“What if that happens?”
“They’d have to send the other sub down with a cable to retrieve us. It’s happened before. We’d be fine for a couple of hours, but it does get uncomfortable. Anyway, this is just a sideshow, one of those really cool things you have to see while you’re in the neighborhood. The real magic is over here.”
Ness grips the controls, and we lift from the sea floor. I watch the floodlit sand for more signs of life. I see what look to be shrimp running. “I think we had all of two days in class about these lifeforms,” I say, marveling at the sight. “Exo-something organisms?”
“Two days, huh? What’s amazing is that the biodiversity down here is almost as great as in a rainforest. They discovered these ecosystems back in the 1970s. It defied everything we thought we knew about life, where it could live, what it could adapt to. Now we know that life can live practically anywhere, that it even grows like lichen on the surface of the space station. I was thinking about this one day, down here, getting some samples. And it struck me both how robust and how fragile nature can be. It seems as though life can adapt to anything, but then a small change wipes out an entire species.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then picks up where he left off.
“The crazy thing about these vents is that the chemistry of the sea is completely different here. There’s no sunlight to get everything going. The base unit of energy is hydrogen sulfide, which is toxic to the creatures we know up top. Resemblance between these animals and the non-vent kind can fool you. But they do share ancestors.
“Here. Check out this gauge. That’s our current sea temp. You can see how quickly the temp falls away as we leave the vent. If we keep going, it falls below zero. The pressure and salinity are the only reasons the water doesn’t freeze.”
The readout shows nineteen degrees Celsius. I think that’s about seventy degrees Fahrenheit, but I’m rounding. “Right now we have something like surface sea temp,” I say.
“Right. But go either direction, and you get something warmer or something cooler. The temperature gradients form rings around the vents. It got me wondering: If life exists in these extreme ranges, why did it get hammered by a few degrees rise in the rest of the ocean? Look.”
He sees something I don’t. Ness bursts into activity, driving the sub down to the bottom and then controlling the arms, scooping something up. A fountain of sand erupts where the arm attachment hits the sea floor.
“Gotcha,” he says. It’s the most excited I’ve seen him. He works the arms back toward the sub, then throws more switches. “Won’t be sure until we get back to the surface, but that looked like a good sample.”
“Of what?” I ask.
“I’ll show you when we get back to the estate—”
“Jesus, Ness, enough of this. What the hell are we doing here? And yes, I’m skipping to the end of the story. I don’t care anymore. None of this makes sense—”
“Breathe,” Ness says. And I realize I’m panting. Hyperventilating.
“I need out of here,” I say. My heart is racing. I feel trapped, first by Ness and his meaningless clues, and now by the thought of twenty thousand feet of water above us, the creaks and groans of solid steel as the sea is trying to crush us, and the realization that there’s nowhere to go, not for hours, and I swear the air in that tin can is growing stale, is getting thin, is running out—
“Look at me,” Ness says.
“I—can’t—see—” I labor between pants for air.
Ness floods the submarine with that red light. I only see a spot of it; the rest of my vision has closed in around the edges, irising shut. I feel Ness’s hands on either side of my face, supporting me. Making me look at him. He has arranged himself sideways in his seat. He is asking me to breathe in, to hold it. I try.
“Let it out,” he says. “Slowly.”
Puh puh puh. The best I can do is three short and rapid exhalations. And then I’m gasping for air again.
“Listen to me,” Ness says. I concentrate on his voice. Part of me believes I will die here, at the bottom of the sea, and that there’s something romantic about that. A good death for a rubbish life. As a staff writer, I’ll get a killer obit in the Times.
The other part of me is certain that Ness will save me. That he won’t let me die. And the resistance I feel around him, that I protect myself with—I let it go. I want him to save me. I don’t want this rubbish life to end so soon.
“That’s it. A deep breath. Hold it. Concentrate on me. Just look at me. Listen to my voice. Good. Now let it out.”
I don’t know how they got there, but my hands are on his cheeks. I feel two days of stubble rough against my palms. I see his lips moving, his eyes locked on mine, all in that red glow of lights meant to guard our vision.
I can breathe again, barely, but I don’t want to let go of him. And I don’t want him to let go of me. I can breathe like this. To release him would be to drown. I feel like I should warn Ness that he’ll have to hold me like this, and I’ll have to hold him, at least until we get to the surface. I feel like I should warn him to get away from me, warn him of what I’m about to do.
And it’s hard to say who moves first. There is a lightning bolt of awareness, an electrical shock as my mind rewires itself to cope with this looming fact: We are about to kiss. And then I’m pulling him into me, and I swear I feel him pulling me as well, and lips that I have damned crash into the lips that damned them. Holding his face, like one might cup a chalice, I realize how thirsty I was for this. How badly I want him right then, in that moment. I don’t care who he is, who I am, or about any story. We are at the edge of the world, in the depths of space, where the laws of biology and the rules of physics do not seem to apply.
His lips feel warm and full against mine. Through closed eyes, I see hot magma and the cool, deep blue. I feel the rush of the Atlantic as it fills the space around us, swirling, lifting us into weightlessness. Breaking free from the kiss for a moment, I manage a deep breath. A heavy sigh. Then I moan and collapse into his lips once more.
His hands feel strong on my back, on my waist. I run my hands up his arms, to his shoulders, through his hair, pulling him into me, our kiss turning into something as crushing as the depths.
“Maya—” Ness mumbles around my lips. He’s about to talk sense into us both.
“Shut up,” I whisper. I grab one side of my coveralls and pull the snaps apart, which go like cracked knuckles, popping staccato from neck to navel. I start to wiggle my arms out, and Ness says, “Are you sure?” And I say, “I’m hot. I need out of this.”
Ness pulls away from me and reaches for a knob. “I can make it cooler,” he says.
“Just help me out of this.” I wiggle and contort my back, but one of my arms is stuck. Ness laughs and helps me. Kicking off my shoes, I wiggle the coveralls down my legs until I’m free of them. The air in the submersible is blessedly cool on my feverish skin. Adjusting myself on my seat, sitting on my knees, I lean over Ness and tear the chest of his coveralls apart. He gets his arms free. I pull his white t-shirt over his head and toss that aside. Kiss him again. Our tongues touch, soft and warm. Gentle. I bite his lower lip to let him know gentle is nice, but it’s not everything.
“Mmm,” he murmurs, pulling away. Again, I fear he’s about to talk sense into the both of us. Mention Holly. Or professional codes of ethics. And I’m going to have to explain to him how what happens at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge stays at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. But he says, “Gotta save the battery,” and reaches around me, embracing me, and I laugh as he fumbles for switches behind me, a pump running somewhere for a moment, Ness cursing, the pump switching off, and then the red lights around us and the harsh white floodlights outside all going dark.