Still.
We proceeded with a large dose of caution.
There was no sign of Lanny, up ahead. Either he'd come to a fork in the road or he'd progressed where our lights did not reach.
It was okay. Plenty of dive time. Plenty of room. The tunnel was wide enough for the three of us to fit side by side with room to spare. But damn it was a burrow into the reef and I felt squeezed.
My mouth went cottony. I tried to recall the taste of fennel on my tongue. All I could taste was stale canned air.
My breathing picked up. My bubbles speeded up.
Time to hum. Slow down that breathing. I searched for a tune, anything but the Jaws theme — a lullaby would be nice and I found myself humming All the Pretty Little Horses. Two bars in I realized where I'd gotten that tune, Oscar Flynn singing to the dying sea lion on the beach. I tried to shut it down but it morphed back into Jaws.
I abandoned humming and began to recite the Gettysburg Address.
Fourscore and seven years ago—a score is twenty so fourscore is eighty plus seven equals eighty-seven and it was the math and Abraham Lincoln that calmed me down.
Up ahead, the tunnel was widening.
Lanny was nowhere in sight.
I had my breathing under control but my mind took off on its own. What was ahead of us? What sort of surprise lay in wait? Something beyond our field of view. Something like that huge ghostly shape I had glimpsed two days ago across the chasm in the dying kelp forest. Only down here, the shape would be close. Identifiable.
My mouth went dry as toast.
Which is preferable, lady? Shadows of the mind or reality in your face?
CHAPTER 41
The tunnel flared wider and then opened into nothing.
We found anchorage on a rock wall and played our beams in flashes and slashes, and shadows lived and died, and we found that we were anchored at the mouth of a cavern.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
And then somebody's light caught Lanny hugging the left-hand cavern wall.
He raised a hand and shielded his goggled eyes. His own glove light was off. He switched it on. Behind him on the wall was a recessed area with shelves of equipment. Some sort of control panel. He turned and opened the panel door and his glove light revealed a keypad. He punched a button and the keypad lit up.
And now more light blazed.
A floodlight.
We shielded our eyes.
When my eyes adjusted I saw the breadth of the cavern. It was large enough to moor a fishing boat.
Large and tall and wide but who knew how deep because it was bisected by a fence.
The fence rippled in the gentle current.
What kind of fence ripples?
I painted the fence with my light and saw that it was made of mesh.
Mesh so fine that my light wouldn't penetrate.
The depths beyond were unfathomable.
The fence skeleton, though, was revealed in the floodlight — a fence framed with PVC piping, fitted flush with the ceiling and floor and corner walls, a fully enclosing fence.
I wondered what the hell lay beyond.
There was a gate to the beyond but it was shut.
The gate, too, was fine mesh and it was framed within the fence.
I fixed on that gate. I saw how it worked. It was cabled to the control panel on the left-hand wall. The cable was hard to see — you had to be looking — but I'd become familiar with cables and I spotted it tucked along the frame of the fence, leading to the wall, and from there it snaked to the lighted control panel. And then I spotted the second cable snaking out of the control panel, feeding into a fissure in the wall. I knew that cable, how it snaked up through the hole in the reef up to the fake rock, and from there to the sound link on the cage.
Down here — just like up top — there was a rock-faced door, sparkling with fake crystals. This door stood ajar. Lanny must have opened it to access the control panel.
Oh Lancelot.
What are you doing here?
I went deadly cold.
His job. What else?
Tap a key, throw a switch, turn it on, turn it off, who the hell knew because Lanny sure wasn't talking.
Walter and Tolliver and I still latched onto the wall at the cavern mouth.
Lanny watched us watching him.
The floodlight illuminated us as well as Lanny. All of us revealed. Tolliver letting go of his anchor in preparation to kick off, and Lanny at the wall looking twitchy.
Tolliver made one of his diver signals: flat hand, palm down, moving slowly up and down. Take it easy.
Lanny did not take it easy.
He turned back to the keypad and punched in more numbers.
The gate in the fence slowly swung open.
I flinched.
Lanny lunged toward the gate and ventured inside the fenced-off room.
For a moment I was relieved, I thought if he's going in there that means he knows what's what. He knows it's safe in there. Safe from what, who knows, I didn't really care to know.
But he'd come here to do a job and now the job was taking him in there.
And we'd come to stop him.
We pushed off and swam across the cavern to the gate and paused there and Tolliver gave me a palm-up sign — stay here, stand guard, who knew what I was standing guard against but there was one unbreachable rule down here. Don't get stuck. Don't get on the wrong side of a gate that is wired.
Inside the fence, on the wrong side of the gate, Lanny was suspended, looking around.
Looking lost.
I understood. It was an unsettling room. Hell, the whole cavern was unsettling but this fenced-off room, more so. It was our first clear look inside — our lights did not penetrate the depths and barely pierced the murk up front, by the fence — but it was enough to see that the room was netted like a kids' indoor netted ball pit. The ceiling, the walls, the floor, the entirety of this room was netted with the same mesh that netted the fence and the gate. The mesh rippled slightly.
Up front, near the fence, the murk was pierced by two dim shafts of light.
Lanny was suspended, as if in a trance, in the strange light. He looked up.
We looked up.
The light came from small holes in the ceiling and I figured they must be chimneys that punched through the body of the reef up above, allowing in light from the open sea. Degraded light, filtered light, and along with it came a soft rain of particulates, all of it filtered through mesh.
Lanny came out of his trance and headed for the left-hand wall.
A control panel was mounted there.
I thought, no no no.
Tolliver and Walter ventured into the room.
Lanny reached the wall and yanked open the panel door, revealing a keypad, a twin to the keypad panel on the wall outside the fence. This inner keypad was lighted, already activated.
I saw the power cable running along the wall, linking the inner and the outer panels.
Twin keypads, cabled, yoked. Live.
Walter and Tolliver were taking their damn time, mindful I guessed of spooking Lanny into punching the wrong keys.
Too mindful, too slow, come on come on.
Lanny was fumbling with his BC, taking something out of a pocket.
Walter and Tolliver at last got a move on, and flanked him.
Lanny let go of whatever he'd been fooling with and tried to push them away.
Tolliver escalated, grabbing him by the arm.
Lanny twisted to escape, his free hand reaching for the panel, and now Walter intercepted him. And still Lanny struggled, and for a moment I feared that hoses and regulators were going to get dislodged, that the entangling divers were going to stir up silt and blind us all here in the guts of the reef.