The lights in the room return to normal but to Nina’s horror the water does not stop. It continues to inch farther up her thighs with every second.
“Bathsheba, what the hell is going on. I got it right. I got the question right!”
Over the bubble and lap of incoming water Bathsheba’s voice remains as always unnervingly calm. “You are correct. Question one complete. Two remaining questions.”
“What the fuck!”
Silence from Bathsheba.
The screen instead flashes up with the next question.
This room is filling at 3 cubic units per minute. This started
three minutes ago.
How long until the room is completely submerged?
A timer appears at the top of the screen expressing the three minutes already mentioned, seconds adding on as she watches.
“Maths, okay,” Nina blurts suddenly, talking herself through it with a strange disassociated calmness, her hands trembling the whole time. “So, three threes are nine. We’re nine cubic units in. The room’s volume is—” She spins to estimate, then splutters out a “fuck” as she realizes she has absolutely no idea.
The water is now almost at her crotch. She takes a breath and forces herself to refocus.
Then the glimmer of an idea. Nina suddenly remembers a completely random and soul-crushingly embarrassing single-woman life hack that she found on YouTube her first week as a new homeowner back at Cambridge University. She had never lived alone before and had found the act of trying to get the house in order herself while working all the hours under the sun utterly soul destroying. There was never enough time, or the right tools, and the house still looked like an anonymous shell. So at 2 A.M. she’d watched a tutorial on hanging pictures without tools. She’d used a log from the wood burner stack as a hammer, some picture hooks, and her own arm span to measure distance.
Without a second thought Nina stands and sploshes her way to the nearest wall, water now at waist height, and presses her nose to the wall, one arm stretched out to touch the other wall. Then marking the spot where her other shoulder hits the wall, she measures one meter. She repeats the process across the first wall and can complete the action twice more, telling her that the wall is almost exactly three meters across.
She pulls away from this wall and repeats the action on the three: all three meters. She looks up: the ceiling in here is high for a basement. It looks about the same as her father’s townhouse ceiling, perhaps four meters.
So three by three by four meters? Thirty-six cubic meters.
Nina quickly looks back to the screen. The timer is hitting four minutes, the water now at Nina’s chest.
“Okay, okay,” Nina mutters, trying to stay composed. “So, four minutes of flooding in the room at the rate Bathsheba suggested of three cubic units per minute means the room must now be twelve cubic units full. And if there can only be thirty-six cubic units in total in the room and those twelve units are already in it then I only have twenty-four cubic units left to go before I drown.” She visibly shakes off the thought and refocuses.
“And if the room fills with three cubic units per minute, that’s twenty-four divided by three. I have…eight minutes left,” she concludes triumphantly. In front of her the timer counter clicks onward. “Shit, no, no, I have seven minutes now.” With the water at her collarbone, lapping just beneath the screen, Nina waits until the timer hits five minutes exactly and then types her answer.
Correct!
The screen flashes up, the water inching up its own glowing edifice.
The screen will shortly be submerged, Nina realizes, and she will have to duck under to read it.
The water does not stop in spite of her second correct answer. And with that her tiptoes lose the floor beneath her as she begins to tread water.
“Come on, Bathsheba, next fucking question. Come on!”
CHAPTER 28
MARIA
M aria’s body relaxes back into the airplane seat. The cabin doors are sealed and they are taxiing around to the runway, due for takeoff in less than ten minutes. She has made it.
She has somehow made it out of there alive.
She thinks back over the last forty-eight hours, her face still bruised, her muscles still aching, cuts and abrasions hidden now under a thin cashmere sweater she had bought from an airport boutique.
She somehow managed the swim, a swim she would later, from the safety of the US embassy business center, calculate had been more than a kilometer. Somehow she managed it in her own breathless fashion. And when she saw an empty stretch of public beach, she waded back to shore and, steering clear of the main road, made her way along the wild coastal path following signs to the Gorda ferry port.
