Ten feet. She could see the bright circle of the shaft’s top. Water over her knee in one leg, up to mid-calf in the other. The pain threatening to drive coherent thoughts from her mind. The only good thing was that the higher she went, the more buoyant she became.
Finally breaking the surface, she saw Merritt and Guillotte standing by the hole. They would have been monitoring her bubbles, once she was in the shaft.
“I ha-ha-had a dry-suit failure,” she stuttered. “Lower half flooded. Need help ge-ge-getting out.”
Guillotte yelled for more men. With two holding each arm and him pulling on the tops of her tanks, they hauled her out. She flopped onto her belly. Freezing water flowed through the suit, soaking her torso.
“He-he-help me doff. Can’t do myself. Too cold,” she said, through shivers and chattering teeth.
When they finally peeled the drysuit off, she had to get out of the wet dive underwear. Extra sets hung from one wall. She went to them, turned her back to the men, stripped naked, and pulled on dry ones. She donned all the rest of her ECW gear and drank a full thermos of hot chocolate given to her by one of the Draggers.
Once Hallie had just about stopped shivering, Merritt asked, “What happened down there?”
“Very strange,” she said. “Suit failure on both knees. I don’t ever remember—”
Merritt spun on Guillotte. “You let her dive in a suit with defects? She might have died. We could never replace her now!”
Guillotte’s cheeks reddened. “I inspected every piece of her gear. Including the suit. There were no visible defects.”
“But there were defects!” Merritt snapped.
“Aggie, wait,” Hallie said. “I don’t think Rémy missed anything. I inspected the suit, too. I was halfway through the dive before it started leaking.”
Merritt took a deep breath, stepped back. “Okay. Sorry if I flew off the handle. It’s just that with Emily gone, we can’t afford to lose you, Hallie. Can we, Rémy?”
“Of course we cannot.”
“I have to get back to the station. Rémy, you can transport Hallie after you’ve secured her gear.” Merritt turned and started for the door.
“Hey,” Hallie said.
“Yes?”
“I got the extremophile. There’s a biosample in the Envirotainer.”
“Oh,” Merritt said. “Right. Good work.”
And she left.
27
After riding back to the station with Guillotte, Hallie went straight to her room and fell asleep. The ringing phone woke her an hour later.
“It’s Aggie. Have you seen Doc yet?”
“Not yet. The dive was—”
“Please do it as soon as possible. He’s waiting to hear from you.”
She hung up and lay there trying, without success, to sleep. The dry-suit failure had been frightening, but she’d handled worse diving emergencies. A good dive was one you walked away from, and she had walked, this time.
She wanted to hear from Wil so badly it was like a physical ache. To stay quiet this long, he must have been very angry. But, remembering the scene at the airport, she didn’t think he’d looked angry. More sad than anything. Why would what she said make him sad? And what on earth had he meant: There are things you don’t know about me. Really? After a year together?
That led her to wonder if there were things he didn’t know about her. Important things, not who she’d dated in high school or why she disliked French food. No, she decided, he did know the important things. She’d held nothing back. Nothing had warranted holding back. Which made his own comment all the more mysterious — and troubling.
The next morning was Wednesday, the start of her third day at the Pole. She had set the alarm on her phone for seven. The station PA system woke her at six-thirty.
“Attention the station. Attention the station. All hands meeting in the galley at zero seven hundred. Repeat, all hands meeting in the galley at zero seven hundred.”
“I called this meeting to talk about the recent fatalities,” Graeter said, standing up front, near the serving area. Hallie had arrived early, hoping to see Fida again, but he hadn’t appeared. Agnes Merritt sat with her, and Rémy Guillotte joined them just after Graeter started speaking.
“As I’m sure everyone knows, Dr. Harriet Lanahan passed away on Monday, Dr. Diana Montalban Tuesday. If anyone has questions or concerns, this is the time.”
“How about, like, what the hell happened?” a gruff male voice asked from somewhere back in the gloom.
“Doc?” Graeter said.
Morbell came forward, wearing a white lab coat and the dark glasses. He seemed to shrink under scrutiny.
“Well. Ah, yes, I can offer something in the way of explanation. Wound dehiscence. Harriet Lanahan had an esophagectomy last year. Diana Montalban had undergone a C-section delivery two years earlier. I believe that their surgical scars ruptured—”
“Wait a minute,” a woman from the audience interrupted. Short, red-haired, combative. “You’re talking about incision sites, right? That’s just skin and subcutaneous tissue. It wouldn’t cause bleeding like that.”
“As I was about to say,” Doc continued, “major veins and arteries were involved in both operations. Some must have ruptured.”
“Why now, and why two so close together?”
“Many kinds of stress can cause dehiscence. A condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is sometimes at fault. Pole is cruel. I don’t have to tell you that.” He shrugged, held up his hands.
“I was a surgical nurse once upon a time,” the red-haired woman said. “So I know about dehiscence. It almost always happens soon after surgery. This long after — very rare.”
Hallie could see Doc’s jaw clenching. Graeter stepped forward. He said, “All due respect to nurses, Doc is the physician here. Anyone else?”
For a moment no one spoke. Than another woman stood. She had very white skin, even for a Polie, and shining black hair, and deep purple circles under both eyes. “Yeah.” She pointed straight at Hallie. “What about her?” Every head in the room turned to stare.
“What about her?” Doc said.
“She comes in and people start dying.” She looked at Doc. “What about that?”
“I told you what I think caused the deaths. I don’t believe Dr. Leland had anything to do with them.”
“Would you be saying that if she was a Dragger?” the woman asked, and murmurs of agreement came from the crowd.
“Of course,” Doc said.
“I’m not so sure,” the woman retorted. “We don’t—”
Graeter stepped forward. “Doc answered your question. Are there any more reasonable ones?”
The woman colored, but she sat without saying anything else.
“Thanks for coming,” Graeter said. “Let’s get back to work.”
People started filing out through several exits. Hallie saw a number of stares directed her way. A few people whispered and pointed.
She left the cafeteria and headed for Doc’s office, moving along in her bubble of light. She kept looking over her shoulder, unable to shake the feeling that someone was following her, but every time she looked, there was only the darkness.
28
Doc was waiting in his office with a stethoscope hung around his neck. There was enough light, barely, for her to see his strange pink eyes.
“No glasses?” Hallie asked.
“Here I can adjust the light,” he said. “My condition is of the oculocutaneous variety. Too much light is not only painful, it makes everything I see look washed out and blurry. Like a badly overexposed photograph.”