that would be.
When Alex’s feet hit the ocean floor, he spun around in a slow semicircle toward the reef. Then it was right in front of him, and all he could do was blink in amazement. The reef was so much more incredible than any photograph could capture. It was covered in every imaginable shape and color of plant and animal life—waving pink sea fans, purple and yellow tubes of coral—all forming a backdrop for the many animals that called it home. Sea stars of purple, orange and yellow shared space with spiky sea urchins on the coral. A spotted moray eel poked its head from its den, a turtle nipped at a plant, a grouper the size of a coffee table cruised by and a school of tiny blue fish flashed in synchronicity. Beyond it an underwater meadow of seagrass spread into the distance.
Alex turned to look to his left. There, much too close for Alex’s comfort, the ocean floor fell sharply away to create a cavernous, eerie-looking dark blue space: the sinkhole the reef was named after. Alex shivered, imagining himself stepping off the edge and falling down, down, gathering speed as the air in his BCD compressed, struggling to swim upward…slipping beneath the surface and sinking while his brother laughed onshore—
Stop it.
He was doing so well; the last thing he needed to do right now was send himself into a panic over something that had happened nearly two decades ago. He tore his eyes away from the sinkhole.
Alex’s group was starting to move along, so, remembering his pool dives, he put a little air into his BCD until his fins lifted from the ocean floor. Then he did his best to get himself horizontal—he could only imagine what a newbie he must look like, but at this point he was almost beyond caring—and started swimming after his buddy.
Of all the incredible things to see underwater, Nicola’s favorite was probably the very common trunkfish. With their clown-like faces, boxy spotted bodies and you-don’t-scare-me attitudes, they practically made her laugh into her regulator every time. She was pointing one out to a student when she noticed another diver swimming past her.
Many divers had trouble identifying people when they were suited up underwater, especially