“You know what must be done,” Genzai told her. “You understand the price of failure.”
Kaida barely heard him. She got in the water and fixed two sandbags to her feet. Tadaaki handed her a modified kaigane, its scoop curled like a bird’s talon so Kaida could hitch it to the anchor line leading down to the wreck. Everyone else could do that with one hand while holding on to the prow with the other. Kaida could not, so as soon as she hooked the line she was already plunging toward the bottom.
She’d never gone down this fast. Equalizing the pressure in her ears was impossible without a free hand. She felt like someone was pushing chopsticks into her ears.
But soon enough her toes touched down on the broken, silt-covered carrack. When she freed herself from her sandbags, one of them slipped into the hole in the hull and instantly vanished. The sight of it terrified her. In her eyes the wreck had just devoured the sandbag, and now its mouth was open and waiting for her.
Even the mask’s strange hunger did little to quell her fear. Her throat grew tight. Her heart started pounding; she knew it would consume her body’s breath too quickly. The sheer length of the mask’s tether frightened her too. She’d only used a third of its length in getting down this far. She had a long way to go yet, and all inside the gutted wreckage.
Steeling herself, she drew her little knife from its sheath on her stump, and in one deft stroke she snipped the tether linking Tadaaki to the mask. The outlanders wouldn’t be happy with her for that, but she’d planned on doing it long before it was her turn to dive. The thought of being snagged by the face while trapped in the wreck was too frightening to contemplate. Freeing herself of the tether was the only way she could make herself go in.
She let the mask’s weight pull her inside. Its craving had a direction now. She could not yet put a name to that hunger, but its object was directly below her. And the hold was not as dark as she thought. Remembering what Genzai had taught her about imagination and fear, she let herself fall deeper.
An open hatch lay before her. She swam through it face-first, pulled downward by the mask. The light was lower in here; what little she could see was purple, not blue, except for the yawning black mouth of another open hatch. She avoided that one. Others had gone down there. It was a dead end. But there was supposed to be a second hatch here, right next to the first. Was she in the wrong hold? Had she gotten lost already?
She looked up to find the sun and find her bearings. Shioko looked back down at her.
It was her stepsister’s last ambush, but it gave Kaida such a fright that she thought her heart might jump out of her chest. Shioko’s pale face almost glowed in the twilight of the wrecked ship’s bowels. Her eyes stared blankly; her mouth hung open. Her arms and legs dangled like braids of seaweed from a mooring line.
Recoiling in horror, Kaida accidentally found the second hatch. It must have fallen shut somehow, and in the low light it was indistinguishable from the rest of the bulkhead. She’d only found it by backing into it. Now she wondered: had it fallen shut on Shioko, trapping her? Had she spent her last breaths pushing it back up? How hard she must have fought to free herself, only to see daylight just as the water filled her lungs?
More than anything, Kaida wanted to retreat. Push off hard and kick for the surface. Get her panic under control and dive again. But she knew she could never make herself enter the ship’s corpse again. Not after seeing Shioko. Not after seeing where her own body would come to rest.
Kaida hefted the closed hatchway and fell through it. It was the hardest, bravest, most foolhardy thing she’d ever done. Drawing her knife again, she stabbed it into the swollen wood, jamming it so that the hatch could not close. It would still be heavy, held down by all that water, but at least Kaida would be able to see its outline when she came back up. If she came back up.
And now she had no choice but to surrender herself to the mask. She could sense the object of its desire quite clearly now. It still lay deep below her, calling to her somehow. A long, graceful curve, glowing in the darkness the way sunlight glowed through closed eyelids. It could only be a sword.
The mask pulled her straight down. Kaida couldn’t see a thing. Something clubbed her in the shoulder. Kaida tried not to imagine what it might be. She tried to focus more on the craving of the mask than the demons conjured by her imagination. Her throat was as tight as if Miyoko were choking her.
She fell headlong, cold water flowing over her skin, and soon collided with a wall of soft, waterlogged wood. She hit face-first; tiny pinpoints in the mask bit into her forehead. She pushed the pain out of her mind. In so doing, she became aware of her body’s other pains. Those chopsticks were back in her ears, pushed in deep by all the water overhead. Worse, her lungs burned as they’d never burned before. Now Kaida understood how Masa had died. It was the mask that killed him after all. The demonic hunger of the mask erased the pains of the body, and those pains were the only voices telling Kaida to go back up for air. The closer she got to the sword, the less she feared drowning, and that lack of fear was more dangerous than anything else in the ocean.
Her fingers probed this way and that until she found the lip of another hatch. It wasn’t heavy like the last one. As soon as she opened it, she saw the welcome glow of purple light. Ryujin’s Claw had raked open the keel, and through those gashes she could see coral. These were the wounds that condemned the outlanders’ ship. This was the sea dragon’s deathblow.
And trapped in a mashed, splintered corner was the sword. The mask let her see nothing else. She dived for it. It was a good way down, four or five body-lengths at least. As soon as her fingers wrapped around it, her desire for it vanished, and all of a sudden she felt the wild heaving of her diaphragm. She’d all but expended her body’s breath. And she was twice as deep as she’d ever gone before.
She looked down at the coral and up at the hatch she’d come through. The shortest route to the surface went straight up through the wreck. But there was no straight line there, only a dark and circuitous path. The clearest route lay outside in the open water, but she had to swim farther down to get free of the carrack. She was already far too deep. And the sword was as heavy as an anchor.
It was never the easy choice, swimming down instead of up. But obviously Shioko had tried swimming upward. Kaida was the stronger swimmer, up or down, but Shioko hadn’t shared Kaida’s fear of being trapped in the wreck. And Kaida had already spent too much time choosing. Black spots formed drifting schools in her vision.
Up, down, both options were probably fatal. There was no doubting it. Kaida gave herself over to the mask and the sword. They pulled her downward, out of the wreckage.
Escaping its innards was such a relief that it gave her newfound hope. She even had a flash of insight: she knew she lacked the strength to drag her two anchors all the way to the surface, but perhaps she could use the hull as a sort of ladder, launching herself one push at a time, just like kicking off the sea floor. Suddenly the broken carrack became the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.